Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140-159)
Professor David Cutler, Dr Sandra Knapp and Professor
Richard Bateman
25 MARCH 2008
Q140 Lord Haskel: We have had evidence
about the innovative technological advances offered by web-based
applications to improve the efficiency and the effectiveness of
dissemination. Professor Cutler has just referred to the development
of the Society's website as "leading to more involvement".
There is clearly a need for a roadmap both for the development
of the field and for the roll-out and funding of new information
technologies over the next decade. Who is or should be producing
this roadmap?
Dr Knapp: I have been very involved in these
web-based developments and one of the things that is becoming
abundantly clear to me in being involved in these initiatives
is that the community itself is building the roadmap through experimentation
and through looking at different ways of doing things, different
methodologies, just trying things out in a different way. I think
this roadmap is emerging from the community. The appearance of
the Encyclopaedia of Life on the scene very recently, it was launched
on 27 February this year, means that that is pulling people's
minds together in a way that I think is proving extremely positive.
Whether the Encyclopaedia of Life will be the roadmap remains
to be seen. I think we need to see how it works and how the community
itself fits into this. The web-based developments are being tried
in several different ways. There are few enough people involved
in these projects that they all communicate with one another.
For example, CATE, which is a project funded by NERC here in the
UK, is collaborating with my project, which is funded by the Planetary
Biodiversity Inventory from the National Science Foundation in
the United States, which is also collaborating with EDIT, a project
funded by the European Union. So all of these projects talk to
one another and are taking the best from each one to see how we
can go forward. One project on its own would probably not find
the best.
Professor Bateman: Can I twist your question
slightly because I think underlying it is envisaging databases
providing identification aids. You will have had several presentations
on these topics. The area that interests me equally—and
I think Lord May too—is the question of the pocket sequencer,
and whether we can switch from a morphology-based taxonomy to
a DNA-based taxonomy. This is a topic that brings in issues such
as GenBank, where you do have an initiative that is widely respected
across the globe and where most of the relevant information available
is being put into a single dataset, which is a situation that
most of us studying morphology would give our eye teeth to see
happen. Also, I was always very sceptical of Lord May's advocacy
of the technology that would allow us to do this. I am sceptical
no longer. I have seen the presentations from the American military
showing us these devices already exist. The only interesting question
is how long it will take before they become affordable to the
average systematist. Then the real challenge is going to be the
quantity of data available on that database. I applauded GenBank
and said that is what morphologists should aim for. However, there
is a lot of poor data in GenBank, even though there is an element
of quality control, and it is not going to be a magic bullet—it
is not going to solve immediately our ability to identify organisms
for a whole bunch of different reasons. Even though we have the
one unified database, the way that we approach using these devices
and the way that we collate the resulting information from that
has not been properly discussed, so there is a need to discuss
that kind of web-based information as well as the morphological
web-based information and all of these have to be made to communicate
with each other. It is not an easy task, especially when you consider
the different levels we are operating at—global, European,
national and regional. It is finding a solution that is satisfactory
to all of those different levels that is the challenge.
Q141 Lord Haskel: Who should be providing
the strategy? Who should be looking for the solution?
Professor Bateman: The organisation, if you
saw its remit on paper, that would best fit that would be the
Global Biodiversity Information Facility, but Britain has a rather
unfortunate history in that regard, since as a nation we refused
to pay our subscription to that international organisation and
in the end the Natural History Museum and Kew went ahead and paid
the subscription on the nation's behalf. The theory of GBIF is
a very good one. The practice has not yet reached the levels where
I would be a strong advocate of it. We have many different organisations
that in theory could address these issues. It is a question of
picking which one is going to be most appropriate and then resourcing
it at an appropriate level. I think this is something that this
nation alone cannot do—it has to be done at an international
level.
Q142 Chairman: Can you give us some
idea of the size of the subscription?
Professor Bateman: It was about ten thousand
pounds.
Dr Knapp: It was £12,000. Going back to
this issue of who should be responsible, understanding biodiversity
and using taxonomy to understand biodiversity is a problem of
global proportions and so the roadmap needs to be global as opposed
to national or even regional. I do not know if you were given
a document as part of your written evidence done by the European
Distributed Institute of Taxonomy as a Foresight report which
looked at what taxonomy might look like in ten and 20 years' time.
One of the very interesting things about that that the group identified
was how technology would be different for different groups of
organisms. A roadmap for one group of organisms may look quite
different to a roadmap for another group of organisms.
