wordup

Happy Holidays & thanks to friends of wordup!

2010-12-31T20:11:00.001+01:00

wordup wishes you the very best for 2011!

And to the friends of wordup research: thanks for an amazing 2010!! Through these friends I have enjoyed a front row seat on the research and development at:
Centre for the Mind
Finrisk
Institute of Neuroinformatics
SCANCO AG
Stimmt AG
Universal Postal Union

Thanks very much, also, to the many individuals who have discussed ideas and research with me in 2010!

When I wrote in March 2009 that I was organizing interviews with "researchers and research policy opinion leaders about their response to the changed global conditions in research funding," I simply could not have imagined the way things have developed since. The response of Universities and innovative businesses to the aftermath of the global financial crisis has been dramatic. But much more diverse than I predicted back then.

I'm re-doubling my efforts to help innovators prepare themselves for the changed economic conditions. During the next few months I will distribute some interviews I have made, posted on Youtube, about how people are re-drawing their plans and keeping their eyes on the prize: being innovative, seizing opportunities.

And of course I am already planning the wordup research Asia 2011 tour! Stay tuned.

Hello from Interact @wordupresearch

2010-11-04T11:21:00.002+01:00

I'm currently taking a holiday from this blog. That is not to say I won't make further posts.

Most of my blog attention now resides here on my new 'interact' blog:

Interact does not replace this blog. It is just a different concept for blogging and one that suits me better right now. And don't forget that my tweets get published here, on this site (top left hand side), so I would still encourage you to stop by now and then.

Thanks for reading!

Unblogged: visit to Singapore and Sydney

2010-07-26T14:36:00.000+02:00

I know I should get out more, so next week I will begin a journey to Singapore and Sydney for some face time with the people I usually only blog about.

High on my meetings list are students, recent graduates and entrepreneurs. I'll be heading along to a youth event jointly organized by the University of Sydney and the National University of Singapore, called What Makes a Young Champion. And I will also be speaking with graduates and faculty of the Singapore Management University.

With the financial crisis starting to have a direct impact on many research institutions around the world, it is interesting to see how universities are reshaping themselves as a result. For example, Singapore Management University is expanding its Social Sciences and Humanities faculty. In the UK, the Humanities/Arts faculties face the greatest funding pressure.

More than anything else I am simply keen to learn from people who are living in these exciting Asia-Pacific centers.

Read the full announcement here. I welcome you to follow my journey here (for Facebook fans) or here (for those that aren't...).

Scientific culture and war in Britain

2010-03-18T11:27:00.001+01:00

Is the pen mightier than the sword? Not in hand-to-hand combat, according to new research by Univ. Maastricht Professor Geert Somsen about British war propaganda in 1941.

Raining down on France that year were more than 22 million pamphlets, dropped from bomber aircraft, containing stories penned by Britain's top secret Political Warfare Executive.

The so called Forth Fighting Army of Britain, its propaganda campaign, was no less active on the Home front. Former Nature editor Sir Richard Gregory made rousing remarks about the importance of scientific culture at the Science and World Order conference held at London's Royal Institution. Diplomats, politicians, and significantly, famous scientists and science journalists heard Gregory argue that science is a "true democracy and a great democracy".

Professor Somsen noted that many of the assembled luminaries, including Gregory, had openly questioned Western democracy during the decade before. In short, they rallied for the Allied cause and sent a clear message about the democratic, democratizing effects of science and international research culture.

Thanks to the host of Professor Somsen's seminar, the ETH History of Knowledge Centre.

Risks Report narrows awareness gap about runaway risks

2010-01-19T20:48:00.002+01:00

I've now had a chance to digest last night's stimulating panel on the WEF Global Risks Report, hosted at the Centre for Global Dialogue.

Collapsing asset prices, indebtedness and fiscal crises have featured prominently in each of the Reports since 2006. This year, editor and lead author Sheana Tambourgi points to what she calls an 'awareness gap' about the implications of underinvestment in infrastructure, rising costs of chronic disease and, more cryptically, a deficit in global governance.

Why the attention towards such apparently vague risks?

The panel discussion focused on the impact of interconnections between individual global risks. A central theme of the Global Risks Report, the complex interconnections between risks are examined graphically in the Risks Interconnection Map (RIM, pictured).

For example, the Map shows how connections between the degraded state of global infrastructure, weak climate/energy policies and China's slowing growth rate can explain why chronic disease, food price volatility and biodiversity loss could combine to produce a disproportionately large economic cost.

What can such an analysis offer? To answer this question I am reminded of a recent piece in Nature suggesting that “science should focus more on understanding the present and less on predicting the future”. A focus on the apparently vague and relatively modest hazards of the here and now may help to avoid a calamity of far greater proportions.

Happier New Predictions from wordup!

2009-12-31T13:39:00.001+01:00

We're all brimming with predictions about 2010 at this time of year. We know that a year is a long time in politics, yet for some reason there is a collective over confidence, peaking in the New Year, that we have a handle on the most important events that will take place in the next 12 months.

I'd like to lead a retreat from over extended predictions and it seems I am in good company. With Japan.

Japan's official weather agency has ceased making its traditional prediction about the start of the cherry-blossom season. "The agency has given out such information in early March every year but we will no longer do so from next year," said agency official Yoshitoshi Sakai. I also salute their courtesy for providing almost 3 months notice of the policy change.

This is a serious issue for me. Not the start of the blossom season, although a precise prediction is great for making advance travel arrangements to see Japan in bloom.

Good models help us peer through the fog of observation and reveal the best interpretation of what is going on. We like to know what the future will bring, but dislike the fact that some of it is fundamentally unknowable to us.

Consider that a good visionary may not be someone claiming to see furthest, but rather someone that sees the 'here and now' differently. Arguably, it is from this that we might learn the most.

Happy New Year!

Online collaboration in finance

2009-11-06T09:08:00.002+01:00

Is it likely that the finance industry will embrace social media? I found myself back at the Centre for Global Dialogue this week to hear what banks and insurance companies really think about enabling employees, as well as a firm’s extended client community, to interact and share information using corporate online platforms.

First of all, there seems to be a lot of interest in corporate social media. Many separate motivations appear to explain this interest ranging from recruitment, to product marketing, to the simple goal of answering employees’ wishes.

