SUMMARY OF COUNCIL MEETING ON 1 JUNE 2004
Attendees
1. The meeting was chaired by Sir Keith Peters. The other members present were:
Professor Sir John Beringer; Professor Geoffrey Boulton; Professor Janet Finch; Mr Andrew Gould; Professor Wendy Hall; Dr Dieter Helm; Professor Alan Hughes; Dr Sue Ion; Sir David King; Sir Paul Nurse; Dr Raj Rajagopal; Professor Michael Sterling; Professor Kathy Sykes.
2. Also in attendance were: Jeremy Clayton, Group Director, Office of Science and Technology; a Departmental Chief Scientific Adviser; Lynne Edwards, CST Secretariat; Jacqui Russell, CST Secretariat; Jen Stokes, CST Secretariat.
Conclusions
The Council agreed:
- To engage with the Chief Executives of the Research Councils and the Higher Education Funding Councils to discuss what plans they have to ensure that interdisciplinary research is facilitated.
- To make it clear to Government that the Council expects to be involved in regular reviews on progress with the 10 year investment framework for science and innovation.
- The broad terms of reference for the Personal Datasets subgroup, given below:
- what innovative uses could be made of electronically stored data now?
- what innovative uses might be possible in future?
- what would be the benefits and possible disbenefits of these uses for individuals, society, public services, businesses, researchers and Government?
- what would need to be done to make such uses acceptable and possible?
- are there opportunities for the UK to develop and exploit a competitive advantage in any of these uses?
- The work of the Innovation and Commercialisation subgroup will be under the broad headings of: rationale for selecting and supporting technologies; and research and development absorptive capacity of UK sectors.
- The Science and Society and Energy subgroups are continuing to define their work programmes
To investigate the potential for innovative beneficial use of personal datasets now and in the future; to assess benefits and disbenefits for individuals and data users; to advise on measures that might be taken to maximise benefits and minimise disbenefits:
