Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
Professor Stephen Hopper, Dr Eimear Nic Lughadha,
Professor Mary Gibby, Dr Michael Dixon and Professor Richard Lane
19 FEBRUARY 2008
Q1 Chairman: May I welcome you very
warmly indeed and thank you for the written evidence that has
already been submitted, some of which this afternoon we might
have a chance to take further and ask some specific questions
arising out of what you have written. It is a matter for you whether
you wish to embellish or add to that. Thank you very much indeed.
I will ask you in a moment to introduce yourselves. This is partly
for the record because a recording is taken of this evidence session
and that will in due course be on the web, so your every word
will be out there for someone to listen to; I will just remind
you of that at the start. We are aiming to finish probably not
too much after five o'clock, but there is the possibility if afterwards,
on reflection, you want to clarify any point you have made, or
to add to them, to write in to us and we take the possibility
seriously of coming back to you on any specific points on which
we would like further discussion. As I think some of you know
very well, the Committee has had one briefing session—an
excellent day at the Natural History Museum—but this is
our first evidence-taking session, so we are warming up to the
process as you are. Would you introduce yourselves and say what
particular allegiance you have, or which institution you come
from?
Professor Lane: My name is Richard Lane. I am
the Director of Science at the Natural History Museum.
Dr Dixon: I am Michael Dixon. I am Director
of the Natural History Museum.
Professor Gibby: I am Mary Gibby. I am Director
of Science at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, but funded by
the Scottish Government.
Professor Hopper: I am Stephen Hopper, Director
of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
Dr Lughadha: I am Eimear Nic Lughadha. I am
Head of Science Policy and Co-ordination at the Royal Botanic
Gardens, Kew.
Q2 Chairman: If there is something
especially you want to say by way of introduction, there are a
few moments for that now, alternatively, we could move straight
to the discussion of the questions that we have for you. Have
any of you come with a short statement that you wanted us to hear?
Dr Dixon: I welcome this opportunity to present
material to this inquiry today. From the Natural History Museum's
point of view, we feel that we are one of the world's leading
institutions for systematics and taxonomy. It is an important
subject. It is important to us because of the nature of our collections
and the expertise of our scientists. We also feel that there is
a very important public education role that the Museum plays so
we welcome both the inquiry and the opportunity to give evidence
today.
Q3 Chairman: We have already been
hosted by you very successfully and we appreciate your interest
in this. We are returning to this topic as you know because we
count it as a very important topic which is why we want to pick
it up again and run with it. As a first question, in this, our
first question session, I want to ask a broad question, what is
the state of play in systematics and taxonomy in the United Kingdom
today? Are we well provided for? Are we minimally provided for?
We think there is a very vibrant quantity of science going on,
but what would you like to add to your comments?
Professor Lane: Perhaps I could start. We need
to put the UK into an international context and in that context,
the UK does well. It has leadership and a certain amount of capacity.
It probably has greater breadth than it has depth and that is
quite a key issue. The other key point is that the UK is well
provided for in terms of the basic infrastructure to do science—we
have terrific collections built up over many years and if you
look at the collections represented at this table (NHM,RBGE, RBGK),
they are a very significant sample of the biodiversity of the
planet. So, we have that base. The main limiting factor is that
the subject is expanding enormously and our ability to expand
with it and to lead and take the subject forward is the main constraint,
and that is about people and obviously financial resources.
Q4 Chairman: Can I probe you a little
on the distinction you drew between breadth and depth. Would you
like to spell out what you mean by that?
Professor Lane: Yes, if we consider that technology
is allowing us to explore the world in the way that we never could
before—everything from metagenomics to very sophisticated
bioinformatics, which requires development in its own right and
requires development within the context of the subject. Against
that is the need to describe and delimit the different forms of
life on the planet and that is where the depth that we would have
had in the past, of a large number of experts to do that, rather
untrammelled, is where the UK is under the greatest pressure.
The subject is expanding, the resource base is not expanding at
the same rate—that tells you that there has been a shortfall—and
our ability to lead is strongly curtailed by our resources.
Q5 Chairman: Does anyone else want
to comment on that broad question?