Q143 Earl of Selborne: I wanted to
follow up on these international initiatives to try and understand
what the end plan might be. Perhaps I should preface my remarks
by putting on the record that I am a member of The Linnean Society
and Chairman of the Trustees of Kew. Dr Knapp has reminded us
of organisations like the Planetary Biodiversity Inventory, Creating
an E-Taxonomy and the Encyclopaedia of Life, which sounds to me
to be the most global initiative of all. Do they really all feed
to each other? Is there a possibility that eventually the international
community of systematists will resolve which of all these organisations
they should give their priority to or are they complementary?
Dr Knapp: I think they are complementary. Some
of them are organisations and some of them are grants which will
end after five years or three years. So everything except EoL
is a grant—funded project which ends at the end of five
years. For example, the Planetary Biodiversity Inventory, which
is funded by the National Science Foundation in the US, is part
of a big grant to supply information and we have given that information
to the Encyclopaedia of Life. The Encyclopaedia of Life has as
its aim to provide a page for every species of described organism
on earth. One of the things that will make the Encyclopaedia of
Life work is if there would be credit given by institutions and
the scientific community to taxonomists who would contribute to
initiatives like this. A young taxonomist starting out is unlikely
to devote much of their career to something which will give them
no credit in terms of the Research Assessment Exercise or career
advancement in a sense like that. How to make those work together
goes back to depending on how we assess science in the scientific
community, not just in the UK but also in other countries. I think
it is a little bit different in the United States where this sort
of science—descriptive taxonomic science—is highly
valued in universities and in institutions like museums and botanic
gardens.
Q144 Baroness Walmsley: I think that
last suggestion is a very, very interesting one, giving credit
to people for putting the information on. It takes me to something
that has been concerning me and I go back to what Professor Bateman
has just been saying about GenBank, that he is concerned about
the quality of some of the data. Surely that genomic information
database shares that problem with many databases based on morphology
where some of the information on the database is dubious to say
the least. You will get an organism where you have several examples
and it is all the same thing with several different names and,
conversely, you get a lot of different things with the same name,
but something that Dr Knapp has just suggested presumably would
be peer review and therefore you would be sure of the quality
of that sort of information for which a student got credit. What
is the answer to this problem of the quality of some of the information,
especially as it is passed from hand to hand to hand?
Dr Knapp: I think peer review is key in this.
There is an ongoing discussion within the Encyclopaedia of Life
project, which is something that was launched in what they call
an alpha form, which is even less put together than a beta form.
Most software is released in beta form. There is a large community
of taxonomists who feel that there needs to be a core which is
peer reviewed and then lots of added on bits which will allow
anybody to contribute, but there is a peer reviewed taxonomic
core which is authoritative. Because web-based technology is becoming
incredibly sophisticated with Web 2-type technology you can mix
and match a lot of these things in a way that you could not do
two or three years ago. In the end technology will be our friend!
Q145 Earl of Northesk: Dr Knapp has
already referred to the National Science Foundation in the United
States. It supports basic taxonomy programmes, for example, the
Planetary Biodiversity Inventory programme. What are the benefits
of such a programme and would the concept translate into a UK
sector?
Dr Knapp: The Planetary Biodiversity Initiative
is something that was inventory. It was something that was started
by the National Science Foundation in order to set up groups that
were international and global in scope to tackle groups that would
otherwise never be tackled taxonomically, so these are large complex
groups. A friend of mine has analogised it as one or two workers
doing one of these endless tasks like painting the Golden Gate
Bridge where by the time you got to the end of it you would have
to start over again at the beginning. That sort of huge international-type
programme we probably do not need in the UK because we can use
it. Something else that the National Science Foundation does is
called REVSYS, which stands for revisionary systematics, and what
that is is a programme that is dedicated to funding three year
grants for individual researchers or groups of researchers at
a single institution to do taxonomy, both biogenetics and descriptive
taxonomy, in groups that are of manageable size. Something like
that could easily be translated into the research council funding-type
scheme. PBI might be slightly more difficult because they are
very large grants, they are in the millions of dollars grants
and they last five years and they involve global teams of people
from many, many institutions. I am just reviewing grant proposals
for the third round of Planetary Biodiversity Inventory grants
right now.
Q146 Earl of Northesk: So at the
web-based level PBI demonstrates the potential worth of a wiki-type
structure?
