PROFESSOR COLIN BLAKEMORE, PROFESSOR IAN DIAMOND, PROFESSOR KEITH MASON AND DR RANDAL RICHARDS

9 MAY 2007

  Q40  Dr Harris: My last question is one to Colin Blakemore in particular. The Government says it is interested in international collaboration and has mechanisms to do it. We have had evidence from the Government. Sometimes domestic political exigencies can get in the way of that. For example, if the MRC was told that it had to devote more of its translational budgets towards dealing with the needs of the NHS, more than it is doing already or directing it more, then do you accept that that might provide a risk to what you would otherwise like to do in respect of investment in overseas work, such as the Gambia unit or indeed diseases of the developing world that are, generally speaking, not necessary NHS priorities?

  Professor Blakemore: This sound like a side question cleverly slipped into this discussion. If you are asking me to comment on new translational initiatives that might conceivably be supported through the Spending Review, then it is impossible for me to do that until we know the outcome of the Spending Review. All I can say is that the proposals that we have put forward for strengthening translational activities in collaboration with the Department of Health are things that we wanted to do, which we do not see that in any way as compromising our activities elsewhere, either in basic research in this country or overseas.

  Q41  Dr Harris: I just meant that if there was a mechanism like there is with translation-led support and the alphabet soup of the body above that that is directing research, your funding into NHS priorities, there is not an equivalent pressure to direct funding into international research areas.

  Professor Blakemore: I would not at all put that spin on the intended function of the Translational Medicine Board or the Public Health Research Board. Those are strategic boards which are owned by and are part of the MRC and NIHR and will be working with us as part of our structure to advise us.

  Chairman: We will leave it at that point. That was delicately answered.

  Q42  Linda Gilroy: Looking at funding co-ordination, the Royal Society in their evidence have suggested that to get the full impact out of the aim to establish ourselves as scientific partners of choice around the world, the research councils should be prepared to back this up with dedicated budgets. Would this be of benefit and if not, why not?

  Professor Diamond: I think there is a very interesting question in the context of extremely tight scientific budgets more generally. Our policy has always been not to say that we will have an international pot but simply to say that we will remove barriers to international collaboration at any time, and then to use scientific excellence as the criteria. I think that that is a very strong point that we need to hold on to. Having said that, very clearly, where there is a need, for example the ESRC together with the British Academy has schemes to bring researchers from America or from South Asia or from the Arab World or from China to the UK in order to develop the conversations in major centres which will lead to subsequent research proposals, then you need that seed corn funding. I have already talked about our collaborations with other research councils in Europe, which again has had pilots to lead to things happening. I think what you have to do is not necessarily to have pots of money but to remove barriers and at the same time to enable conversations and collaborations to happen.

  Dr Richards: I agree wholeheartedly with what Ian has said. However, in my experience I have found that some countries will not move and will not support responsive mode applications. They say, "What is the size of your dedicated budget level?" That is why this year the EPSRC has created a dedicated budget to catalyse international collaboration. It is not the sole cause of activity but certainly it is evidence that we are in the game seriously.

  Q43  Linda Gilroy: You mentioned how we need to work in to achieve excellence in science but what about what was mentioned earlier on, building capacity in areas where we do not have strength but where it may be a national foreign policy goal to build up that capacity again? Does not the question of having dedicated budgets arise? I would like to hear from the other research councils.

  Professor Diamond: Can I disagree with you? Where there is a market need to develop capacity or where there is if you like a market failure in terms of the UK's ability to deliver something, then clearly you must have directed research and certainly ESRC does that an enormous amount. You have directed research and you enable collaborations to happen, which would expand the capacity of the UK to deliver in that area.

  Q44  Linda Gilroy: ESRC again has a framework apparently to do that, from what you are saying but what about the other research councils? Do they have dedicated budgets or anything approaching that to deal with that particular issue?

  Professor Mason: As I said before, essentially everything that we do in the STFC, or a large fraction of it, is essentially a dedicated international budget because a lot of our work is subject to international organisations and the work that is supported by them. I think we already do that. I just pick up the point, and it echoes what I was trying to say earlier, that we can made decisions in terms of scientific need but if there are wider strategic issues involved, then we need to have joined-up government thinking about how we can go forward and that should be appropriately resourced if it is found to be something that needs doing.

  Professor Blakemore: I am sure that my colleagues would agree with what I say on behalf of MRC and that is that we would want to commit money to international working without jeopardising normal standards of quality of assessment in what we do. In that context, most of the councils have found that committing dedicated budgets to particular scheme can sometimes be a hostage to fortune if the budget is not met with appropriate opportunities of high quality. The stage at which to commit particular sums seems to me to be the point at which you have assessed the quality of what is available. Certainly capacity-building programmes—for instance establishing programmes of overseas fellowships—or investment as we have in institutes and units overseas, requires a decision about the budget on a long-term basis and we have done that. My own feeling is that the MRC would be reluctant to say that we will commit a certain percentage of our budget to international working and would make simply more general encouraging statements that the MRC of course is very keen to continue to develop its international collaboration and will, as appropriate, commit the funding to do that.