Professor Hopper: To me, taxonomy is big science
in the true meaning of the words. It has been an ongoing enterprise
for 300 or 400 years and it is an enterprise that has not finished
its work by any stretch of the imagination. What has happened,
however, has been a perception that taxonomy is a bit old-fashioned—it
has been dropped from many university curricula—except in
some areas such as molecular phylogenetics, it is not actively
encouraged by our present reward system, and yet it is the fundamental
underpinning for all biological science. For all our interactions
with other organisms, we need names, we need a predictive classification
system and I would argue that never in the history of the planet
is there a more urgent need for that fundamental underpinning
than now. The challenge that we have is to address the recent
historical perceptions of taxonomy; it is a hypothesis-driven
science, I believe fervently, and one of the most rigorously refereed
in the sense that everyone uses its names, far more so than many
of the discoveries in contemporary biology. In that sense, it
is refereed on a daily basis. I have this fervent belief that
in the UK there is a wonderful and proud tradition of global enterprise,
tremendous collections and we need to lift the game in the research
sense and the curation of the collections so that they can deliver
the urgently needed information for best environmental management
of the planet.
Q6 Chairman: I could ask a fairly
blunt question, as you touched on it in your answer, why does
it matter? But I will temper that by saying, why is it as important
as you imply? Does anyone else want to come in on that?
Professor Gibby: The demands for them on the
subject have changed enormously over recent years. There is a
great demand for it in the UK and overseas; on the fundamental
information to support conservation efforts; to understand biodiversity
out in the wilds; and to see how it will adapt to change. Many
people who are doing taxonomy have been encouraged to work in
partnership with others to explore these issues and help take
those issues forward. So taxonomists are at the heart of that
but they are also being asked to diversify in what they do and
not just stick to the strict taxonomy but applying that to conservation,
to modelling, to see what will happen to populations and species
under climate change, and so forth. So, what they are expected
to do is widening all the time, and there is a demand there. You
ask, should we be doing it? Yes, we should, because there are
many people out there wanting that service.
Professor Lane: I would like to add to that.
One of the compelling scientific questions of our time is about
change in biodiversity. It is changing not only in the species,
because we are very aware of the biodiversity crisis and our impending
loss of species on an unprecedented scale—certainly in recent
times—but also for accurate and fast information. For many
developing countries, being able to identify potential pests on
their crops, to say either that we can identify these and take
action, or perhaps, economically even more important, to say that
they do not contain particular pests. That requires us to have
two kinds of information: one is that we understand whether the
pest is one or several species and, secondly, that we can identify
it fast in any stage (of it's life cycle). Those are two scientific
activities that are becoming required faster and faster than they
were maybe 10 or 20 years ago. The immediacy of knowledge for
an ever-increasing variety of society's needs is quite compelling.
There is also a large undercurrent of scientific questions about
the change in the nature of biodiversity. The taxonomic information
we generate is one of the key ways to answering that question.
Chairman: That has opened up the issues for
us very well. I will pass over now to Lady Walmsley, who chaired
the Committee that produced the previous report.
Q7 Baroness Walmsley: It is very
nice to see Dr Nic Lughadha here, who was our specialist adviser
last time, for those noble Lords who do not know that. One of
the recommendations in the last report was that systematic biologists
should go out and blow their own trumpet a bit more and emphasise
the importance and relevance of the subject. We heard at our seminar,
a couple of weeks ago, that it has been done to a great extent;
there has been much effort to do that, and there have been successes
and the whole thing has survived much better, partly because of
that, and we must congratulate those who have done it. We have
just heard much about the increase in demand for taxonomic information
and we also saw it in the written evidence from RBG Kew. In that
situation, could you tell us whether you feel that the discipline
will be able to fulfil that demand, either by greater effort or
by focusing down on the areas of greatest need, or is it simply
a matter of increasing capacity?
Professor Hopper: Perhaps I will open and then
defer to Dr Nic Lughadha. Regrouping and reallocating existing
resources is a pressure that is irresistible to the major institutions
in the absence of an increasing budget for this sort of activity.
It is an ongoing process and is a process of change that is challenging
many staff. If you can imagine, people appointed 40 years ago,
had fundamentally different employment regime as taxonomists where,
in the main, their challenge was to understand a group of organisms
and describe the diversity of life and develop a pretty big classification.
Because the funding resources have not kept up with demand, there
has been a need to engage with the users of taxonomy in a much
more active way, which has meant that the big organisations certainly
have had to change some of their core activities to meet that
demand.
Dr Nic Lughadha: We have got much better at
adding value to our product and translating it into something
that is ready for the user, rather than putting out something
very dry and academic and saying, "it's out there, they need
to look it up and learn how to use it". Of course, that involves
additional resources, both the time of the conventional taxonomists
and also other people who know how to manipulate texts, images,
and so on, to make a more user-friendly product. The people who
nowadays call themselves taxonomists are spending a smaller proportion
of their time doing descriptive taxonomy and more of their time
than 10 or 20 years ago translating it into what the user needs,
understanding the user needs, negotiating with the user about
how they might cover the costs, both of creating the material
and of translating it. We have worked a lot on efficiencies and
it is fair to say that the original question was, "can we
meet the increasing demand simply through further efforts and
focusing down?" The simple answer is, No. We have done that
to the extent that we can, we are now in a situation where resources
are limiting and we really need some growth in those resources.