Social media might also be a way to access tacit knowledge within a company. Under the right conditions, a social media platform could record valuable exchanges between employees that might otherwise never leave the water cooler.

There lies the rub.

Under the wrong conditions, the risk with corporate social media is that it functions as an all-watching big brother. Who would want to collaborate online if there were ambiguities about how the information was used and no protection of privacy?

A presentation by Marilyn Pratt was informative in this regard. Pratt co-runs a corporate social media initiative at business systems software firm SAP involving almost 2 million people. Posts appearing on the platform are moderated, but that doesn’t mean that a group of company spooks go around erasing anything that hints at criticism of the firm.

Indeed, even the really irritable posts go online in a section called the ‘Coffee Corner’. As for the moderation process, 700 of the moderators have been recruited from outside SAP. These and other comments from her presentation suggested a sophisticated online culture has developed.

So there are certainly some conditions where a corporate platform can work in practical terms. Reading a little into this area I recently came across a book called ‘Delete: The virtue of forgetting in the digital age’ by public policy academic Viktor Mayer-Shoenberger.

Based in Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Mayer-Shoenberger believes that even the most sophisticated attempts at corporate best practice will fall short protecting your digital privacy. Ultimately, he argues, the solution is to place a limit on the duration that digital information is stored.

To delete periodically.

I have plenty more to report about the conference, but that might have to wait for subsequent posts.

Financial regulation and the ecological niche

2009-09-27T21:47:00.007+02:00

A crazy thought experiment: what happens if I take a science research paper and substitute the topic of investigation with a hot topic from the social sciences: financial regulation?

Below, I have included excerpts from the original science paper and from my newly minted thought experiment 'paper'.

Original title: The importance of niches for the maintenance of species diversity
Thought experiment: The importance of Glass-Steagall legislation towards inhibiting risky levels of concentration among financial intermediaries

Original introduction: Ecological communities characteristically contain a wide diversity of species with important functional, economic and aesthetic value. Ecologists have long questioned how this diversity is maintained.
Thought experiment: Recent events in global financial markets underscore the risks of excessive concentration among financial intermediaries. Sometimes referred as the problem of 'too big to fail', economists are seeking ways to prevent financial systems from being populated by a small number of dominant players.

Original introduction: Classic theory shows that stable coexistence requires competitors to differ in their niches.
Thought experiment: A canonical lesson of the Great Depression was the recognition of the need to separate the granting of credit — lending — and the use of credit — investing. Specifically, the Glass-Steagall act of 1933 enforced a separation between commercial banks and investment banks.

Original introduction: That niche differences are key to coexistence, however, has recently been challenged by the neutral theory of biodiversity, which explains coexistence with the equivalence of competitors.
Thought experiment: With the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act in 1999, financial theorists convinced regulators that stable financial systems could exist even when a bank has the choice to participate in commercial as well as investment banking activities.

Now, let's get a little stranger. Let's look at results and conclusions of the two papers:

Original findings: However, in the absence of niche differences the most common species, Salvia columbariae, became considerably more common, constituting almost 60% of 2008 community seed mass.
Thought experiment: In the absence of the Glass-Steagall act, Citigroup constituted almost 60% of 2008 global financial market.
Conversely, the seven smallest regional banks constituted 35% of the financial markets in the presence of Glass-Steagall Act, but only 8% in its absence.

Original conclusions: Our results support the hypothesis that niche differences strongly stabilize coexistence.
Thought experiment: Our results show that a separation of investment and commercial banks produces a marked reduction in dangerous concentration in the financial sector.

I'll stop there. The original paper, by Levine & Janneke HilleRisLambers, appears in the September 10th edition of the journal Nature.

Swiss Doctoral Workshop in Finance, Darrell Duffie and SoFiE

2009-06-05T21:44:00.006+02:00

wordup will be on the road next week beginning Monday with a visit to the Swiss Doctoral Workshop in Finance, held near Bern. I will then move on to Geneva for a presentation by Darrell Duffie before joining the opening of the second Society for Financial Econometrics conference, also in Geneva.

The Doctoral Workshop (image, left) assembles graduate students from top finance research schools throughout Switzerland and places them before an academic audience from around the world. The venue, Study Center Gerzensee, is run by the Swiss National Bank. And run very well, I must say.

In the past, this meeting has been a great chance to learn what finance researchers really think is going on in the economy and I am sure this year will not be an exception to this.

Having won a Swiss finance prize in 2008, Stanford Professor of Finance Darrell Duffie will give an acceptance presentation entitled "Policy Issues Facing the Market for Credit Derivatives" on Tuesday evening at the Société de Lecture, Geneva. I've been in touch with Darrell and among the various themes he promised to talk about will be a precise explanation of the dramatic kinetics of last year's bank failures.

I will then be taking a brief break to visit a long time friend Dr Daniele Pralong in a small town on lake Geneva. When I met Daniele at Oxford 15 years ago I would not have imagined that either of us would living be in Switzerland today, and certainly not both of us at the same time. But having arrived here earlier in the year from her most recent address in Washington DC it seems we will now be separated by a mere train ride. Great news for wordup given the better access Daniele's broad knowledge of bio-medical research.

I invite you to follow all the action here, via twitter. And I hope to coax a few words from doctoral students here using a Google's Friends Connect platform I installed for them a few weeks ago.

There are risks. You have to think about them.

2009-05-28T23:56:00.011+02:00

Economists have predicted 10 out of the last 5 recessions. Jokes aside, economic prediction is beset with false alarms and missed warnings these days, so why should we get excited about the author of the 2006 business best seller "The Crash is Coming", Max Otte?

Professor Otte, Worms Technical University, Germany (pictured, middle) and Kanwardeep Ahluwalia, Swiss Re (right) led the discussion at this evening's Swiss Re's Centre for Global Dialogue Risk Talk on forecasting the next crisis.

Otte seems to have been spot on with his 2005 prediction of a 'financial tsunami in 2008 and certainly before 2010'. But why should we have believed him at the time?

His reasoning was based on 'very simple measures' of total debt versus gross domestic product in the US, and the fact that indexes like the Dow were rising much faster than measures of real wealth.

But the simplicity of Otte's analysis masks what is perhaps a deeper level to his thinking. After all, relatively few people predicted this financial crisis. His ideas met with a significant headwind at the time. And his ideas where not the product of complex risk models. Quite the opposite, in fact.