Dr Knapp: I had one of the very first grants
that was given. What we were tasked with was doing the descriptive
level, species level taxonomy of a large group and the group I
work on are the nightshades, things like potatoes and tomatoes.
We were supposed to do that and make it available on the Internet.
When I started this project five years ago the Internet was very
different to what the Internet is like now. We have changed the
website that we have to reflect some of these changes in technology.
The money was not given to establish a website, it was given to
do the taxonomy, which is one of the great strengths of the Planetary
Biodiversity Inventory programme, that the money is given to generate
new data, not just to recycle old data in new packages.
Professor Bateman: For me the great strength
of the NSF initiatives we are discussing at the moment is that
they were custom built. They did not evolve from anything else.
They were not constrained unusually strongly by resource allocations.
They were custom built by people who knew what they were talking
about. Consequently, they are the most effective set of schemes
that have been launched in a long time. If you asked me how they
could be improved my answer would be that they become fully international
schemes rather than US-based schemes. I see no reason why PBI
could not be a fully international initiative that received funding
from the NSF equivalent bodies in a range of different countries,
and then we would have some chance of reducing a number of initiatives
that take place. The acronyms must have caused all of you difficulties
in your reading for this topic. It would allow us to combine the
different nomenclature codes within taxonomy, it would allow us
to have a registration scheme for names and it would allow the
international aspirations of taxonomy, which have been there for
a very long time, to be properly realised. It is a great scheme
but if it was truly international it would be much more powerful.
It would drag all sorts of other key decisions along with it and
force us to take them.
Dr Knapp: One important thing about the National
Science Foundation is that schemes like this originate from the
community of scientists who work on that topic and then that is
taken up to staff in the organisation who then sell it to the
NSF management. Having staff in the National Science Foundation
that are committed to biotic surveys and inventories, which is
where this topic lies, has been a long-term resident in the National
Science Foundation but is not true in the research councils in
the UK.
Professor Bateman: And as a result of that there
is no question about where ownership of taxonomy in the US lies.
Q147 Lord May of Oxford: I just want
to correct what otherwise could possibly be a misapprehension
here. I lived and worked for 20 years in the States before I moved
here at the end of the Eighties and during all that time I was
funded from the NSF, which I think is much better organised than
our research councils, with much fewer silo compartments. I was
funded out of one of the basic boxes which was called Population
Biology and Systematics—to the best of my knowledge it still
is—and it funded responsive-mode research across the entire
field of ecology systematics. It was not talking about who were
users and who were producers; it was looking at research proposals
across that whole waterfront. It was also more notable because
the whole thing was unitary, so in my case somebody took it upon
themselves to divide it half between that and half between applied
mathematics in a manner you could not do here. All our discussion
up to this point has been about particular initiatives of the
kind that we also have here including the Planetary Biodiversity
Inventory and that is good too, but we should not run away with
the fact that one of the biggest differences is a research programme
in basic taxonomy or systematics can go to the NSF and be funded.
Here it would appear to me, from what I have read and what you
said earlier, it cannot.
Dr Knapp: I think that is important and why
I mentioned the Biotic Surveys and Inventories, which is a programmes
like Population Biology and Systematics which has resided in the
National Science Foundation since I was a graduate student, so
since the 1970s. I know there has been dedicated money to describing
organisms on Earth.
Q148 Lord May of Oxford: Another
difference, which takes us much wider, is that much of the staff
at the NSF are academics coming in and going out rather than a
bunch of career apparatchiks.
Dr Knapp: I think the NERC theme leaders are
a very positive step.
Q149 Lord Colwyn: Despite some of
the major UK research establishments being widely recognised as
playing a globally significant role and the encouraging remarks
you are making this afternoon, we still continue to hear of a
decline in the UK capacity for systematics and taxonomy. What
in your view will appear as the first key limiting factor in this?
I am grateful for The Linnean Society's very helpful paper where
you say, "The single biggest barrier to delivering research
priorities in taxonomy and systematics is the static (if not declining)
population of scientists with expertise in the taxonomy and biology
of organisms." Is this going to be the limiting factor that
is likely to appear? Will this serve as an indicator that some
critical points have been reached, and what can you do about it?
