An awful lot of unhappy life scientists, is there no hope?

No “start the week” meeting because it was a bank holiday. Yeh!! 

Tuesday saw a trip up to Keele University at the invitation of Rama Thirunamachandran, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor – who I know from his previous life at HEFCE. It was interesting in that much of what they said was a mirror of what the NERC had told us the previous Friday, but from the point of view of a university not a research council. Keele have decided corporately to go “deep green” and are investing in local energy supply and saving measures, with a bore hole into the underlying coal seams to extract methane, building and refurbishing their estate to BREEAM excellent or very good status and installing solar heating into their student residences. I also met a few people from their medical school, who have start ups in regenerative medicine and tried Zahid’s cunning plan on them. Lots of support. 

Wednesday was in London and started with my monthly catch-up with Celia Caulcott – the first time was in a Starbucks, the second was by Skype and this time was old-fashioned telephone, so the link is definitely multi-modal! After that, it was down to the Home Office with Mark to help them define their SBRI competition. They had 2 basic ideas, one of which was really exciting, of wider applicability and with lots of interesting ways in – we spent some time on this. The other was hard core counter terrorism and I think it got sidelined for now. Mark seemed a bit put off that they dropped their contribution, and there seemed to be an interesting tension between the industry and military secondees, but I think we made the point that we have experience in specifying this sort of activity. I rushed off to get a free lunch our of the ERA Foundation, where I met Allyson. This is an interesting event. It is basically a networking event for the friends of a few people, including David Clark of ex-EPSRC and WMG fame. I met an interesting person from the RSA, who is playing in the design space, and another from OFCOM. Timing truly is everything. 

Went back to Kingsgate House, firstly for a discussion with Sam Rowbur of OGC, who has made massive progress on the “retrofit for iconic buildings” idea we floated a few weeks ago at OGC. We are now planning a small workshop for the enthusiasts from FCO and DECC – but also the decision makers/blockers. Then a no-show from a journalist that Nick had set me up on a blind date with. Subsequent voicemail says confirming e-mail lost in ether, but Nick says this is a lie. Don’t ya just love journalists? 

The final commitment of Wednesday was another of Wee Dougie’s Hootenannies. Usually, I go to these because they are relevant to what we are doing and I use them as a networking event. This time, the subject was one I knew vanishingly little about – biodiversity. The audience was also a new one – aside from the upper house members of the FST who rely on these events to eat on a Wednesday evening. It started with a largely impenetrable litany of jargon from Bob Watson, but he was followed by a guy from The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-05/haog-teo052908.phpwho has obviously preached on this subject before and explained the context and problem much better. The last speaker was the irascible Bob May, who managed to upset nearly everyone in the room at one point in his talk. The discussion was enlightening and I have learnt enough of the jargon to be mildly dangerous. Important points are: we don't really understand the full inter-relationship of species and are thus liable to screw something up badly, we focus too much emphasis on “charismatic species” at the expense of the nasty, slimy small ones that actually make the biosphere work, we need to understand the economics of biosystem services i.e. What service each niche in the biosphere contributes to the overall working of the whole system, although biodiversity has been enshrined in scientific literature and even some legalisation for as long as climate change, the public still don't get it – at this point there was a sizable minority who went down the scientific meritocracy should rule the world path but luckily Bob May knocked them down!! All good stuff and made me realise that there are still large tracts of knowledge that I don’t actually know about, let alone understand. 

The next morning was the breakfast launch of the Government response to the Bioscience Innovation and Growth Team (BIGT) refresh. Who’d have thought that you could get a bacon butty in the BERR Conference Centre before 8 o’clock? It started smoothly. The Dark Lord read from his prepared speech and gave us a good plug. Then David Cooksey responded, and started emphatically “When you strip away the veneer of this report, you find that there is very little new in it. It is disappointing. We began discussing this issue in 2003 and in the six years since there has been lots of talking, but in terms of change, there has been relatively little." and proceeded to put the boot in big time. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/bioscience-leaders-attack-ministers-inaction-1681074.html The Dark Lord stirred in his thick green fog, unleashed his laser eyes and came back. What actually was the problem?, what could and should Government do to make a difference?, surely the industry didn't want to survive on government hand-outs and could make their own way? The representatives of the bioscience industry then took turns to support Cooksey, but did in fact split into 3 tribes – the “change regulation to make trials easier”, the “support early stage companies to get started” and the “support later stage companies to get through trials” tribes. At this point the Dark Lord, who seemed to be enjoying a robust debate in the morning, had to leave and Peter Perfect took over. There was a lull in questions, so he talked about how the Office of Life Science was going to change all this government inertia and support an industry he knew well. From a few comments after the meeting, it appears that this repeats the first BIGT launch 5 years ago, and the company people are getting a bit fed up with words and not actions. 