"You can't simply put a number on risks,' Otte explained during the discussion at the end of the presentation this evening. Earlier he had expressed a certain cynicism towards the goal of precisely quantifying risk. In a jibe towards the widely used risk model Value at Risk, Otte questioned how any organization could rely so strongly on the assumption that past volatility alone could predict a company's future risk exposure.

Physicist Dr Ahluwalia shared some interesting insights from his final days at investment bank Bear Stearns. Luck or otherwise, Ahluwalia resigned exactly one day before the company's 'fatal liquidity problem' in March 2008.

"People were not confident to enforce the risk measures that were already in place," explained Ahluwalia. Here again we see that the problem is not simply a flaw in financial risk models. The problem concerns the limits to the very application of these models to risk management.

And that is what I think distinguishes Professor Otte from the crowd. "One needs to go back to first principles and ask when will the model itself break?"

"There are risks. You have to think about them," he said.

Boost to European public-private medical research

2009-05-20T20:40:00.006+02:00

While skeptical about green shoots in the financial sector, I am happy to herald upbeat news that the EU is pledging more than 240 million euros towards a drug research project involving leading European pharmaceutical companies, academic research institutes and a handful of biotechnology companies.

Back in 2006 I worked for a research software company called Genedata (known affectionately as the University of Genedata, pictured left). The company had a deal to work with 15 European pharmaceutical companies (basically, all the major ones) to develop quantitative tools for predicting drug safety on the basis of whole-genome toxicology findings.

The pharmaceutical industry stumps up about a fifth of the world commercial research and development budget and Big Pharma in Europe contributes generously towards Europe's trade surplus in the technology sector (still very healthy in 2008).

So it is great to see convincingly green shoots!

Is trading success all in the numbers?

2009-03-18T20:59:00.004+01:00

I guess I'm not the only one wondering if private trading has been rendered all but impossible by the current market volatility. What is the point of me carefully building a portfolio when the entire market can be blind-sided by a single media report and placed on an entirely new trajectory?

Lately, my long time friend and former research colleague Dr Alessandro Usseglio Viretta has been applying his considerable mathematical talents to this very problem. He is using a form of machine learning known as Support Vector Machines (SVM) to perform a complex analysis of the market in real time.

SVM works by classifying stocks into simple categories, for example ‘buy’ versus ‘avoid’, on the basis of reams of market data. But while the predictions of the algorithm are straightforward, the stock picking rules created by SVM are feverishly complex. Every piece of market data chosen for inclusion in a SVM analysis is carefully factored into the final trading strategy. “It really matters what you choose to put in the model,” explains Alessandro.

Alessandro has developed a platform able to perform SVM on timescales of minutes and even seconds. This is crucial for participation in markets such as foreign exchange, not to mention volatile equity markets. “That is where high frequency trading comes in,” comments Alessandro. And note that the New York Stock Exchange has recently introduced a fee structure that is more accommodating to high frequency traders.

With an intellectual rigor befitting his early graduate physics work at CERN, and professional verve reflecting his recent collaborations with quant financial services provider Oliver Wyman, it is not surprising that traders are coming forward to test their strategies using Alessandro’s computational tools.

But in the end, will it work? “I’m doing the math, but the important thing to realize is that I am collaborating with experienced traders,” explains Alessandro. “Together, we’re in with a good chance”.

Finance research moving up the Swiss charts

2009-03-14T20:44:00.003+01:00

Where does finance research and education fit into the response to the 2008 financial crisis? I remember studying carefully the Swiss Bankers Association dossier on the "Financial Master Plan 2015", in 2007, and finding very little about finance education (although the associated press release placed education at the top of the list of future priorities in Swiss banking).

Swiss banking expert Claude Baumann (pictured right speaking with JPMorgan's Jes Staley at a finance research conference last year) placed finance research in the top position in a recent "wake up" call for Switzerland's banking and finance community.

In an upbeat piece in Zeit Online, Baumann says that the Master Plan is still possible. Switzerland should rely on its traditional strengths: creating stability. And according to Baumann, it should continue to clean up its act as regards banking secrecy!

Swiss Re Risk Talk has cap at hand

2009-03-04T23:52:00.007+01:00

This evening's Risk Talk at the Swiss Re Center for Global Dialogue was, as usual, excellent and assembled a capacity crowd of local business people and researchers.

World Economic Forum's Sheana Tambourgi set the theme for the discussion by reviewing the results of the WEF's new Global Risks Perception Survey. According to Tambourgi the survey distilled details of the complex and apparently escalating 'global risks landscape' to reveal a core set of risk ingredients that includes collapsing asset prices, over-stretched fiscal pledges, the future of China (and India) and of course climate.

Seems that the Survey is the result of an extensive talk-fest sponsored by the WEF involving 120 experts based in New York, London, Zurich and also Kenya, Turkey, China and India. The results have been fed into a clustering algorithm that churns out what Tambourgi calls a Risks Interconnections Map.

Each of the risk ingredients mentioned above appear as tightly interconnected clusters on the map. The map consolidates economic data from 160 countries and expert opinions on 24 separate risk categories. According to Tambourgi, the map indicates how risks interact with one another and has the potential to anticipate the "propensity of a given risk to trigger other risks".

Interconnectedness is also the theme of Swiss Re's David Bresch research focusing on climate change. As head of Swiss Re's Atmospheric Perils Group, Bresch identifies CO2 as a common thread linking together the ever growing world economic losses due to climate change.

It was at this point that the audience witnessed the re-insurance angle. Bresch presented some neat results estimating the ratio of insured versus uninsured global economic value during the past 30 years. In the mid 1980's this ratio was sitting on its historical average of roughly 50:50.

But in the last two decades there has been a dramatic rise in the proportion of uninsured global capital such that a mere 20% of it is currently covered by insurers and re-insurers. Bresch calls for action to reduce the resulting hike in risk faced by the global economy. His preferred method to hand: the creation of a global carbon market using cap and trade.

Thomas Hess, chief economist at Swiss Re, presented some very elegant mathematical models of the global financial risk landscape. According to Hess' calculations, the impact of the ongoing financial crisis on the real economy "is just getting started". His analysis focuses on an historical analysis of the default rate observed in so-called speculative grade companies.

This key business risk index typically stands at around 5%. Hess' warning about the possibility of nastier things to come is based on the observation that the current value is barely above this historical level, yet his model predicts that it will peak at 21% during the course of the crisis.

