Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140-159)
PROFESSOR IAN
MCGRATH,
MR JOHN
BREWER, DR
BRUCE HAMILTON
AND DR
ANNA CASEY
25 OCTOBER 2006
Q140 Dr Iddon: Why not? Running across
the battlefield is very analogous to what sports people do.
Dr Casey: That is what I was about
to say. Sport is not named but of course the majority of the work
they place within our capability is all to do with training, recovery,
exercise and performance enhancement so of course it is to do
with sport, it is just not named that way. There is a fairly large
programme of research funded by the Ministry of Defence to address
this. For instance, we have very recently formed a consortium
of industry, military and government organisations such as the
Health and Safety Laboratory as well as five or six leading universities
in the UK. We formed a consortium called the Haldane-Spearman
Consortium which has recently won a competed contract from the
Ministry of Defence Research Acquisition Organisation (the RAO)
to perform human sciences research, most of which is based around
these sorts of topics. It is an enabling contract which is worth
potentially up to twenty million over the next six years. That
is a recent development, so the Ministry of Defence is putting
significant resources into preparing people for operations, preparing
people for optimal performance and different environmental conditions
using different technologies and different supplements and different
ways of optimising performance. We have a slightly different experience
in that the Ministry of Defence is putting a fair amount of money
into this area. I should just add, we do not always use military
subjects for these studies. A lot of these are well-controlled
studies in an academic department and are performed in the same
way as they would be in a university. We would often use populations
of moderately trained or well trained athletes, cyclists, runners
in the same way that we would in the university environment. We
do use military subjects; we do need to match our subject populations
to the military populations that we are addressing, but we do
often do performance studies which use athletes.
Dr Turner: On the question of funding,
I can see why you might hesitate to ask the MRC to fund this kind
of research, or even BBSRC, because they have pretty serious remits.
However, what we do have in sport is a massive billion pound industry
which, if we had some system of imposing a levy across the whole
sports industry, you could produce a twenty million a year budget
with the greatest of ease. I just wondered if anyone had ever
investigated that as a possibility.
Q141 Chairman: I have to tell you
that when Harry Thomason set up one of the first sports laboratories
at Salford University, Manchester United were his first customers.
Professor McGrath: If you go round
the country a lot of sports science groups are giving support
to football teams up and down the country. I think there is a
requirement by the various organisations that they should have
sports science support now. That has been quite a good thing in
enhancing the volume of research if not necessarily the quality.
Mr Brewer: Going back to the question
of 2012 and where we should be directing our resources to be successful
in 2012, I think we have to accept as well that our success in
2012 will not just be based on performance in endurance sports;
there will be team sports and powerbase sports—hockey, basketball
and so on—where we will need to be successful. One of the
areas that we would like to feel that more work is being done
is showing to the performers in the countries in those team sports
that appropriate nutritional practices will enable them to improve,
not just the marathon runners and so on where we know the science
has already established a very close link between sports nutrition
and performance. I think there is a lot of work to be done across
a broad category of sports to show that they can enhance their
performance with correct nutrition. That is something we feel
very strongly about. The other area where we feel that funding
could be directed is towards the whole story of recovery. If you
look at sports people at the moment there are far more sports
people in full time training now thanks to the Lottery than there
were 10 or 15 years ago. As a consequence of that, performers
at the highest level are training on a daily basis for a number
of hours, day after day. Quite often in team sports there are
small squads as well. The whole issue of how do performers recover
properly after training so that they can go back and train more
effectively and train properly on a daily basis is something that
I think is very important. If we can achieve that and achieve
better recovery in terms of performance and immunity from illnesses—colds
and so on—then I think that is an area we would certainly
like to see research and development focussed in the build up
to 2012 because I think there are some big wins to be gained from
that.
Q142 Mr Newmark: How common is it
for sporting bodies actually to undertake or commission research?
Dr Hamilton: In my experience
it is very rare to commission research, primarily because the
sporting bodies do not have funds to do so. We do develop clinical
research based around practices that we are doing, so we would
do a lot of auditing about procedures and we will, using our sports
scientists that we have links with in track and field in particular,
develop small projects based around developments that are going
on. In terms of commissioning and paying for it, it is very limited.
Q143 Mr Newmark: Do you think this
is something they should be doing or should it be left to other
bodies to do?