We are living off capital to a certain extent. We are translating
from a base of the collections but we are no longer investing
enough in maintaining those collections, or in circumstances where
we are investing, we are investing in the collections' maintenance
at the expense of the descriptive taxonomy. The balance is out
of kilter and it needs further resources invested in the system
in order to rebalance so that we can have an appropriate balance
of collections development and maintenance, which is the basis
for products created not only by the staff employed at our institutions
but also at many other institutions around the world who look
to Kew, the Natural History Museum and RBGE for their basic primary
research material.
Q8 Lord Methuen: Concern has been
expressed repeatedly that the quality and value of taxonomy does
not do well when it is assessed by organisations such as the RAE.
How better do you think this might be overcome? This is obviously
a general concern, how do you feel that this access to funds should
be better tackled?
Professor Lane: Perhaps I will answer, having
been involved in a recent RAE. Our institutions do not partake
of the RAE and that is quite appropriate. It is an instrument
to measure a different sum of output. Parts of what we do, would
do reasonably well under the RAE; the phylogenetic, and some of
the biodiversity studies, which are broad-based analyses, are
competitive. Some of the areas that do particularly poorly are
the delimitation of taxa and subsequent description, and the population
of databases. That is something, which under the RAE, depending
on which unit assessment is being looked at, could either go in
measures of esteem or some of those other measures around scholarship.
For many organisations that are not sitting at this desk, their
inability to show value to a funding council is a major constraint
on them taking up taxonomy in their institutions. It is a general
challenge for measures like the RAE and other metrics-based systems,
and even peer review systems, to give value to the population
of data sets and databases when they are used by others, and that
is a particular challenge that we face in a significant part of
our activities.
Professor Hopper: There is a need to explore
new ways of recognising the contribution of taxonomists and rewarding
them. That is the way forward. As I mentioned in my earlier comment,
if you look at, for example, the frequency with which names are
used in the biological literature as a metric, then you might
have a fundamentally different perspective on the value of taxonomy.
Q9 Chairman: Professor Lane, can
I follow one other point you made, so that I know whether or not
I am clear about this. You seem to suggest that the creation of
data sets was not recognised within the RAE in the way in which
other types of research are. Was that was you meant?
Professor Lane: The innovative part of establishing
a framework for databases, and development of them, is recognised
and there are various methods of doing that. But populating those
databases and data sets with real data, as opposed to the exploratory
data, the scaling up, tends not to be recognised.
Q10 Baroness Walmsley: Is that because
the perception is that it is just an inputting job, without any
judgment, skill, experience and professionalism behind it, which
I am sure is completely wrong. But is that why? Why do you think
that is?
Professor Lane: It is difficult to articulate
the intellectual value and value-added that is in seeking data
from nature, converting it into a form that can then be put out
in a data set, whether they are measurements or whatever. That
is a misunderstanding of what the process is of gathering data
from nature and transforming those observations into data that
can then be analysed.
Q11 Lord Methuen: Is there a point
here of new data versus old data that they would support the influx
of new data but they are very reluctant to think about the import
of old data?
Professor Lane: I am not sure that the division
is between new and old data. It is between funding to start something
and funding required to finish—it is the funding required
to finish that is a challenge, because the exciting bit is starting.
Professor Gibby: The research councils are very
happy to fund that innovative research and that is the problem.
If you are doing that innovative research, you are getting out
the high-impact papers, pulling in the research grants and you
will survive in the university. But if you then want to roll out
the exciting product you have developed to make it applicable
in the real world, you cannot get the resources for the manpower
to help to do that. The research councils would say that it was
not at the cutting edge, it is not blue sky, and it should come
from Government.
Q12 Lord Krebs: My question, which
is in two parts, follows neatly on from the last point. Obviously,
some of the funders of taxonomic research measure productivity
and output in terms of the research assessment exercise metrics,
but other funders look at things in a different way. I wondered
whether we are overplaying the importance of the RAE and its metrics
because presumably funders such as Defra, or other Government
departments might be looking for measures such as the sustenance
of a national institution—such as Edinburgh, Kew or the
NHM—without using exactly the same metrics that the Higher
Education Funding Council would use. The first part of my question
is to ask if the RAE dimension of things is the only driver, or
do the users of your taxonomic database for research and curation
appreciate that there are other dimensions and are they providing
money for you based on those other dimensions rather than the
RAE metrics? I will pause at that.