To put that percentage in perspective, the peak speculative grade default rate during the deep global recession of the early 1990s was a mere 12%. The dramatic bursting of the dotcom bubble in 2002 yielded a value of just 10%.

The problem, Hess emphasized, is the potential for this kind of upheaval to destroy good companies as well as bad. And Hess didn't seem to have the same enthusiasm for market based solutions as Bresch had presented before him. Hess quipped "When will the current crisis end? When the next bubble starts."

So can cap and trade really provide an interconnected solution to the global economic and environmental calamity we seem to be facing? The most recent news from the EU's carbon trading scheme would suggest otherwise.

Alas, we are yet to see the dawn of a new bubble in the value of carbon credits.

A sobering thought on the civility that society holds so dear

2009-02-08T18:38:00.008+01:00

Balancing loyalty and competition is important if a group of individuals are to achieve their best in a creative and productive collaboration. Oxford sociologist Jerome Ravetz reviews a new book about scientific societies during the Enlightenment in this week's edition of Nature and reveals the subtle challenges involved in getting this balance right.

Describing the delightful civility of the British Royal Society in the seventeenth century, the book's author Steven Shapin seems to have turned a blind eye on what Ravetz calls the dark side of this very fertile period of European research: Newton's dubious treatment of Gottfried Leibniz concerning Leibniz's contribution to the development of calculus.

Ravetz reflects on the dark secrets that seem to characterize so many periods of intense innovation by considering the genteel world of the Quants in our banking system. The quiet confidence of this group of talented souls is contrasted with the violent collapse of their elaborate financial constructs during the past 2 years.

I was reminded of a comment by another researcher of loyalty and competition, Ernst Fehr. Fehr (pictured, centre) has devoted the best part of a decade to demonstrating the importance of loyalty and other forms of what he calls 'other regarding preferences' for the successful functioning of modern society.

Fehr's research presentations are music to my commune-attuned ears and sensibilities, but I am glad to have also heard him present the dark side of his position on group loyalties. On one occasion he calmly commented that "of course, the mafia also display a well developed sense of loyalty and other regarding preferences,".

As Ravetz concludes in his reflection on the contribution of civil collegiality in the financial meltdown, "[it is] a sobering thought".

Self and other-regarding preferences throughout the life cycle

2008-08-31T21:44:00.007+02:00

A new film, and a new paper in Nature this week pinpoint exactly when children develop a sense of consideration for others. The film, in addition, pinpoints the age, later in life, when this socially important behaviour appears to vanish entirely.

First to the paper in Nature by researchers Fehr (photo, middle), Bernhard & Rockenbach. It shows that children as young as 8 years old demonstrate a complex set of egalitarian tendencies. Egalitarianism involves the distribution of resources in an equitable fashion between self and other, even when this distribution involves a personal cost.

Many argue that this preference is the bedrock of human cooperation, so it is important to know when and how it evolves in us. We are not born with it. Three year olds have no discernible preference towards sharing and almost never share when sharing results in personal cost to themselves.

The celebrated part of this paper is the meticulous care with which conclusions can be drawn about the precise nature of other regarding preferences. Using methods tailored for children that have been adapted from highly sophisticated experiments used to study adult behaviour, Fehr can easily distinguish human altruism from a host of distracting facsimiles, such as the tendency to be merely helpful. Helpfulness is observed in many kinds of animals.

I wouldn't want to diminish this beautiful experimental work, but I happen to have just heard about a new Ben Kingsley film that seems to chart the age-related decline of other regarding behaviour with an equally impressive accuracy and precision.

Elegy, featuring Ben Kingsley and Penélope Cruz, is a film adaptation of a Philip Roth novella about a Columbia literature professor having an affair with a student. Nicely framing behaviour across the human life span, the film examines self versus other preferences in young women and men in their mid 60s.

The film looks terribly, terribly nauseating. But it seems to provide an elegant study of the disintegration of other regarding preferences during old age and the subsequent return of mental functioning that is characteristic of early childhood. And as a work of pure fiction, the storyline also portrays the generous other regarding tendencies of younger folks that choose to live with such men:

Cruz dialog: "I didn't ask you what I was gonna do. I asked you what you wanted to do with me".

Kingsley dialog: "I was in love with her, George. I have never felt like that ever in all my life."

Cruz dialog: "I am happy".

I'd seen enough by the end of the trailer, but I trawled around and found an illuminating Ben Kingsley Guardian interview by Brian Logan:

"Very soon preconceptions of me, if there are any left, will be meaningless, because I'll be moving too fast,". [Kingsley] makes a karate action with his arms, to indicate how confused we'll all be. The child in him will be pleased at that.

"Egalitarianism in young children" is published on page 1079 in the August 28th edition of Nature. Elegy is coming to a cinema near you.

Lights, Canberra, inaction

2008-04-13T15:00:00.005+02:00

Earlier this month I read two very different policy announcements about innovation. The first came from the European Commission and declared hopes that 2009 would be the European Year of Innovation.

The image of the light bulb comes from the official EU press release. Both the image and the sentiment surrounding the announcement speaks volumes about the top down notions held by the Commission about how to realize economic gains from Europe's rich and diverse research base.

A prime example of this top down, and frankly wishful, thinking is the European Institute of Technology (EIT). Intended to rival the MIT as a centre for innovation and the commercialization of research, the EIT was officially launched on March 11th this year by the European Parliament.

If the Commission's hopes are realized and 2009 is declared the European Year of Innovation, the EIT will doubtlessly take centre stage at the celebrations. The only problem is that no one seems willing to come to the party.

The Commission expects universities and companies to fund a lion's share of the EIT's ambitious development costs. Yet the EIT concept has received what can only be described as scorn from academia, research policy groups such as the European Science Foundation and Industry.

Few predict that the initiative will result in any measurable degree of action.

Canberra
The second announcement on innovation came from what I would call a thinking person's academic policy think tank, the Group of Eight based in Canberra, Australia.

The announcement describes how Australian spending on basic research in 2005 has fallen to a third of the levels observed at the beginning of the 1990s.

As Go8 chairperson Alan Robson points out, changes in the way research is funded has created a situation in which "the winners are losers".

Government funding to the top performing research universities fails to cover the total costs of research, effectively forcing the most successful universities to cross subsidize their research from international student fees.

