Needed: A Bucketload of Solace

The week started with the Low Carbon Vehicles Innovation Platforms Steering Group meeting at Aston – Julia chairs it!!! Jamie Turner brought one of the Lotus multi-fuel cars (and didn’t understand why there hadn’t been one at our Strategy launch). It went mostly okay, but Julia’s recent return from Vietnam and our focus on last week’s launch mean that we hadn’t prepared a proper Chairman’s brief so we wasted time with a few evolutionary backwaters before we got down to business. There is a lot of work to do over summer, with getting a couple more RDAs on board (financially speaking) and running a consultancy process that gets the wider community on board. We are broadening our community in this area, but I still recognise too many people and we don’t seem to have broken out of the pre-cooked people. 

Tuesday morning was the Research Assessment Exercise. I seem to be responsible for the word models that will be used to assess the wider engagement of Chemistry departments with industry, society and government.  That’ll teach me to open my mouth and express an opinion!! It makes up 4% of the overall score, which put the EPSRC commitment to “Excellence with Impact” into perspective! 

The afternoon saw Tim O’Brien and I – with Mani and Lynne Franks as minders – brief Pearson on the Low Carbon Vehicles Integrated Development Programme idea and progress. Mani was worried that he saw it as an “EFE (Environmentally Friendly Engine, a long running aerospace programme) for the Automotive industry” but he was taken with the disruption of existing supply chain arguments and aside from asking the unrealistic question “are we spending enough money?” (to which our response “we are starting at a level which we can afford, would constantly have to make internal priority decisions with other IPs and KTAs but, if more money was available, we could probably wisely invest twice as much” seemed to make him happy). He ended by asking us to go as fast as we could. Actually, that’s not true. Once the LCV meeting ended, he asked me about carbon fibre recycling.  Apparently, Kumar had told him that widespread use of carbon fibre would be compromised by the lack of a simple and effective recycling route. I mentioned this to Fearless Leader, who has a historical interest in the area and he promised to tell me what he knows!! However, Thursday short-circuited that a bit.  Now, as Douglas Adams would say, you have anticipation!! 

Wednesday was spent at Swindon talking to people. Nurse Jackie, the new Assisted Living person, who trained as a nurse is already inputting the different perspective of one familiar with the end user community!! The idea that heart monitoring could be an invasion of privacy has me thinking!! Neil has joined us for 6 months to help with the Phase III Innovation Platforms – although his primary focus will be the Sustainable Agri-Food Supply Chain. He is now reading all the data we have accumulated, has added some of his own and is kitting himself out. 

The end of the day was a drive to Grantham, which is out beyond Melton Mowbray and the place where Stilton comes from – great contextual information, or what? The only other person in the restaurant of the Ramada Hotel at 8.30 was Emma Feltham, who has just been promoted to be the Business Relationships person at EPSRC – so she has to deal with the Strategic Alliances (she already knows there are too many), the IMRCs and similar. She takes up post in June and will be across to meet us all soon. 

Thursday started with my swansong for Materials UK as the plenary speaker at the Materials Congress. The talk was given in a marquee, so I guess that’s the closest I will get to performing at Glastonbury!! Reviewing the state of the UK materials industry was an interesting task. We have a slightly above average materials community, but we have access to world class design (industrial, architectural and fashion) and a strong position in the evolving philosophy of recycling and re-use. The Materials UK argument has always been that taking advantage of the insight provided by these end-user familiar communities could enable the “basic” materials industry to compete on differentiated products and systems. If you’re sad enough to be interested, the presentation will be on my blog (http://blog.matuk.co.uk/) later this weekend. The fact that there was a workshop on recycling carbon fibre was too good an opportunity to miss. I went along and saw what we do in the UK (mainly a company called Milled Carbon (http://www.milledcarbon.com/) which has its head office near a very good local pub and Nottingham University. There does seem to be a lot in the rest of the world though – Adherent Technologies (NM, USA), Valley Stade Consortium (Germany), Wells Specialty Products (TX, USA), Ruag (Switzerland) and Firebird Advanced Materials (NC, US). Anticipation over. :-) 

They also had a cross-sectioned Jaguar in the main hall. Looking at it and discussing it with various delegates, I was reminded why James Gordon’s famous second book was on structures - you can’t really think about materials without a bit of engineering thrown in!! (the first one was http://www.nous.org.uk/Gordon1.htmland the second was http://www.nous.org.uk/Gordon2.html)

Friday was a day of two halves. In the morning I went to talk to the guys at UKAEA about fusion research. I think Alan Hooper had stiffed me for this. I spent a pleasant 3 hours getting in touch with my inner geek. Chris Llewellyn-Smith briefed me before pitching me into a room full of people who saw me as a source of money. I think I know a bit how Fearless Leader feels!! :-)  Actually, I wish I had done this before I spoke at Grantham because I learned and remembered a lot of materials science in the discussions. The “blanket” for the torus that contains the plasma needs to withstand high temperatures, radiation and moderate mechanical stress! The fact that steels lose their strength after their Curie temperature apparently explains the precipitate collapse of the World Trade Centre as well as one of the problems of building a container for a bit of the sun. It seems like cutbacks in funding from the EPSRC means that the engineers at Culham have got very good at modelling materials in extreme conditions. They are engaged with the ITER projects (http://www.iter.org/) and the development of a system for testing materials ahead of building a “proper” fusion power station – in about 20 years. There don’t seem to be many procurement opportunities and the market for materials, products and systems is a long way off. I went through the criteria for funding and they appreciated the time I had spent with them and realised that we probably weren’t a source of funding. That said, they offered to show me over the Joint European Torus next time I am in the area. Given the engineering interests of some of my colleagues, I wondered whether I should try to expand the invitation. We all need to see big, long-term technology to remind ourselves of why we started!!! 

I then popped down to London to present to the R&D Committee of the ABPI. This was at the (agitated) invitation of Philip Wright, the Director of Science and Technology.  ABPI had (apparently) an Innovation Platform proposal they had discussed with Fearless Leader. I gave the latest evolution of the Innovation Platforms talk, honed at ICARG and OAG but now in the new clothes. It felt like the ABPI had an idea of what they wanted to do and had re-interpreted our public utterances in terms they could use. Luckily, Annette Dohertey (Senior Vice-President, Pfizer Global Research and Development, and Director of the Sandwich Laboratories, UK and Chair of one of the SEEDA committees) and Jeremy Haigh (VP and international COO, Research and Development, Amgen) got what I was trying to say and told Philip to re-write the idea in terms of what the Pharma Industry could do to address a societal need rather than an industry one and engage with Government more fully. That got a response of “we’ve talked to OSCHR and John Bell supports this idea” to which Annette, Jeremy and Malcolm Skingle pointed out that the Technology Strategy Board had it’s high level champions as well and that the ABPI needed to work with us rather than attempt to dictate. We know Malcolm and Annette well, but I was well impressed with Jeremy and he ought to go on our “potential friends” list. I would also like us all to have a common view of how we engage with the various bits of the Governments health infrastructure.