Professor Cutler: I think certainly it will
be the main indicator as we have fewer professionally trained
taxonomists. The outcome of this will not be in counting taxonomists
but in looking at what we cannot achieve and do. I think we shall
have problems in monitoring climate change, for example, when
we lose the expertise in a lot of the disciplines, notably the
fresh water biology side. Forensic science services which rely
on the identification of material in various forms, material coming
into the country, medical identifications and the ability to make
use of our existing resources I think will all be indicators.
We shall see this first when we cannot find the expert to do a
particular job. What is leading to this is the fact that most
of the money which is put into taxonomic training these days is
rather on the cutting edge side and that is extremely valuable,
but I think that students who might have been encouraged in the
past to take up whole organism studies and to look at the aspects
of training to be taxonomists in specialist groups are put off
by the fact that there is no real long-term employment for many
of them in prospect and that they have to live on short-term projects.
These in themselves are limiting for taxonomy, and short duration
projects are unsatisfactory. The possibility of getting a job
at the end of the day is very difficult. I think we have got to
look at various points in this big chain, right from primary school
nature tables, up to how we train taxonomists. It can be addressed
to some extent by having a basic training for taxonomists and
equipping them with tools which cover a very broad spread of facilities
these days. Then I think it is normally possible to take individuals
and train them in expertise in particular groups, but we do not
do that at the moment apart from our major institutions and some
university links. To go back to the beginning, we shall find we
do not have trained taxonomists, the succession will have been
broken and to re-establish that is going to be extremely difficult.
Professor Bateman: I would say we have already
reached that point. The second part of your question was about
a tipping point. I do not think we will spot the tipping point
when it happens. What we are discussing is a very gradual decline
and there is not going to be any particular threshold, in my opinion,
where the entire system collapses. What I did find during my year
as Head of Policy at the Biosciences Federation was that of all
the other biological societies who were members of the Federation,
many of those societies listed taxonomy as one of their top three
concerns and these are societies that are not directly involved
in taxonomy. They are already finding that the taxonomic support
they are looking for just is not available and it is not available
for a whole range of reasons—partly because we now have
very patchy taxonomic coverage, partly because we are, quite rightly,
being asked to cover new groups that have not even had taxonomy
done previously, and partly because we are being asked to feed
information into many of these dissemination schemes that we have
talked about earlier. Each time you are adding information to
something like the Encyclopaedia of Life, for the most part you
are not generating new information—you are presenting existing
information in a more digestible package. The workload on the
remaining taxonomists constantly increases and the number of effective
taxonomists declines. You will not really see this in effect until,
and indeed after, the bulk of Britain's taxonomists have retired,
because the moment they retire their productivity generally increases.
They are no longer under a bureaucratic constraint.
Q150 Chairman: We like to think of
ourselves in the House of Lords in that way!
Professor Bateman: I am not joking—their
productivity does increase because they are freed of all of these
bureaucratic loads. They move into the amateur societies and make
tremendous leadership contributions there. Basically you are not
going to see the full effect of the phenomenon that we are concerned
about until we are all dead, and I am relieved to say that that
is going to take a little time!
Dr Knapp: I am an example of this tipping point
being reached slightly. In a recent hiring exercise in the Natural
History Museum we had advertised for research leaders, so people
who were to come in and set up research groups and help lead the
science in the future. Only one of the six people that we offered
jobs to was British. When I first came to the Museum I was a bit
unusual in not being British whereas now being British is the
unusual thing. I think you could make an analogy in a way to the
National Health Service. You would not think that not teaching
the cranial nerves in medical school would cause the collapse
of the National Health Service, but in several years' time an
entire generation of doctors who have no idea about how the human
body was put together will cause the National Health Service to
cease functioning and it is similar for the environmental health
of the globe in a way.
Q151 Lord Colwyn: During our last
evidence session, after they had turned the broadcast button off,
I admitted that, having done biology at O level and zoology and
botany at A level and then a medical education and a dental education,
I had never heard the word taxonomy until I came to this Committee.
How do you get people interested? Where do you find them? At what
stage?
Dr Knapp: I think people are born taxonomists!
Anyone who has had small children knows that they spend their
lives sorting things on the ground into things you can put into
your mouth and things that you cannot. One of the things that
taxonomy could use is more people to go out and be enthusiastic
about what an exciting thing it is to study the diversity of life
on earth and there are people like that. There are definitely
people who are passionate about the subject. The Linnean Society
really serves a very useful function in the fact that the Society
is open to anyone who wants to join who has a passion for natural
history, so as a result we have meetings at which there are amateurs
and professionals and sixth formers. As part of our strategic
plan we are looking into how we can take the interest in organismal
biology, natural history and by extension taxonomy further down
in the age structure.
