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Lord Sainsbury of TurvilleResearch Councils Conference 2002 |
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| I am delighted to be here today at the start of this year's Research Council Conference. The focus of today's event is Research Councils UK, culminating in the formal launch this afternoon. I know that you will hear a considerable amount about this topic throughout the day, so I thought that I would say a few words more generally from my position as Minister for Science. Before I do, however, I do want to remind you that the Research Councils UK concept emerged from the Quinquennial Review of the Research Councils, which required a huge effort from all concerned, including many of you. For this and for all your work during the past busy year, I'd like to thank you. I realise the time and effort which you give up to serve on the different Councils, and I am most grateful.
You will know that we are currently in the midst of a new Spending Review. All of the Councils have worked very hard with the Office of Science and Technology to produce an exciting portfolio of bids. We have sent these to the Treasury, and we will know the results in the summer. At the last Spending Review, in 2000, we increased the budget for Science and Technology by 7% in real terms, year on year. I would like to maintain the same level of increase in this review, but it is going to be very hard work given the other pressures on Government expenditure. There are also a number of issues which we want to move forward. The Cross-Cutting Review of science has revealed a serious underfunding of scientific research in our universities, and Sir Gareth Roberts Review of people with science, technology engineering and mathematics skills has highlighted some areas where we need extra resources. We can expect, therefore, the Spending Review to include some searching questions about how we have spent the money from the last spending review. I think we have some excellent news to tell here both in terms of the science being done and the exploitation of it to create wealth and to improve the quality of our lives. I am extremely pleased that the recent HEI-Business Interaction Survey showed an upsurge in the knowledge transfer activities of universities. It is encouraging that in 1999/2000 there were 199 spin-offs from UK universities compared with 70 per year on average in the previous 5 years. But it is on the quality of the science that we have been doing that I want to focus on this morning. Many of you will have been at this conference last year, where we focussed on the three cross-Council programmes of genomics, e-science and basic technology. You discussed in some detail key aims and objectives for these programmes and how to take them forward. The genomics activity was a follow on to activities which had successfully begun following the 1998 Spending Review, and has continued to produce excellent results. E-science and basic technology were completely new programmes a year ago, and I would like to say a few words about the excellent progress which has been made in the last twelve months. In e-science, the National e-Science Centre has been set up in Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities, with eight regional centres across the UK which together are forming the first UK-wide "Grid". The National e-Science Centre (NESC) is developing a £3m portfolio of 'industrial projects' with an additional £3 million contribution from industry. It has established an 'e-Science Institute' which will run a seminar programme focussing on international multi-disciplinary research. In concert with the Regional Centres it will develop communication, awareness and training activities with other grid centres and e-science pilot applications. The speed of the backbone network SuperJANET has been raised to 2.5 Gigabits per second last year, a figure which will be quadrupled by the end of this year. Additional increases are being made to connect universities with this background, and universities have the possibility through SRIF of increasing their own network speed. The new high performance computing facility should be in place by the end of the year, providing UK researchers with one of the top civil research machines in the world, and instantly increasing by a factor of 5 to 10 times the capability offered by the CSAR facility in Manchester, itself an excellent facility. Regular upgrades in performance are scheduled over the next few years. The majority of the money for the e-science programme has rested with the Councils to invest in specific projects. Of twenty anticipated projects, eight are already underway (covering areas of science such as condensed matter and materials, combinatorial chemistry, engineering, high throughput informatics, particle physics and astronomy) and the rest will follow over the next few months. In addition, EPSRC has funded three, six-year, computer science orientated Interdisciplinary Research Collaborations. These are major projects that fund key computer science research groups from a number of universities to undertake long-term research. This work has at all times been done in close collaboration with industry. The £20M invested from the industrial part of DTI is provided through a LINK-style scheme to attract matching industrial funding. A number of companies have already become involved including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, Rolls-Royce, BAE systems, GlaxoSmithKline, Unilever, and CSC. We are also investing in longer term research in key areas where the UK either leads, or is competitive with, international competition, and which will be vital in future generations of Grid technology. These areas include photonics, quantum computing, large scale information management, scaleable networks, and shared environments. All this is being done in close collaboration with international partners, particularly in the development of common standards and protocols. I am extremely impressed by the remarkable amount of progress which has been made, as a result of the targeted funding which was obtained at the last spending review. The Basic Technology Programme has also made a remarkable start since last year. The Programme was established to contribute to the development of a generic technology base that can be adapted to a diverse range of scientific research problems and challenges spanning the research spectrum. Our aim is to innovate and make leaps in technology development rather than incremental improvements, and we hope to generate the potential for creation of fundamentally new capabilities which could form the basis of industries of the future. In fact, the programme is throwing up more good ideas than we are at present able to fund and we must be able to react to the pressure building up in the scientific community. The programme has caught the imagination of some of the foremost UK scientists and the projects are of the highest standard. It has also led to scientists talking across disciplines, breaking down old barriers and establishing new links across and between academia and industry. The grants for the first £20M were announced in February this year, after an extremely high quality set of proposals were submitted. Projects include technologies to manipulate and position atoms and other nanoparticles, the development of new artificial vision techniques, and the exploitation of the TerraHertz band of the electromagnetic spectrum for imaging. The second call for proposals closes next week, and I expect an equally high class field of applications. These two programmes have been a major success, and have complemented all the excellent research funded by the Councils over the past year. Along with the cross-Council programme on genomics, they have shown clearly how the Councils can work together on major priorities. This brings us back to the Quinquennial Review and Research Councils UK. We all have a major challenge to make Research Councils UK work, to deliver a much more coherent joint strategic approach to the key issues which face us, and also to work much more closely together on a range of practical issues. The cross-Council programmes have demonstrated how well we can work together and we can repeat this major success with Research Councils UK. I think that you and John Taylor are taking an important step forward with Research Councils UK and that over the years ahead it could have a very beneficial impact on UK Science. |
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Other speeches by Lord Sainsbury of Turville
(the following are available from the archive) |
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