Professor Lane: I quite take the point that
RAE metrics are not the be-all and end-all of this, but the point
I would make is that if you wish to have a thriving scientific
endeavour, individuals need to move between the major research
institutes, like ours, and the university community. There should
be a free movement of people between those to get value-added.
That is where the pressure comes to compete well in RAE metrics
rather than on organisations like ours.
Dr Nic Lughadha: To address the second part
of the question which was whether the users of the databases appreciate
it and secondly, do they pay for it? There are high levels of
appreciation but the user-pays model has almost never applied
in taxonomy except in very specific instances. The difficulty
is that many of the users are international users of our—for
historical reasons—very international collections and therefore
a user-pays model simply would not be applicable. There is a high
level of appreciation and value of the data but not a direct user-paying
model. To look at what Defra measures, which was another part
of the question, Defra—certainly with regard to Kew—appreciates
the breadth of what Kew does and delivers both in a national and
an international context, but levels of Defra funding have not
been adjusted to accommodate the much broader expectations of
Kew, both from Defra and from the world at large, in terms of
making data available, implementing the CBD and other international
requirements.
Q13 Lord Warner: May I probe a bit
more into that business of users, because they are international
users, will not pay. Is it will not pay, cannot pay, should not
pay?
Dr Nic Lughadha: In many instances there are
users in developing countries. Let me take the example of access
to collections. We are slowly, with primarily US funding, digitising
our, for instance, herbarium collections, the label data and the
images, and making that available on the internet. To expect the
users, many of whom are in developing countries, to pay on a per-use
basis for that resource is a very problematic model, not least
because many of them would say that morally that material would
be theirs rather than ours. Where there is scope for payment is,
for instance, in the US and that is the model on which we are
receiving some of this funding. So, the same resource that would
be made available free in Africa and Latin America, will be charged
to US universities, for instance, and that is the funding model
that makes the current digitisation work possible. But that does
not scale up, that picks up the most desirable and most interesting
specimens, but does not pick up the volume of material that researchers
will need to do large-scale analyses of the material.
Q14 Lord Krebs: On a specific point,
I remember a few years ago visiting CABI International and they
seemed to be running a commercial model to provide information
to taxonomic information services on a worldwide basis. Could
you tell us a bit about how CABI's commercial model works for
providing taxonomic information?
Dr Nic Lughadha: I will speak from a Kew point
of view, and my knowledge of CABI in that respect is that their
model is based on a very small amount of core funding, something
less than 10%, just a few percent is core funded now, and the
rest is basically on a contract for services basis. They have
been remarkably successful in managing to cover their costs in
doing that. However, they only cover the costs of the near-to
user outputs, they are not covering the costs of their collections.
As an example, we at Kew are about to take on from CABI, with
CABI's encouragement and agreement , the CABI mycological collections,
because CABI's business model simple does not work when you have
a big resource like a collection to maintain. You can fund user-driven
services on a self-funding basis, but not the collections on which
they are ultimately based.
Professor Lane: I would suggest that funding
model (user pays) does not work. The non-existence of the International
Institute of Entomology's is an example of that; it was unsustainable.
Q15 Chairman: I would like to push
one further point in this area. It is always easier to blame "them
upstairs", but what are your own institutions' resource distribution
models like? Do they take due account of your own needs, taxonomy?
Do they differ, or do they just channel the money down; is it
divided upstairs?
Professor Hopper: Perhaps if I can talk about
the Kew model. Kew's roots come from taxonomic science and the
big challenge perceived by Sir Joseph Banks and subsequent people.
About one-third of our staff is involved in science and of that
third, I think I am right in saying that, about one-third is in
taxonomy and descriptive taxonomy. We also have molecular phylogenetics
people in the Jodrell laboratory, so we invest in that side of
taxonomy as well. Is that the nature of your question?
Q16 Chairman: Yes, I know the position
personally better in the university system where the argument
always is that universities give up their autonomy to the funding
streams above and they simply follow what comes down. I was wondering
what the position was with your organisations.
Dr Dixon: At the Natural History Museum, we
receive grant-in-aid through the Department for Culture, Media
and Sport, but that money is not hypothecated in any way, it is
up to the executive management and the trustees of the Museum
to decide how that is allocated between the various activities
that we undertake. Of the money that goes to frontline services—and
let us define the science that we do in taxonomy and systematics
as frontline services, as is the public side of what we do, the
public offer that the museum presents—we spend about 50:50,
which has been pretty consistent over quite an extended period.
Chairman: Thank you. That was what I was asking
about; what the proportions are.