Professor Bateman: Most begin as children. It
is incredible how many of my colleagues who I have spoken to cited
the Natural History Museum, Kew or the London Zoo as being the
awakening of their interest in taxonomy at the typical age of
five. So if they are not born they learn very, very quickly. There
might be some broader issues out there. We have rightly focused
on taxonomy. I had a look at the list of A level applicants and
which particular undergraduate courses they were applying for.
The number of applicants for single Honours Biology this year
has decreased quite substantially and it appeared on the list
immediately above cinematography at just 20,000 applicants, whereas
Sport Science received slightly more than twice as many applicants.
Taxonomy may be at the vanguard of some broader issue that should
give us some concern.
Chairman: We do look at these wider questions.
Lord Haskel: You were talking about enthusiasm.
One of the things that the present Government did, Lord May will
remember this, is that we started a system of ambassadors for
science and that has turned out to be extraordinarily successful
and there are now two or three thousand of them. Maybe that is
a scheme which you could latch onto.
Q152 Chairman: How important are
mathematical skills to the analysis of the information and the
building of pictures and hypotheses and so on? Does the community
have enough access either through its own members or to others
who have an interest in this? Is this an issue for you? In some
sciences this has begun to be a problem.
Professor Bateman: I would say not, to be honest
with you, particularly if you roll up statistical skills with
mathematical skills. There are aspects of modern mathematics such
as Bayesian analysis that are being driven by systematics. In
fact, one of the concerns that is expressed by phylogenetic systematists
is the way that their techniques and their concepts have been
appropriated by a whole range of other disciplines and sometimes
are misapplied. In terms of our actual access to appropriate mathematical
skills, I would say for the present time it is adequate, but I
do also notice that the interest in the number of applicants for
mathematics is falling, and I would not like to say that mathematics
is safe or that we will have access to those mathematicians in
the future. They might have the same degree of decline as ourselves.
Chairman: I think the evidence is there for
that, which is why I raised those questions.
Q153 Lord May of Oxford: I have just
spent the better part of the last month writing a short book,
which is the biographical memoir of Sir Richard Southwood, a major
entomological ecologist of his generation. The greatest evolutionary
biologist in the last half of the last Century was Bill Hamilton.
Both of these are people who by the age of three to six had decided
they were going to be essentially, though they did not know the
words, entomological taxonomists. Only later did Southwood widen
his vision and become one of the founders of ecological entomology
just as Bill Hamilton widened his vision and became the most influential
evolutionary biologist in the last half a century. As you have
just said, Sandy, many kids are like this. I am told by Charles
Godfray that the number of younger people in their teens in amateur
entomology botanical societies has not decreased but that once
they go to university they see this as becoming a stodgy thing
and not so exciting. How do The Linnean Society, of which I am
a member, and The Systematics Association see their role in working
with this diversity of amateur societies, which still exist and
still are healthy, partly to make sure that the Southwoods and
Hamiltons of tomorrow, neither of whom were any good at mathematics
incidentally, will be there and so that the amateur entomologists
and the amateur botanists, the people who provide the database
for the RSPB on which Defra bases its biodiversity action plans,
would still be flourishing? How do you see your role in doing
that? Do you think it is true that there are still as many teenagers
in these societies? If there are not, that is really important
and it is a failure on your part or your organisations' part.
Professor Cutler: The Society has a very keen
interest in the amateur element. We provide free access to our
library and our resources to bona fide enthusiastic natural historians
no matter what their age. We fund people through some of our grant
schemes, 17 or 18-year old people undertaking African research
and so forth. We have the elements of this and we have recognised
that there is a lot more that needs to be done. During our tercentenary
we were looking at the future of the Society and we have now got
a fairly effective plan going which is addressing these very issues,
particularly that of education. We have already initiated a series
of sixth form lectures again which died the death some time back
largely because it was difficult to get teachers at the time to
take groups of students out of normal hours. By taking lectures
to different parts of the country we hope that we are going to
revitalise this. We are in the middle of a series of three lectures
at the moment for sixth formers to open their eyes to the impact
and the interest and the spread of natural history. I think the
Society is very willing and the membership is very willing and
has appreciated its responsibility at last, which has taken some
time to come!