  Q45  Linda Gilroy: So is that a modified no to having a dedicated international budget, is it? Can I then ask you about a particular aspect which has emerged from science community comment on what happens in relation to developing research projects emerging from initial funding for networking events? There is money available to create these networking enabling events but how does the transition happen from investing in that to going on and taking advantage of that?

  Professor Blakemore: I can give on example of that in the case of MRC. The decision to make a specific call for proposals in the area of flu, which has led to a lot of collaborative work with China, was based on network events of exactly that sort, first of all a visiting delegation to southeast Asia and then an international workshop that was held in London to advise on the structure of that call. So the intention of course is to follow up networking events with funding programmes when it is considered appropriate. But one has to accept that sometimes the initial pilot stage of that kind of exploration is going to come up with the answer that is not appropriate at that stage to invest.

  Q46  Linda Gilroy: Are there also events in your experience then which fall by the way because there is not enough funding? Is it an area which needs increased funding and the same question to the other witnesses?

  Professor Blakemore: If you are giving me the opportunity to say that the research councils need increased funding then I am delighted to accept!

  Q47  Linda Gilroy: Within the order of priorities that are there is there a need to look at that with greater favour?

  Professor Blakemore: I think you have touched on an important point and that is that any discussion about collaborating and spending money overseas has to be tensioned against the primary obligation of the research councils to support the science base in this country.

  Professor Mason: Just some comments to add to that, one has to recognise that it is relatively cheap to start a network and to organise a few get-togethers and if that activity results in a more concrete proposal it rapidly gets more expensive, of course, to support the work that comes out of that. The fact of the point that I was making earlier was that such proposals then have to survive in the white heat of scientific peer review and have to be of a very high standard to get funded because we do not have the resource to fund anything but the very, very highest standard research for which we get proposals. So inevitably a number of activities will fall by the wayside at that point, and it gets back to the issue of do we, for other non-scientific strategic reasons, want to keep such activities alive to the next stage and should that be resourced appropriately?

  Professor Diamond: That is where sometimes there is the point that you made earlier where there may be a real need to develop capacity in a particular area in the UK and then you do have to keep things going and ask the question, we have brought the best researchers in this area together, perhaps working with collaborators where we do not have the quality of the proposals that we need let us go back to the drawing board, let us keep the pot open and let us work out now how we are going to develop capacity which will be of the scientific quality, because at the end of the day there is no point in putting a pot around science which is not good science.

  Dr Richards: We have a mixed mode where from a network we might already decide that this is an area we want to pursue so there will be some target funding there, but we might form a network, as people say, and proposals might go forward, go for responsive mode and then have to stand in competition because everything else goes through peer review. So it is not a question of walking away, it is because it is the peer review which decides the standards, so some will fall by the wayside because of that.

  Q48  Linda Gilroy: Finally on this sector, you have already given us some insights into how you are taking steps to deal with the issue of double jeopardy, particularly within the context of Europe, but to the three councils other than ESRC, do you have signed agreements to address the problem of double jeopardy?

  Dr Richards: Yes, we do.

  Professor Mason: In our case we work primarily through the international bodies to which we pay subscriptions, and of course we have a whole process of arriving at a consensus for certainly strategic areas that we want to get into, which avoids the double jeopardy issue.

  Q49  Linda Gilroy: So there is a transparent way of dealing with this? It maybe does not amount to a signed agreement, which would be appropriate to you. And the MRC?

  Professor Blakemore: In our memoranda of understanding we have certainly referred to the issue. I think it is most acute for us in Europe where the issue has risen directly in connection with MRC collaboration in EUROCORES schemes, (Collaborative Research Schemes), and we have tried to address that question and have reached agreement on avoiding double jeopardy by accepting a single process of peer review.

  Q50  Linda Gilroy: Outside of the European Union what possibilities are there for trying to come to that sort of understanding, Professor Diamond?

  Professor Diamond: For our Council we have agreements with Australia and we have agreements with Korea. We hope to have an agreement of a similar nature with China very soon and with the United States we have particular agreements—and when I say particular agreements they are in particular areas of social science and that is not for the want of trying on our part, but it is very much an issue for the Americans, and other colleagues you will have heard this morning making exactly the same point. So there is a real desire for that partnership where there are bureaucratic reasons within the United States why it is not so easy for that to happen.

  Dr Richards: At the EPSRC we have MOUs with China, Taiwan, Korea, USA and Japan. With the NSF, which is our closest body, what happens there is we have agreements with usually the programme director on how to avoid double jeopardy. So there is one in chemistry and there is one in materials particularly. And because of the difficulties that the NSF has what we usually do is we say we will accept the NSF peer review system, which is made transparent and known to all the UK applicants, as long as there is a UK participant in there as well and there are also some UK referees on the applications.