Robson also estimates that the funding shortfall has created a situation in which the top universities of Australia have deferred Aus$1.5 billion in university maintenance activities.

Urging policy makers to think beyond the orthodoxy of "turning ideas into money", Robson says that his priority is towards "building relationships and better communication between universities and the communities they serve".

The focus on innovation alone is failing to achieve this goal.

Banks as dangerous neighbourhoods

2008-02-07T08:52:00.000+01:00

Tom Keene interviews Nassim Taleb about the deficiencies of Value at Risk models by explaining that empirical models cannot predict Jerome Kerviel's 5 Billion euro loss at SocGen on the basis of existing data, for example Nick Leeson's 860 Million loss at Barings.

The progression can only be explained by evoking nonlinear processes, says Taleb. Taleb suggests that the nonlinearity can be explained by the trend towards concentration in the banking industry (fewer banks, each larger in size) and by increased interdependencies between these banks (eg increased use of interbank loans).

The solution? Smaller banks; and more of them.

Pandemic preparedness in the 21st century

2008-01-16T22:39:00.001+01:00

I'm back from another cerebral treat at the Swiss Re Centre for Global Dialog, Rueschlikon, Switzerland.

Andreas Reis, WHO Department of Ethics and Human Rights, reviewed the 50+ year history of pandemic preparedness. Back in 1952 the WHO created the Global Influenza Surveillance Network, now comprising 118 centres in 89 countries. Reis described how GISN has been tirelessly detecting and cataloging flu strains ever since.

The year 2000 saw the establishment of the Global Outbreak Alert Response Network (GOARN), which has already delivered vaccines and antivirals to more than 50 flu outbreaks in 40 countries.

GOARN has also advanced the thinking behind the institutional response to pandemics. Reis talked about the "Titanic" principle of vaccine allocation, in which women and children are privileged in the response to a pandemic.

He contrasted this with strategies in which health care professionals would instead get to jump to the front of the treatment queue. He emphasized that every strategy has its weakness.

Next came Basel county Chief Medical Officer Anne Witschi to describe the various phases of Switzerland's impressive outbreak response strategies. Witschi started with a description of Phase 3 of the response: the detection and isolation of a person infected with influenza A virus.

Contact tracing roots out those who have been exposed to the virus. Isolation of all traced contacts completes the picture for phase 4 of the response.

Phases 5 and 6 see mass vaccinations, - voluntary in Switzerland, and attempts to achieve social distancing. Social distancing refers to the prevention of any significant aggregation of people by shutting down schools, public transport and canceling all unnecessary workplace activity.

Remember that the Swiss government has stockpiled 8M doses of the antiviral Oseltamivir (Tamiflu) in anticipation of pandemic. Enough for every human in Switzerland.

Witschi described how Switzerland would manage the resulting traffic jams (no public transport) and boarder controls (people will make unpredictable moves to join family members and other loved ones). Much thought has gone into managing religious congregations.

Finally, medical insurance expert Peter Miller presented Swiss Re's models for predicting the death toll of a full blown pandemic. What was interesting for me was to learn that the mortality rate has never exceeded about 3% of those infected.

Miller was quick to point out how our preparedness has improved. A calamity of the scale of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic has, according to his models, been reduced to a 1 in 3000 year event.

One serious difference between the H5N1 flu virus and other threatening viral nasties is the time lag between when one can infect others and when symptoms start to show. Someone infected with SARS is symptomatic from the moment they can pass on the disease.

For H5N1, there is a 1 day time lag before the symptoms set in; a whole day when a victim can innocently infect others.

During question time marking the end of the meeting, the man sitting next to me raised his hand and asked Anne Witschi some probing questions about the Swiss stockpile of Tamiflu. "Is there really enough medical equipment to deliver treatment for everyone?", he asked.

"There's a full treatment course for every person in Switzerland," came the confident reply.

"And the syringes?" he probed. "Are there enough syringes stockpiled to keep treating people?".

Suddenly, just for a moment, the spell was broken. "There is still a small problem with the stock of syringes and needles," Witschi added sheepishly. The man ceased his questioning.

Afterwards, I asked the man whether he had already known the answer to his question. "I'm working in this area," he said. And then said no more.

Flu pandemics remain spooky, no matter how impressive 21st preparedness appears.

Links 2008.01.09: Hygiene, Social nets and EU-land media survey

2008-01-09T20:22:00.000+01:00

Hygiene hypothesis links rising allergy rates with antiseptic modern life: new twist
Study by Bengt Björkstén explores human gut microbiome - sum total of microbes in the gut, for clues as to why rich microbiome correlates robustly with reduced allergy.

Social-networking biggest in Japan
Flattish growth in online membership around the 100M mark in the US is contrast with "rest of world" membership topping 400M and rising.

Citizens grumble about poor coverage of EU in media
Survey of all member states reveals that citizens feel EU news is insufficiently reported on TV (48% thought so), radio (46%) and print (36%), with generally positive attitudes about the quality of what media coverage there is.

There was little consensus regarding Internet media coverage. This surprises me. I'm always shocked that what little internet news covered European achievements covers is badly: Ever noticed that the media announces a 1 year delay for Boeing Dreamliner as 'confirming a plan' but announced the same news for Airbus A380 as 'troubled plane maker faces further delays'?

Falling investor confidence has and will cost us dear

2007-12-25T09:42:00.000+01:00

This blog began 2007 with a comment on the fickle nature of investment in medical research.

Citing a recent Tufts University study on the pharmaceutical industry, I commented that rising development costs could not be the only cause for the high attrition rate in drug development. I wanted to turn the direction of causation around and suggest that pharma faces a problem with investor confidence.

After all, the increase in development cost is a long term trend in biomedicine, and the additional cost has been passed on to the consumer, i.e the sick. When an industry focuses so strongly on the risks of investment, is it not time to ask whether investment culture is itself in bad shape?

By July, that same investment culture made headline news when it collectively switched off interbank loans and other forms of short term commercial lending.
The results were immediate and visible across much of the globe; the 2007 liquidity crises was born.

The finger of blame pointed towards risky mortgages in the US. But problems in the mortgage sector cannot explain the ongoing calamity in the financial markets.
The numbers just don't support such a conclusion. So far, declared losses in the banking industry still fall short of the $300B mark that analysts estimate to be the losses for the sub prime mortgage sector.