Professor Bateman: Obviously the Association
itself is a dominantly professional society. I would rather comment
in my roles as Vice President of the Botanical Society of the
British Isles and President of the Hardy Orchid Society. Since
we have the President of the Botanical Society present, I think
I will talk about the Hardy Orchid Society if I may, which is
another organisation of about 500 people. It is funny how specialist
organisations often stick at 500. I actually censused the entire
Society, and we have got roughly equal numbers in every age bracket
above ten. They start early and they finish late. It covers horticulturalists,
it covers some with scientific interests and it covers people
who like showing plants. I have spent some years educating this
group of amateurs about relatively high-tech science—molecular
systematics, for example—to the point now where I can use
them as a field team and I can ask the Association to go out across
Europe sampling on my behalf, measuring flowers and sampling for
DNA analysis. I maintained such a programme this summer, and I
was so delighted at the results that I wrote them up straightaway
and they are already published in a peer—reviewed journal.
People tend to see the amateurs as the best sources of identifications
and we will hear later about the BSBI's work in that area. I honestly,
genuinely believe this concept of citizen scientists has a reality
to it. We can go further still when the technological innovations
that have been predicted by Lord May come to pass. I noticed the
written version of this question said are these amateurs going
to be marginalised by the technological innovations? No way! They
are going to be out there in the field with their hand-held sequencers
linked to GenBank, capturing images of the plants that they are
sequencing. What they actually represent are a serious challenge
to the relatively small number of remaining professionals, who
are going to be asked by these amateurs to interpret the results
of their analyses.
Dr Knapp: I think Lord May is referring to a
certain extent to the younger generation of amateurs. There are
many younger generation amateurs who are very interested in natural
history. Whether they go on to make natural history their socio-economic
profession as opposed to their profession in the Victorian sense,
ie what their vocation is, is another thing entirely. We should
not worry too much about whether they will become professional
taxonomists to a certain extent because if we have a set of people
who are enthusiastic about natural history and enthusiastic about
diversity then that provides a constituency. There are two issues
in that, it is maintaining the profession in a socioeconomic sense
and maintaining the profession in a cadre of people who care about
the natural world. I work at the Natural History Museum, which
is where my day job is when I am not the Botanical Secretary of
The Linnean Society, and I think that places like the Museum and
Kew are looking very much at building that vocation for natural
history, but we also need to think about training those professionals.
In the late 1990s I taught Introductory Biology at University
College and I devoted half of a term to covering all kinds of
different groups and we looked at diversity on a DNA scale and
what different things did, just the diversity of life. That has
gone now from the curriculum at University College.
Q154 Lord May of Oxford: But not
at Oxford.
Dr Knapp: Oxford might be unusual in more ways
than one! This comes back to something that Professor Cutler said
earlier about whole organism biology. When that drops out of what
is perceived to be a career path then I think you get people discarding
it because students, let us face it, are not stupid.
Chairman: By and large that is true, yes.
Q155 Baroness Walmsley: Lord Haskel
mentioned the scheme of ambassadors, which I think is probably
SETNET. I believe there are about 6,000 ambassadors now. The problem
is that most of those young scientists and engineers are employed
by commercial companies and their companies give them credit,
support, time off and all the rest of it for going into schools
and enthusing young people about their particular scientific discipline.
The problem with the taxonomists is that many of them belong to
companies that cannot afford to spend the money that they need
to back them up to go and do that. I do not know how many of the
SETNET ambassadors are systematists or taxonomists but perhaps
some of you know. This is a problem. I do not know if you have
any solutions because research groups cannot afford to release
their people. It is yet another job for people to do, is it not?
Dr Knapp: I think that is true to a certain
extent. Speaking as a person who works in a publicly funded body,
institutions like ours, like the Natural History Museum, Kew and
the Royal Botanical Garden Edinburgh, have as part of our institutional
goals to interact with the public in particular sorts of ways.
I do a lot of going into schools.
Q156 Baroness Walmsley: Clone yourself!
Dr Knapp: People in my research group do as
well. The Natural History Museum gives a lot of credit to people
who do that sort of thing.
Lord May of Oxford: That is a really good question.
If you are in a private company then the corporate social responsibility
report will give you credit. If you are in something like the
Natural History Museum you will get credit. If you are in a university
the RAE will not and that is one of the many problems with the
increasingly bureaucratised Research Assessment Exercise.
Q157 Chairman: This is becoming a
discussion. We need questions!