  Professor Blakemore: Our experience has been that it is very important to settle these issues before beginning the process and, if possible, to arrive at agreement on peer review and how the process will be managed in advance. I can give a particular example. The MRC negotiated handling the international peer review process for an autism-genome project, which is a project with co-funding from North America and from the UK, and the agreement to use a single point of peer review was settled in advance.

  Q51  Mr Newmark: Professor Blakemore, you alluded to some challenges but what challenges do you expect research council officers in Washington and Beijing to face? You touched on the cultural issues but I am wondering what else you see out there? It would be helpful to try and differentiate between the sort of challenges that one has in the US, which I suspect are slightly less than they are in China?

  Professor Blakemore: I think in the US the challenge is very different because in the US the task of the office will be to build on existing considerable strengths. Despite the statistics that Evans presented the UK is very much a preferred collaborator with leading US scientists already. So I think that the office will principally be looking at other forms of interaction other than the peer to peer, senior scientist to scientist interactions, which are already very healthy. On the Chinese side I would say that the principal issue will be a matter of catch-up. I think Germany and France are ahead of us in having developed their connectivity with China. The Germans have had an international centre attached to their embassy in Beijing for several years, which is already a well recognised point of contact for Chinese scientists, students and so on. However, let me qualify that by the well known statistic that there are now more Chinese students in the UK even than in the US. So they are managing to find their way here even without the assistance of an office in Beijing, but we hope it will greatly facilitate that process.

  Q52  Mr Newmark: Just touching on a point which Professor Diamond made, which is this whole concept of joined-up thinking, I know, because I visited the FCO Science & Innovation Network posts in Boston. How does this fit in with the work that they are actually carrying out? Are they mutually exclusive, are they working together?

  Professor Blakemore: Absolutely not mutually exclusive. The Science & Innovation Network in Beijing facilitated the discussions about the establishment of the RCUK office. They are a partner in the use of the office, and I think it is a very good example of a well joined-up process.

  Professor Diamond: Not only that, the original plan was for the office to be in the Embassy but the Embassy actually found the facilities for the office, and exactly the same with regard to the Embassy in Washington and indeed in Delhi, that the ambassadors are incredibly proactive in working with us to ensure that the office can be centrally located with the Embassy.

  Q53  Mr Newmark: So how are you going to measure success and the impact of the offices in Beijing and Washington? You say we have one in Delhi, but I did not think we did?

  Professor Diamond: There is a plan to develop one.

  Q54  Mr Newmark: So as one measures success, having measured success I am assuming that one will then trigger a decision to go into Delhi?

  Professor Diamond: The decision to go to Delhi has been triggered but it is just that—

  Q55  Mr Newmark: Okay, so how are you measuring success and impact of the Beijing and Washington offices to then have already decided to open up in India?

  Professor Blakemore: You are quite right, we need to have the metrics for that and that is an issue which the RCUK international team will be tackling.

  Q56  Mr Newmark: Professor Blakemore, you said will be tackling it but you have already made a decision to open up in Delhi, so you must have had some measure of success to have made that decision, or are just simply saying, "We just know, gut feel, there are great opportunities for us in India, therefore come what may we are setting up there"?

  Professor Blakemore: I am not sure that gut feel is such a bad initial approach to dealing with China and India, and, in any case, it is perfectly obvious that China and India are an increasingly important player internationally, so it is very important for the UK to be working with them.

  Q57  Mr Newmark: In China as opposed to the US—and I am not necessarily reflecting my relationship with my wife—but how do you stop a syndrome of what is mine is mine and what is yours is mine in terms of research that is carried out and work there, as opposed to the US? Is there any cultural challenge of being truly collaborative in work that is being done there?

  Professor Blakemore: I think that the norms of the ownership of research are internationally accepted as represented through co-publication. If you are talking about intellectual property, that is another and important difficult issue.

  Q58  Mr Newmark: But is that a separate issue from this or is that very much part and parcel of what we are trying to achieve here?

  Professor Blakemore: It touches on Keith's point about the importance of using the overseas contacts to develop innovation as well as developing research effort, but that is going to require input from other aspects of—

  Mr Newmark: I still do not know how you are measuring success.

  Q59  Chairman: Can I bring in Dr Richards there because you have been nodding—

  Dr Richards: Just a comment on the IP collaboration. I have been having discussions with Arden Bement, who is the Director of NSF, close collaboration, and we have all agreed that there is a double jeopardy issue that you have to get over and agree upon. Then there are the outcomes of the research. Okay, if it is a paper that is fine but more and more it is about economic impact and there you have to address the intellectual property rights—who owns them, especially on collaborative research, and who assigns them. We do not know the answer to that yet because we are going to have to agree those with the agencies we are dealing with and the lawyers are going to have to come in.