Q17 Earl of Selborne: I should start
by putting on the record that I am Chairman of the Trustees of
the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. I would like to get back to mycology,
which Dr Nic Lughadha mentioned. When we did a report in 1992,
and then under Lady Walmsley's Chair in 2002, on both occasions
we described the state of systematic mycology as in crisis. From
what we have heard just now that Kew is possibly taking over from
CABI mycology and, from the written evidence, it is clear that
the crisis continues. First of all, it is necessary to retain
a national capacity in mycology and if so, what is being done
to ensure the survival of this discipline and of the collections?
Professor Hopper: It is absolutely necessary.
Kew, in terms of its funding model, is 50 per cent Government,
50 per cent self-generated revenue and on flat cash; has been
for some time in terms of an operational budget, so in real terms
is working in a declining fiscal operating environment. Mycology
is so pivotal to what the world will need in terms of the fundamental
contribution of plants to environmental challenges like climate
change, for example, most plants have fungi as partners underground
that increase their capacity to grow and assimilate carbon. If
you do not understand what is going on below ground, then your
ability to repair and restore forests is considerably reduced.
There are great potentials in mycology for biofuels, because the
business of some fungi is basically degrading and rotting plant
materials, so the chemicals that they muster and have mustered
through evolution have great potential, if we can get into their
biochemistry, in human use of plant energy. There are medicinal
and other reasons why fungi are fundamentally important, not only
to the UK but to people around the world. Kew has taken the view
that, despite the rather difficult financial situation we are
in, to go the other route of having the CABI mycological collections
mothballed and not available for use in this brave new world we
are entering, would be something that we simply should not contemplate
and we should take on the responsibility of caring for their collections.
Dr Nic Lughadha: We have made a special submission
to Defra asking them for additional funding in light of this additional
responsibility.
Q18 Earl of Selborne: It is clear
from what you say that if Kew is not prepared to take the collections
from CABI, they would not be accessible for science.
Dr Nic Lughadha: That is right, in effect, they
would no longer be curated. They might be accessible in the sense
that CABI might be prepared to give someone the key, but as we
know, a collection that is not curated and kept up to date scientifically,
rapidly becomes intellectually inaccessible and of limited value
as a reference collection.
Professor Lane: I would like to make two points,
one of which is to follow up Dr Nic Lughadha's comment that one
should not consider this just as a collection, the objects are
clearly important as a primary data source, but it is the people
who are able to interpret them who should be valued. The collection
should always be thought of as being objects (specimens) and people;
they are indivisible, for the reasons just said. The other point
is whether we should have national capacity. That is a political
decision about scale of capacity. If we are interested in practical
applications then clearly, as has already been stated, the fungi
have given us enormous opportunity. If we look at it from a basic
science point of view, the group of organisms most likely to be
undiscovered in their scale are probably the fungi. So, in terms
of new horizons, the fungi will probably be one of the groups
of organisms that will reveal extraordinary diversity.
Q19 Baroness Walmsley: Which country
is the world's leader; is there one, in fungi?
Professor Gibby: Until recently, it was the
UK. I do not know who it is now, but it certainly was. There is
still much mycological research going on in universities. It is
still an active subject. It is not related to taxonomy; it is
obviously related to the application of certain groups. Edinburgh
is hosting the International Mycological Congress in 2010. So
there is mycology going on but it is that taxonomic/systematic
base that has been left to die out, which is the really sad thing.
We have still got people around in their fifties who are really
good mycologists and we need that investment. We were in the same
position in Edinburgh with two mycologists on the staff; one working
on rust fungi; and one on lichens. We have invested in one extra
post in science to work alongside the lichenologist, and now we
have a group built up with soft funding with five lichenologists
who are all working together now and doing more ecological work
as well as the taxonomic work. With a little bit of funding, and
some from our resources, some from SNH putting in funding for
training apprentices, you can generate more activity, more training,
and build up a research group. You can no longer have people working
in isolation, it is not effective. So we do not want one representative
for each group across the organisations, you need teams of people.
Dr Nic Lughadha: In terms of sizeable teams
of systematic mycologists, the Dutch are still leading in Amsterdam,
with the focus on living cultures of mycological collections.
There is also a sizeable group, I believe still, in St Petersburg
at the Commonwealth Institute. Those are the two groups of systematic
mycologists that get into double figures, for instance. As Professor
Gibby said, it does need to be a scale. Science these days is
a scale operation, a team operation.
Dr Dixon: This question raises a very interesting
point which is, what defines national capability? Who is responsible
for defining what that national capability should be? We all tend
to operate as individual institutions and we operate collaboratively
and co-operatively, both within the nation and internationally,
but when it comes to defining what national capability there should
be, that is an interesting point to take forward.
|