Unfortunately, I had to leave the free food and abuse and make it back to Fortress Kingsgate. I will not say who I met but it was someone who we know through the RDA/DA meetings we hold. This person had asked to demonstrate a new process that had helped them to understand the landscape and how to address the right issues. What I got was a pretty unimpressive description of Quality Function Deployment, a process first developed over 40 years ago as part of the “quality” boom, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_Function_Deployment) combined with a shameless attempt to sell the consultancy services of the company - http://malvernscienceservices.com/. As luck would have it, I went through the religion of QFD many years ago and knew the questions to ask to determine if they were actually any good, so the meetings ended a little frostily and I may be forced to avoid SAG meetings for a while. 

I then took the train back to Swindon for a meeting on how we wanted to build on Fearless Leaders new-found friendship with the MRC, an interview with a quite good person and a disappointing discussion of what our strategy should be in Financial Services. Since my car was in the Midlands, I tried out a new way to get home by the wonders of this modern train system, taking almost 3 hours to do the trip it takes me 80 minutes to drive – and they wonder why our society is hung up on personal transport!!! 

Friday was another Swindon day, and the day started formally with a meeting with Heidi and the young padawan – something we do too infrequently – followed by a catch-up with the Assisted Living Innovation Platform team. I have not paid much attention to them recently and Heidi had arranged this catch-up. They are continuing with the programme, but are going through a “digging out the ditches” phase and although there is a lot of progress, there is little to show for it. I am now expecting an explosion of activity this Autumn to build on all the hard work they are putting in. Next came a final run through the plans for next Friday’s “water” meeting. The young padawan and Brains have done a great job and we have about 80 people from the water industry closeted in a hotel near Leeds. Next came the first fruits of the outbreak of peace and love with MRC. Em had negotiated a meeting between myself and Declan, who is Borys’s enforcer. Each of us took a squire into the room and we discussed what we could do together. They were pretty much ignoring Assisted Living, didn't seem to know where they were involved in Detection and Identification of Infectious Agents but wanted to debate our intentions in regenerative medicine and stratified medicine. Regenerative took a lot of time, they seem to think that many of the existing companies are pursuing the wrong business plan and therefore should be allowed to die - No , seriously, you read that right, a research council is making decisions about other people business plans!! I made the point that it is our intention to keep the community alive with a combination of a staged support mechanism that allowed the most successful businesses to continue to (the very expensive) first stage trials and a grand community challenge. They liked the challenge bit and hadn’t heard the staged/assessed programme bits, so we agreed that scientific excellence would be a factor in our plans but it was primarily a business driven assessment. Since we are putting more money than them into the pot, I think we agreed on this approach in the end. On stratified medicine, there was more agreement, but a wonderful moment when having agreed everything, they said “so there’s going to be your Innovation Platform and our parallel programme” to which I suggested that a single integrated programme made more sense and why didn't they join in as equal partners to us – the only caveat being that our principles, borne of the other Innovation Platforms, were inviolate. I think they agreed to that as well. Em is convinced that my metachlorian count was up on Friday. :-) 

This was followed by a discussion with Lisa about the developing plans for engaging the “business 150”, and a meeting on how much money we should “ask” for from the Dark Lord to complement out measly £50m, before I joined the doughnutfest that is the Innovate 09 Steering Group. Much progress and the evolving “Glastonbury” motif is a hoot. The final meeting of the day was amazing. Obviously my heads of have decided (don't know whether it is a conspiracy or just an coincidence) that they can distract me with science and business so, in a companion piece to the Assisted Living meeting in the morning, the young padawan had arranged to bring me up to speed with how DIIA was progressing. It was great to hear all the connections that have been made since I last looked at the area, to see the evolving implementation plan but, most of al, to hear the enthusiasm and commitment in Meredith and Penny’s voices as they described what they were planning to do. A great way to end the week.