Dr Hamilton: I agree with my colleagues
in terms of what has been said about where the support and funding
should be directed. From my perspective, there needs to be a tighter
link between the clinical practice (and I include in that the
sports physicians and the coaching arena) and the university research.
I think that is an area that I would look to tighten up. I am
not certain of the evidence for that but certainly linking research
to appropriate practice within the clinical realms would be a
priority for me.
Q144 Mr Newmark: Dr Casey, you touched
a bit on collaborative research for the soldiers. How much collaborative
research do you actually undertake?
Dr Casey: Quite a lot, actually.
Q145 Mr Newmark: Who is it with?
Is it with universities?
Dr Casey: Yes, we obviously now
have this Haldane-Spearman Consortium and we are the prime contractor
with Quintec as the lead partner; there are twenty other partners
which include six universities (Nottingham, Loughborough, Birmingham,
Cardiff, Glasgow and Cranfield School of Management), 12 specialist
SMEs as well as the Health and Safety Laboratory. That is really
quite new, so those collaborations are just getting up and running.
We do have a long history of collaborations on fairly large research
programmes with universities, in this area particularly with Birmingham,
Loughborough, Liverpool and Nottingham. We have very close links
with them and we do perform collaborative research with them on
a regular basis. At some of these universities, such as Birmingham,
we have programmes which have run end to end for 10 years or so.
We have quite close links with them. I think we are quite good
at collaborative research and that is partly because previously
the majority of the Ministry of Defence funding we received had
a small amount ring fenced which we were asked to use for collaborative
research—it was one of the aims of the defence programmes
that were given to us—and that got people in the habit,
but it is done on a regular basis.
Q146 Mr Newmark: How much of that
are one-off projects as opposed to long term funding for that?
Dr Casey: These tend to be three
year programmes so they are fairly substantial. That is probably
as much as a university would receive from a funding body in terms
of sponsorship.
Q147 Mr Newmark: Is that a reasonable
timeframe for you to do what is necessary?
Dr Casey: It is, and of course
what happens—and has happened—is that you kick off
with a three year programme, you establish a relationship, you
have trained someone up within that university to do that particular
work and you then renew those programmes. The funding for these
programmes that I am talking about now has almost all come from
the Ministry of Defence and we are then sub-contracting universities
and it might be a formal relationship in the sense that we give
them a sub-contract, but it is always collaborative in the sense
of an academic collaboration. Often we will do work over and above
what is required for that work programme out of academic interest
and to pursue this area, which is the way that all of us have
to operate.
Q148 Mr Newmark: John, how much collaborative
research do you end up doing?
Mr Brewer: We have done a small
amount with Dr Casey and her team, but otherwise in terms of collaborating
with other businesses the answer to that is no, we fund our own
work. We have links with five UK universities at the moment. We
talk with the universities on an on-going basis.
Q149 Mr Newmark: Are those the same
universities as Dr Casey or different ones?
Mr Brewer: Loughborough, Birmingham,
Liverpool John Moores University and Bath University are the four
that we work with in the UK. That is not to say it is written
in tablets of stone; we do talk with other universities about
perhaps doing different studies involving on-going work. We also
fund work at the University of Melbourne, Institute of Technology
in Australia. It is very much a moveable feast. We have core universities
that we have worked with for a long period of time, Loughborough
and Birmingham particularly, but we are always looking for new
academic partners that we would like to work with. The number
one priority for us is the quality of scientific work that they
can do; the second point is to make sure that when we work with
them that we are doing research work or we are supporting research
work that will have an output for us whether it is for new product
development or claims on existing products, or potentially blue
sky work where we might see a benefit in five or 10 years' time.
Q150 Mr Newmark: Is there much overlap
between what you are doing and what Dr Casey would do, or not?
Mr Brewer: Possibly not. As you
would imagine, we are very sports nutrition focussed. Having said
that, our sports nutrition work or research work does not just
focus on the elite performers; we fund work that is looking at
the overall effect of health on dehydration, for example, with
people going into a gymnasium and sweating and losing fluid and
how that can impair their performance on their day to day lifestyles.
We have worked with Dr Casey and her colleagues at QinetiQ on
that area.
Q151 Mr Newmark: Professor McGrath,
where does the funding for academic research in sports related
topics come from? We have heard a little bit comes from the military;
where else is money coming from?