When and if such losses are realized, $300B just happens to be the amount that banks made as profit in 2006. These kinds of losses shouldn't be a problem. Industries don't normally face mass annihilation when they wipe out the previous year's profit margin in losses.

To come full circle with my January blog, we can frame this situation as a problem in investor confidence and lending. Lenders are placing a high price on risk. Lending has dried up, and with that financial development comes the possibility of years of under-investment in all the industries upon which our prosperity depends.

If you are interested.... Nassim Taleb

2007-11-19T20:25:00.001+01:00

Visit Tom Keen's Bloomberg November 16th podcast for a fast paced tour of 20th century banking and finance by Nassim Taleb. Author of Black Swan: The impact of the highly improbable, Taleb ruminates on why financial risk estimation remains such an imprecise science.

"Physicists do prediction very well," Taleb explains. "Let's say, to 10 decimal places. Whereas Economists? Well they can't predict better than cab drivers".

Why? Physics is empirical, or "bottom up". It pays, argues Taleb.

Risk methods give a false sense of security. In Taleb's words: "Instead of teaching people 'This is what we don't know'. They teach 'what we think we know'. The illusion of understanding uncertainty"...

The short story on Carbon Capture & Storage

2007-11-09T19:15:00.000+01:00

Over the past two days, Swiss Re has gathered together a discordant group of experts on carbon capture and storage (CCS) at their spectacular Centre for Global Dialogue overlooking Lake Zurich.

After a tip off, I had the luck to walk into a panel discussion rounding off the event and heard the best of it, re-stated by the top speakers, in 1.5 hours.

You might have heard about this much toted miracle cure for global warming. Positioned as a solution good for the immediate term, current CCS technologies would greatly facilitate the elusive 80-90% reduction in CO2 emissions, - downing 7 gigatonnes of the stuff per year, required to shove the planet off its collision course with overheating.

I learned about BP's toy CO2 burying project in Algeria, In Salah, showcased by a slick Iain Wright. Equally slick Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs professor Elizabeth Wilson outlined the miracle possibilities of CCS and, with help from Swiss Re Risk Management VP Christina Ulardic, the associated risk of the gas leaking out again and possibly killing people.

But a deadpan delivery by Energy Research Centre Netherland's PhD student Heleen de Coninck more or less dispensed with the whole proposal. Coninck pointed out that pumping CO2 back underground was itself highly energy intensive (even with the existing well developed CCS technologies the so called energy penalty is 15-20%), and likewise highly unlikely given the disparity between the financial market value of carbon (very low, and falling) and the 25-40 euros per tonne needed to pay for CCS.

So there you go. I hope I have summarized the 90 minutes I enjoyed at Swiss Re in 3 minutes of reading.

Sorry you missed the excellent coffee, fruit juice and snacks.

Links: New science/culture organisation in Paris

2007-10-28T19:58:00.000+01:00

Nature (October 18th) reviewed a new showcase for "art meets science" in Paris. Le Laboratoire opened on October 19th in 4, rue de Bouloi (75001 Paris) and has a gymnastic website to go with it. Visit www.lelaboratoirs.org and you'll see what I mean.

More alchemy from the political caste

2007-10-11T22:03:00.000+02:00

Please forgive my fascination for the easy formulas offered by politicians as they promise to transform research into economic prosperity.

The European Commission is always the catalyst for this magic chemical reaction, and somewhere in the discussion the catalyst is named as none other than the European Institute of Technology (EIT).

Here's my latest alchemic discovery, published yesterday. Award winning MEP Dr. Chatzimarkakis asserts that "research is about turning money into knowledge and innovation is about turning knowledge into money".

This elegant statement of reversible chemistry reminds me of remarks made earlier by EIT champion Jerzy Buzek, MEP. Buzek believes that "it is impossible to finance innovation directly". Something is needed to fill the gap in between, he says.

Like Buzek, Chatzimarkakis calls for innovation to overcome the strong equilibrium constraints that make Europe's research treasures inaccessible to economic exploitation.

Using this logic, innovation becomes something money can't buy. Either you have it, or you don't. Or to follow these particular Parliamentarians to their logical conclusion, European researchers must innovate. On their own. Chop-chop!

Hope springs a leak

2007-09-16T21:13:00.000+02:00

Few people knew about it, but until last month more than 1 trillion dollars in risky mortgages were ultimately being financed by loans that were being held for a matter of only days at a time. That might sound strange to the financially uninitiated. And now, even among financial types, the whole arrangement is suddenly on the decline.

Welcome to the current credit crunch in the world financial system.

Household banking names have had to turn out their pockets to finance the original mortgage obligations. Many of these mortgages were made to borrowers with slight chances of meeting their monthly payments.

By the beginning of September, several banks hit the panic button and said they couldn't afford to pay. Central banks around the world have had to step in to keep the loans afloat.

You might be asking how a bank could get caught out funding 30 year mortgages using loans that last only days?

The banks drove into this mess at high finance speed using what are called Structured Investment Vehicles, or SIVs. SIVs are offshore investments, virtually unregulated, for special purposes.

The banks earned good money from these racy little investment vehicles by selling the loans on to buyers in the so called commercial paper market. But commercial paper must be re-negotiated every few days, and that's where things went pear-shaped in August. No one wanted to finance the loans.

Is all this sounding far away form your everyday? Overly risky US mortgages. Offshore investment vehicles. And a rescue package from central banks. Maybe. But closer to home we have people camping out overnight to be first in line to withdraw their savings from UK building societies.

'More' should mean 'better' in research...

2007-08-29T11:34:00.000+02:00

More news from the European Commission about how it plans to foster research in the European Research Area.

Science and Research Commissioner Janez Potocnik explained that 'Europe needs more research, but we will never have more research without more researchers'. Potocnik is taking advantage of the Summer Pause to promote the European Network of Mobility Centres (ERA-MORE), which aims to get researchers moving around Europe.

This is a great endorsement for increasing European research efforts but I miss, a little bit, a focus on quality.

It's heady stuff, but then that is never really in short supply in these kinds of announcements. Another memorable one was Potocnik's recent declaration that knowledge should be a "fifth freedom of movement" in the EU after the free movement of goods, services, capital and labour.

US joins the Basel II party

2007-07-30T10:55:00.000+02:00

The Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and other US financial institutions issued a joint statement on July 20th saying that they would join Basel II, a key global accord of financial regulatory bodies that has been hammered out in the Swiss city of Basel.