Professor Bateman: I think that is a really
important point that is being made here. It is time for me to
enter the confessional! In the two senior management positions
I have held, one as Director of Science in Edinburgh and the second
as Head of the Botany Department in the Natural History Museum,
I shifted the centre of gravity of the research focus away from
taxonomy into other areas of systematics, and I did so for the
reasons that Lord May is stating. He is correct to say that people
in the university sector live or die by a very narrow set of criteria,
but those criteria have had their impact on institutions like
the Natural History Museum as well. If you are being assessed
on the number of high—impact papers you produce and the
amount of overhead on grants that you bring in, you would not
advise anyone to pursue taxonomy—you would advise them to
pursue other areas of systematics. That has very much been the
nature of the decision making in all of the major systematics
institutes.
Q158 Baroness Walmsley: In our last
report we had a recommendation to establish a co-ordinating body
bringing together all the users and producers. I think the reasoning
behind it was that we did not want to decide what the priorities
were. We felt that there needed to be a group of experts to decide
what the priorities are, to identify the gaps and to organise
the profession to fill the gaps. That was our recommendation,
which had a mixed reaction, and nothing was done. Given that we
have the UK Biodiversity Research Action Group and we also have
the Global Biodiversity Sub-Committee, do you feel that now, five
years down the track, another entity is required? Can I also add
to that question that Defra seems to see a separate need for co-ordinating
the systematics and taxonomy research community as opposed to
the need for co-ordinating these disciplines within their different
fields of application, so two different sets of co-ordination.
Do you think that separate co-ordination of research and application
is a workable concept? It is a bit of a long question I am afraid
at the end of our evidence session.
Dr Knapp: One danger in co-ordinating bodies
is that they are occasionally populated by people who co-ordinate
and therefore have no sympathy or ownership with the discipline
that is being co-ordinated. Earlier on, My Lord Chairman, you
identified the fact that nobody was owning this and so if a new
co-coordinating body were made it would co-ordinate what? Co-ordinating
application and research is like cutting off research from a functioning
National Health Service because these two things have to go hand
in hand or it is not healthy. I am not sure that another entity
is required because without substantial funding behind it people
will not buy into it. It is this business of ownership and not
only users owning it but producers owning it, so I will come back
to my idea about a conversation. Before we need a co-ordinating
body what we need to do is to have a meaningful as opposed to
just an empty conversation about what it is we actually need to
talk about. The Linnean Society is a place where this could begin
to happen, given the financial support to be able to enable it
to happen because those kinds of things cannot be just plucked
out of the air. I on a personal level feel that the more you set
up bodies to co-ordinate things the less co-ordination that actually
happens because when it arises from the community is when it is
effective.
Q159 Chairman: Do either of the other
two want to respond?
Professor Bateman: My answer is that I am sympathetic
to what Sandy has said, in the sense that my opinion is that there
are far too many initiatives and far too many bodies already,
and the reason is that it is much easier to get momentum and funding
to set something up and to maintain it, which I think is actually
what we are here discussing. However, having said that I do think
there is some value in the new body. We have already talked about
the UK Systematics Forum; perhaps the greatest achievement that
that arguably under-achieving body managed was to survey the taxonomic
base efficiently and effectively and that gives us a yardstick
from 11 years ago now that we could if we chose measure the current
situation against. It is a black mark against the systematics
community that it has not found the co-ordination to do that.
I therefore think there is a need for some new body, but should
it be a permanent body or just something set up temporarily in
the wake of this inquiry to move recommendations forward, which
I would very strongly favour. Having said that, we are all so
busy that it will not happen unless there is a good, clear reason
and motivation for having that body, and I think the motivation
I have just given is not going to be perceived as sufficient.
The Government has a very clear approach to encouraging research
in particular directions these days, which is to set some fairly
simple targets and then allocate resources to meeting those targets.
If the body that was set up had some influence over that level
of activity then it would meet—it would have no choice—and
the most useful thing it could do, apart from surveying the current
situation, would be to address some of the issues we talked about
earlier, in terms of having registration of names and having an
agreed format for placing information on the web. If Britain really
got its act together it could possibly still show a lead to the
rest of the world, which is what we used to do.
Chairman: Thank you. We are virtually out of
time but I wonder if we could perhaps take one more question from
Lord Methuen.
Lord Methuen: Is the apparent fragmentation
of the systematics community a significant factor in its decline?
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