Professor McGrath: It comes from
the drinks industry. It comes from devices manufacturers (people
who make heart rate monitors or remote sensors for temperature,
metabolism and things like that), a variety of commercial sources.
People tend to get credit from research councils, by doing things
that are related to exercise but which have health benefits. People
would tend to go for BBSRC or MRC grants in an area that was in
some priority area but crossed over into sport. They would develop
their science that way and then they would use a skim off of some
of that to do the more direct sports related stuff. Like any other
academic institution or department they would be looking everywhere,
but they would not be as successful at getting a big proportion
from the research councils which, in academic terms, is what you
get your brownie points for. It makes it very, very difficult
to build up elite groups in universities because you have to do
a lot of small grants which takes up a lot of time and do not
develop the science enough. That is the problem.
Q152 Mr Newmark: In the universe
of sports science, if you had a pie chart what percentage tends
to come from commercial as opposed to military as opposed to government
directly? Or through universities? I am just trying to understand
where the balance is.
Professor McGrath: I think compared
to equivalent areas of biomedical science probably twice as much
would come from commercial sources and half as much would come
from research council sources. That would be my guess.
Q153 Dr Turner: Professor McGrath,
what can you tell us about the effectiveness of knowledge exchange
between the different scientific disciplines in terms of sports
related knowledge? Are the geneticists talking to the pharmacologists
and the biochemists, et cetera?
Professor McGrath: I should say
in defence of sports science that it is a very new subject. Universities
have only been running degrees in sports science for twenty years;
ours has been running twenty-one years this month and it is the
oldest degree. If you look at the people around you the age profile
shows you how high up people have got from British sports science
developing. There are a few older people who were in physiology
before and are now associated with it, but it is quite a young
science. It is regarded as a kind of Johnny-Come-Lately soft science
by people like geneticists and pharmacologists, but interestingly
recently they have become more interested because they have seen
that there are some very interesting applications of their science.
We mentioned gene doping at the beginning and I have to say I
think gene doping is a red herring. Gene therapy in medicine is
a wonderful prospect but it is years away from being effective
and to say that you can use gene doping in this area of performance
enhancement I think is just a distraction. The interesting thing
about genetics is not in terms of changing people's genes but
in terms of having the technology to measure what other changes
are happening in a person. Geneticists have started to become
quite interested; even fairly hard core geneticists are quite
interested. There are some good geneticists working in this area
but they need to work with physiologist type sports scientists
to make anything of it. You need to have people who are very good
and know all about physiological changes that take place working
with geneticists. A geneticist would be of no use on his own with
this. You need to be in a place where you can get the resources
to do this. We opened a laboratory last week with a million pounds
of university money because they want to bring the geneticists
and physiologists together. We have a suite of laboratories which
have bicycles and treadmills in one room with a molecular laboratory
next to it and there is a metabolic laboratory for nutrition next
to that. This is the kind of effort that people need to make.
Q154 Dr Turner: So you think there
is a need for more inter-disciplinary approaches like this?
Professor McGrath: Absolutely,
there is no question about that.
Q155 Dr Turner: What about the exchange
between different sectors, not of scientific disciplines but between
the academic world, industry and the military? How effective is
that?
Professor McGrath: The interaction
with the military has always been interesting because there has
always been interaction between physiology and the military. Going
back before my time there were always people who were coming in
from the military to do joint projects and to teach the kind of
stuff they did with endurance or deep sea diving. There has always
been an interesting feedback with physiology and the military.
At the moment there may be more of an inhibition in information
exchange between the military and the outside world in technological
terms. I think this remote sensing is quite an important thing.
Satellite tracking tells you where a person is and how fast they
are travelling even within a few metres, and monitoring of physiological
performance. I think the military should be putting a lot of resources
into that because it is extremely important. It would be terrific
to transfer that into sport, but I do not know whether they would
want to. I cannot speak for them, but if I were them I might be
reluctant.
Q156 Dr Turner: What do the military
have to say about it all?
Dr Casey: I cannot speak on behalf
of the Ministry of Defence; I can only speak on behalf of QinetiQ.