Various sticking points prevented the US from coming to the table, despite the fact that European and Asian economies had signed up more than a year ago.

At the core of Basel II is a promise from Banks to put aside capital reserves as protection from serious loses. The accord has been drawn up against a backdrop of financial deregulation over the past 15 years, and is seen by many as a critical guard against a global financial meltdown.

Basel II features a cocktail of complex methods for calculating the value of bank reserve assets, including novel methods to assess the riskiness of the reserve assets themselves. The complexity of these methods have created much hand-wringing debate. It was the techie, quantitative side of Basel II that drew my own interest.

Early on, the financial community feared that Basel II would bloat capital requirements and threaten bank competitiveness. Interestingly, one of the final sticking points for US participation was that the capital reserves would actually be lower under Basel II.

Thus, it was the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. that threatened a veto, because Basel II would allow banks to hold lower reserve assets than those stipulated by existing US Bank lending rules.

The 12 large banking institutions in the US that will now comply with Basel II will also remain bound by the so called leverage ratio, a government imposed lower limit to the proportion of assets that banks are entitled to lend. With an agreement on this additional claus came the final settlement for US membership.

Earlier in the month, Middle East financial institutions made an announcement about their own progress with Basel II. A roundtable discussion involving financial representatives of the United Arab Emirates highlighted vulnerabilities in operational risk, i.e. risks associated with failures in systems, processes and people. A press release issued by the roundtable explained that regulators in emerging economies "lack credible, quality data" with which to evaluate their financial risk.

Basel II, the UAE roundtable argued, could be a source of competitive advantage for emerging economies by increasing banking efficiency and productivity. All of which is good news for those at the Bank of International Settlements in Basel, who can now count all major European economies, Japan and now the US at the Basel II table.

Gain or pain?

2007-06-18T21:03:00.000+02:00

The European Research Council (ERC) received 9167 project proposals for its new Starting Independent Investigator Grants. With a significant portion coming from outside Europe, the ERC hailed this tsunami of interest in its new research funding scheme as hope for a "brain-gain" to counter years of European brain drain.

Anyone can apply for the grant as long as they are based in an EU country during the funding period.

But with a budget of €290 split across all research domains, not to mention the arduous task of sifting through nearly 10000 grant proposals, I wonder if the scheme will be a bit over stretched?

It really is a lot of proposals. A lot of effort on the side of the applicants. I would wager that this interest is driven by falling US grant acceptance rates more than anything else.

How will the ERC carve up its relatively petite spoils? Who is going to suffer through the evaluation of those many thousands of eager applicants?

What is missing, for my taste, is a research focus; say medicine or social sciences. And there should be at least some evidence that the ERC will garner together expertise to judge the successful proposals. Otherwise I fear an outcome involving more pain than gain.

Money isn't everything in research

2007-05-14T03:57:00.000+02:00

China is awash with new cash to spend on research, Nigeria has a $5 billion trust to develop applied technologies and India boasts over 20 000 pharmaceutical startups alone. But still it seems there are some things that research money can't buy.

China and India are emerging as places where money is no issue when it comes to research. The Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology just announced that more than a billion yuan (US$130 million) will fill the coffers for research into traditional chinese medicine (TCM).

That is 5-6 times the previous spending round. A further 8 billion yuan has been allocated to the health budget for traditional medical treatments. Yet beneath this rain of additional funding, skeptical voices can be heard. China is being questioned about the way the money will be spent, and its medical safety record is poor.

There's no evidence that things will improve by simply spending more. And according to an editorial in the April 5th edition of Nature, China's share of the global market in TCM is being eroded by Japan and South Korea. There, cash flows at a reduced pace but the quality is better.

Affordable, but not ethical

Biotechnology is booming in India and investors are flocking to the generics market, that is, to the production of drugs that are no longer covered by patents. But some are uncomfortable about this boom taking place alongside India's yawning economic disparities.

Sanofi Aventis Chairman Jean-Francois Dehecq denounced the pharmaceutical industry in India, Thailand and Indonesia in an interview with Reuters in January. He said local producers are "exploiting people" and then selling drugs cheaply to those that "can already pay".

This is an issue of opportunity cost. Foreign and domestic players are queuing to invest in the pharmaceutical sector. But with such handsome profits to be made from cheap copies of popular drugs, little investment is finding its way to research.

Finally, there is the dicey situation in Nigeria. Riding on the back of abundant oil revenues, outgoing president Olusegun Obasanjo recently endowed $5B for science and technology. That's enough for a research budget more than twice that of relatively well-off South Africa.

Combined with co-financing from businesses and international aid organizations, Nigeria could afford a program on a par with many nations in the developed world. But these plans are clouded by the country's bottom 6th ranking on the global Corruption Perception Index.

The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is bracing itself to ensure the money goes to vitally important research in health and agriculture. But no one is holding their breath for the spending boost that outside partners would bring.

Thus, even with a supreme effort to allocate funds wisely, the Nigerian government is unlikely to get the same benefit from its investment that could be obtained in a more politically stable environment.

These three examples tell the same story. China, India and oil-rich Nigeria currently have the cash and the will to fund research. But they are likely to struggle to realize the full potential of this enormous additional funding.

Slow and steady...doesn't always win the race

2007-04-18T20:38:00.000+02:00

Humans currently live on the North side of the Earth's sustainable limits, running up a growing debt with the environment. Our approaches to fighting climate change apparently fail to account for the growth of this debt.

You might have missed news about the recent Global Roundtable on Climate Change, which brought together prominent business leaders to summarize the view of big business on the issue.

The last big business story about climate change was Chrysler's chief economist Van Jolissaint opining, at the January Detroit Motor Show, that it was all in the imagination of 'quasi-hysterical Europeans'.

The story of the Global Roundtable makes better reading. After much deliberation, the Roundtable published its views in a document called The Path to Climate Sustainability. It describes a course of action to curb global resource use and waste production to within sustainable limits.

An exclusive club, its members boast great confidence in the endeavor. Quotably, General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt says that 'global businesses are assuming their just place as catalysts for action on climate change', and that political leaders are "lagging behind".

Immelt is right to highlight the problem of lagging behind.

Lags are a no-no when it comes to moving along a path to sustainable limits. Why? Because if you lag behind long enough, the sustainable limits will themselves change substantially, and move further away from your well intentioned path.

