Examination of Witnesses (Questions 113-119)
PROFESSOR MARTIN
SHIRLEY, PROFESSOR
IAN CRUTE
AND PROFESSOR
CHRIS POLLOCK
1 NOVEMBER 2006
Q113 Chairman: Good morning. Welcome
to our special guests, our witnesses this morning, Professor Martin
Shirley, Director of the Institute for Animal Health; Professor
Chris Pollock, Director of the Institute of Grassland and Environmental
Research, and Professor Ian Crute, Director of Rothamsted Research.
Welcome to you and to the members of the public and indeed to
the Minister as well. This is the second of our oral evidence
sessions in terms of our work looking at the Research Council
Institutes, their place within British science, the way in which
we maintain them, and, indeed, the way in which they interrelate
with the universities and government departments in terms of research.
We are concentrating this morning on BBSRC and its links with
the research institutes and also, of course, the relationship
between BBSRC and research institutes and Defra. That is the broad
territory we are in. I wonder if we could ask you, Professor Shirley,
to chair your panel. If you feel it is important to have another
view, you will turn to one of your colleagues. You are the boss!
Could I start by asking each one of you to sum up, in a couple
of sentences, what is unique about your institute.
Professor Shirley:
In the case of the Institute for Animal Health what is unique
is really quite obvious: we are working with important pathogens
of livestock and we are studying those pathogens in the natural
hosts. We are therefore committed to working with large animals
in containment and we are also committed to working with poultry
in containment. The high level of containment, with specific focus
on pathogens in the natural host, makes the IAH approach unique.
Q114 Chairman: What would British
science lose if you did not exist?
Professor Shirley: If we did not
exist, you would lose that whole capability effectively to look
at the fundamental and strategic areas of biology of these important
pathogens, which range from foot and mouth disease through to
bacterial foodborne infections, through to some of the parasites.
The biology of those organisms in proper context is not being
done anywhere else, and so we bring to the table a uniqueness
and relevance which is not being addressed anywhere else. If we
did not do it, it would have to be done elsewhere. It would have
to be done.
Professor Pollock: The institute
covers the grassland base for the United Kingdom, which is 50%
of the land area. It provides the underpinning support for the
£4 billion livestock industry. It also provides most of our
clean water, our clean air, a large proportion of our eco-system
services and a huge slab of UK biodiversity. The UK is interested
in developing sustainable systems to exploit this in a way which
maximises economic benefit whilst sustaining rural employment
and delivering eco-system services and environmental benefits.
What is unique about the institute is that it does go all the
way from molecules to muck. It covers the strand by which humans
manage landscape (that is, by optimising the management of that
land) and also by using genetic improvement to modify the plants
and animals that use that land. What would you lose? You would
lose the joining up, the systems approach, the added-value, the
integration, the sense of mission and continuity. Our longest
contract is with a plant breeding company. It is a 15-year rolling
contract. That is the sort of timescale you need to work on to
make a difference.
Professor Crute: Rothamsted Research,
as I am sure the Committee is aware, is the longest established
agricultural institute in the world. It was founded in 1843, so
we have a long history. But at this particular moment in time,
we are unique in the sense that, certainly within the UK, possibly
in the world, we are the one place where the mathematical, biological
and physical sciences are integrated in support of, you might
say, farmed land, as distinct from the grassland sector that Chris
was talking about, so, essentially, the major crops of the UK
which occupy about 25% of the land area: wheat, oil seed rape,
sugar beet, potatoes, and essentially the science that underpins
that, which goes through from molecular biology and the things
which impact on crop improvement, the genetic improvement of crops,
all the way through to pests and disease, interactions with soil
processes and the recycling of carbon. Obviously bio-energy crops
is a big issue we are right in the thick of this at the moment.
In fact, we recently introduced seven new high yielding willow
varieties into production for bio-energy. What would the country
and the science base lose? I think the first thing to say is that
probably in the context of making a complementarity with the higher
education sector and the university sector, really the agricultural
sciences and the sciences which underpin production have been
eroded in that sector. We are one of the few places where people
can get firm postgraduate training: field-based integrated into
laboratory-based training in the postgraduate context. That is
the one area I think is important. We have of course a unique
legacy of 160 years of experimentation through our past experience.
We have an archive of samples of vegetation and soil data which
allows us to address all of the pressing issues of today which
relate to climate change, which relate to nuclear fallout, which
we can log through these sort of things, a whole range of environmental
issues which the institute deals with. Ultimately it would be
an inconceivable gap in context of national competency to think
about not having an institute which covered that sort of territory.
Q115 Chairman: Are you saying that
you offer additional opportunities for scientific research that,
for instance, the universities cannot offer?
Professor Crute: The facility,
capability and human resource expertise that we have, in probably
all of the BBSRC institutes, but certainly the three that you
see represented in front of you, are certainly not duplicated
anywhere in the UK, even possibly in Europe or globally.
Q116 Chairman: Could they be advanced?
Professor Shirley: They could
be with unlimited resources. One could replicate all of this elsewhere,
but, to reinforce the point made by Ian, it exists and we have
this unique resource. In the case of IAH, we can go from the molecule
through to the cell, through to the whole animal, through to populations.
This is a unique resource, underpinned by a lot of investment
in the past, particularly in genetically-defined lines of livestock,
whether they be cattle or poultry. It is a unique resource and
to establish this from de novo would be hugely expensive and it
would take years to reach the state where it is functioning. Currently
this is all embedded within the institute and it is a huge national
resource.
Q117 Chairman: Is there anything,
in terms of your institute, in terms of scientific research that
is carried on that could not be carried on given enough resourcing
in a university setting?
Professor Pollock: No. You could
create it in a university setting but you would end up with an
institute. If you want the sense of mission and the sense of continuity,
if you want the targeting or if you want the facilities and the
ability to maintain them over long periods of time, you need to
set in place funding management structures that differ from the
three-year responsive mode graph. If that is something that is
worth doing, you could do it in a university but you would end
up with something that was exactly like you already had.
Q118 Chairman: But it would be embedded
in the university.
Professor Pollock: And, indeed,
if there are management models for institutes that look very closely
at links between universities. The Welsh Plant Breeding Station
started off as part of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, in
1919. That is the precursor of IGER. I have worked at the institute
since 1974 and my contract has changed three times in that period.
Initially it was with the university. But it is still IGER, is
still has the sense of mission, it still has the continuity, it
still has the long-term resources. I am more interested in ends
than means, Mr Chairman.
Chairman: That is a good point to pass
on to my colleague.
Q119 Bob Spink: I am interested in
how you control your work, how flexible you are. The public interest
is served by your long-term commitment to research projects that
go on for years—and you mentioned the 16-year contract—yet
the public interest is also served by you responding very rapidly
to developing situations—and we have seen a few of those
over the last decade, have we not, with potentially others coming
along that we know about? How do you get the balance between these?
Are you flexible enough to respond? Does it set back your long-term
strategies?
Professor Crute: The way to respond
to that is perhaps to give one or two examples. You can be very
responsive to requirements if you have a reservoir of capability
and expertise and you have a reservoir of facility. For example,
something Chris and I were much involved with was the farm scale
evaluations of GM crops. That was something that came quite quickly
politically. There was a requirement to get significant amounts
of data. Because we had expertise in place in weed biology, in
invertebrate biology and knowledge of the sort of mathematical
processes of sampling, we were able, literally overnight, to put
together very substantial teams of people to address that.
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