What I can say is that the UK Ministry of Defence has just placed
a programme on physiological monitoring with the Haldane-Spearman
Consortium and that does include remote physiological monitoring
in the field. This is the type of thing you are talking about;
it is being funded by the Ministry of Defence. We are not as far
down the line as you might expect. I am talking here about physiological
monitoring. There are other programmes within QinetiQ which deal
with the physiological monitoring on a different scale. It is
an on-going programme of work. I do not see any reason why that
could not be translated into sport at the end of the day. I think
you will find that the Ministry of Defence is always very pleased
when it sees pull-through which goes beyond the military. I think
that is something that both the Ministry of Defence and the providers
of research for the Ministry of Defence like ourselves have not
been as good at as we might have been in the past. The issue of
pull-through is something they do now focus on and it is improving,
not just outside but within the military. The pull-through of
research into military policy is something that has improved considerably
and is still improving and that does need to extend to outside
the military. They are very aware of that and very, very pleased
when they see examples of that happening. I think you would find
a willingness to do it, it is just doing it.
Professor McGrath: It is creating
a forum for discussion and that may be one of the things we could
bring out of this. We are bringing together people who would not
normally have come together.
Q157 Dr Turner: Is there any scope
for improvement and enhancement of relationships in this respect
between industry and academia?
Mr Brewer: Yes, I think there
is. To have a group where we, as a business, can raise the issues
that we would like the research to be conducted in and have a
team of academics who we could interact with to identify the best
ways of conducting that research would be something that would
be of great value. It is certainly an area that we have discussed
within our business. Whilst we know the key individuals that we
are working with, there may be other areas of expertise out there
which we are not aware of which could give us the answers to some
of the questions which we are raising.
Q158 Margaret Moran: We have just
had a superb example of what was quoted to us that the communication
across industry, across the military and you mentioned space is
not there. I think the point is very well illustrated in that
discussion. Is there a recognition of the value of knowledge transfer
between different sectors involved here, industry, MoD, interest
in space? Obviously you can have a forum which sounds like a good
step forward, but the understanding and the value and actually
doing the knowledge transfer is a further step on. What are the
problems associated with that? Do you think there is reluctance
to do that or do you think there are other things which would
stand in the way of that kind of knowledge transfer?
Dr Casey: There are obviously
concerns in terms of the military research in the sense that some
of this is classified and would not be available. In terms of
the unclassified research on performance enhancement you would
find a willingness within the MoD to engage in that type of discussion.
They are very open to this and it is not non-existent. To give
a small example, UK Sport recently set up a short term working
group which myself and your adviser sat on which brought together
academics, myself from QinetiQ and UK Sport and actually produced
a document for UK athletes with a view to 2012 on ergogenic aids
and supplements and performance enhancement. That has now been
published on the Internet. It is not non-existent; it does happen.
That was actually pulled together by UK Sport and headed by them.
It is a small example but that interaction is not non-existent.
It is not as good as it should be, but it is not non-existent.
Mr Brewer: When we are working
with our academic colleagues we always encourage them and would
never restrict them from publishing the data that they produce
from those studies in appropriate peer review journals or present
that data at conferences. We have a very much encouraging and
positive attitude towards sharing that data. Obviously there will
be a time delay between the point at which the studies have been
completed and the time at which that data was published and we
would want to use that time gap in order to make any product developments
or new claim developments in order to give us the edge in terms
of the products that we are producing. We would always have an
open dialogue policy with all the data that we are commissioning
with academia.
Q159 Margaret Moran: Why has it taken
so long to have this understanding of knowledge transfer between
the sectors? I take your point about sports science being relatively
new. I always quote that Luton University in the last two years
have developed a sports science course by accident. They actually
advertised for a social science course and misspelt it and then
discovered they had a number of takers for the course. Some are
very new and very exploratory, but twenty-one years is actually
quite a long time in the development of some of these issues.
What has prevented this kind of knowledge transfer so far?
Mr Brewer: Can I say that I was
fortunate enough to be employed by the Football Association in
1988 as their Sports Scientist and at that time I was the first
sports scientist to be employed by a national governing body.
To be quite frank, in that era—the late 1980s and early
1990s—there was no quest for sports science knowledge or
sports nutrition knowledge by and large from the world of sport.
I think we have to accept that the demands from sport and the
world of sport have moved on enormously, particularly since the
Lottery and especially in the last five or six years.
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