SUMMARY OF COUNCIL MEETING ON 6/7 DECEMBER 2004
Attendees
1. The meeting was chaired in part by Sir Keith Peters and in part by Sir David King. The other members present were:
Professor Sir John Beringer; Professor Geoffrey Boulton; Professor Wendy Hall; Dr Hermann Hauser; Dr Dieter Helm; Professor Alan Hughes; Dr Sue Ion; Rob Margetts; Sir Paul Nurse; Professor Kathy Sykes; Dr Mark Walport.
2. Also in attendance for parts of the meeting were: Lord Sainsbury, Minister for Science; Sir Tom McKillop, Chief Executive, AstraZeneca
and Chair, Northwest Science and Industry Council;
Jim Brathwaite, Chair, South East England Development Agency; Mary Reilly, Chair, London Development Agency;
Sir Martin Harris, Deputy Chair, North West Development Agendy; Professor Ed Metcalfe, Head of Science, Technology, Enterprise and Management,
South East England Development Agency; Graeme Reid, Director, Exploitation, OST/DTI; Patrick Robinson, Director, Innovation Strategy, DTI;
Judy Britton, Director, Science in Government, OST/DTI; Jeremy Clayton, Director, Transdepartmental Science and Technology, OST/DTI.
Conclusions
The Council agreed:
- Science and Industry Councils have a crucial role in helping RDAs to identify how they can use their resources for the greatest catalytic effect to the benefit of both their own region and the UK as a whole. CST plans to invite the Science and Industry Council Chairs to join the Innovation and Commercialisation subgroup for a workshop in 2005.
- CST will work with OST in: revising the Chief Scientific Adviser's guidelines on scientific advice and policy making; and developing the role of the new horizon scanning unit.
- CST will maintain a watching brief on the government's policies for open access publications.
- At its next meeting, in March, CST will consider draft reports and advice to government from its four subgroups:
- The Energy subgroup (convened by Professor Michael Sterling) is looking at levels of investment in energy R&D.
- The Datasets subgroup (convened by Professor Mark Walport) is exploring the benefits and practical issues arising from the use of personal information in electronic databases.
- The Science and Society subgroup (convened by Professor Geoffrey Boulton) is focussing on how government could make better use of public dialogue to inform the development of science and technology policies.
- The Commercialisation and Innovation subgroup (convened by Professor Alan Hughes) is exploring whether government could make use of real options analysis when making investment decisions to support the ten-year framework for science and technology.