The basic idea is simple: if you lag behind in your debt payments, debt grows larger, forcing up the cost of repayments. The longer we spend sitting around planning the path to sustainability, the less likely we'll reach the goal.

Netherlands creates Minister for Research

2007-03-26T21:14:00.000+02:00

Sustaining research funding in Europe remains complex and challenging. Solid representation in Government is probably the only way to secure a future for innovative research.

Good news from the Netherlands. It has created a new minister for research and universities. Molecular biologist Ronald Plasterk will fill the new post, bringing experience as a top flight researcher as well as nearly 10 years of involvement in Dutch politics.

I met Plasterk more than a decade ago at a residential training course at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (Long Island, NY). The workshop brought together everyone from PhD students (like me at the time) to professors to learn a new technique aimed at discovering genes involved in learning and memory.

Plasterk was already a rising star back then, having just returned to the Netherlands to start his own research group after postdocs in the US and UK . I remember him as open and friendly, participating in the lab work with as much enthusiasm as the PhD students.

News of Plasterk's appointment came at the same time as a squabble in the UK about research funding. The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) had just announced that £65 million of funding initially allocated to research had instead been spent propping up the Rover car company and maintaining Britain's aging nuclear energy infrastructure.

The DTI blithely announced the funding cut as a mere budget reallocation from one division to another. But as Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Council head Professor Julia Goodfellow explained, "science and innovation is about the medium term. If you start cutting it because of short term need then you have real problems".

Medical Research Council head Professor Colin Blakemore agrees. In an interview with the BBC he explained that "it might be time to take science funding out of the DTI's hands". There was a need, he said, for "science to be handled and administered really quite distinctly and separately from the rest of government".

Out of sight, out of mind
The report on the BBC website described the general downward trend in scientific research funding in the EU. The editorial suggested that the cause of this was "the switch away from manufacturing [in Europe], the industrial sector that does the most R&D".

This is an insightful remark.

Has there really been a disruption in the natural flow of funds between the consumers of innovation, i.e. manufacturers, and the producers of innovation, researchers? Who could have predicted that relocating manufacturing outside of Europe could disrupt this flow?

Intensive Pharming

2007-02-27T22:22:00.000+01:00

Drug companies are engaged in a relentless drive to improve the productivity of their research activities. Intent on simplifying organization structures and speeding up the decision making process, what kind of results can we expect from this more intensive approach to the cultivation of new medicines?

February has been eventful in the world of pharmaceutical research policy. Pfizer and Roche both made bold announcements about their future research strategies, promising a simplification of the way research activities will be organized. And both their strategies involve thinning out middle management so that strategic decisions can be taken faster.

Pfizer's 2005 research budget was the second highest corporate research spend ever and a full 20% larger than its nearest rival in the pharmaceutical sector. But that ranking is unlikely to survive the lab closures and cuts to research staff that are currently in the works.

Scientific domestication
Research at Pfizer will ultimately be concentrated at 3 global centres. The company will focus on just 10 diseases, directing individual research teams to focus exclusively on one disease. This reorganization will result in the weeding out of Pfizer's research centre in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the laboratory that discovered Pfizer's blockbuster cholesterol lowering drug Lipitor.

Commentators have cautioned against organizing drug research into individual diseases, arguing that this prevents valuable synergies between therapeutic areas. February's edition of the journal Nature echoed this sentiment with a quote from University of Michigan's Alan Saltiel saying "A lot of drug discovery is serendipity".

All this seems like a large number of scientists to shepherd along such a defined path. And given the intensity with which this path is being pursued, it could take a long time to turn back if anyone should discover that serendipity is needed after all.

Risky business

2007-01-22T20:01:00.000+01:00

My google alerts recently unearthed a 2005 study by Tufts University on the efficiency of drug research and development. One of its findings was that economics considerations account for more than 35% of the attrition rate of drug candidates in development.

When a drug fails, the event makes news. We generally only hear about failures due to safety or efficacy concerns. Economic factors are rarely given as the reason for the failure.

The Tufts study explains that "rapidly rising R&D costs has led economics to gain ascendancy as a major reason for killing unpromising products in the R&D pipeline".

I find this explanation intriguing. The rising cost of development is not a new trend. Costs have been rising steadily, and returns falling steadily, for years. Does the Tufts study reveal the rise of a new cause of drug attrition in development or simply a fall in investor confidence and loyalty?

A year in review

2006-12-24T14:15:00.000+01:00

It being year's end, I'd like to reflect on what has gone into this blog. I began with a broad agenda to advocate research and describe research efforts around the world.

I followed a few hot topics, for example biodiversity and the application of systems biology to biomedical research. But science communications is just one facet of my blogging interests.

I am also interested in the centers that do the research, and especially, the research policy behind these centers. I am keen to compare the policy experiments in Europe, the US and Asia.

Places like Biopolis, in Singapore, are successfully forging links between government and industry to support research. Biopolis is well funded and now employs high calibre researchers trained in Europe and the US.

Attempts to fund research with joint public/private partners can be found everywhere. Biopolis represents one approach to joint funding, with research interests extending across the biological sciences.

Another approach is found at the Kluyver Centre in the Netherlands, which focuses on a particular application, namely industrial fermentation. Kluyver's strategy has also been successful, as is evident from the generous support added by its new industrial partner Tate and Lyle.

I learned a lot while writing this blog. I discovered Euractiv, Cordis and AlphaGalileo, three excellent news distribution organizations with a focus on research news. Euractiv and AlphaGalileo are independent, while Cordis is an official news channel for European Commission research activities.

All three channels are rich sources for breaking news about scientific discoveries and for science policy developments. I gained from them a steady stream of facts and figures with which to form opinions about European research.

What defines a good research environment? Should research be conducted in fast- paced research hotels with precise goals and short to medium term time horizons? What role should institutes and university faculties play in research?

Should research aim to bring a direct commercial benefit to the funding agencies that support them? Should the private sector pay for fundamental research, or should it become involved only during the final commercialization phase of research and development?

These are key questions towards understanding where research is headed, and the kinds of research cultures we should expect to see in future.

Europe a laggard in research?

2006-11-21T20:19:00.000+01:00

Europe is sometimes described as a laggard when it comes to the commercialization of intellectual property. New research comparing technology transfer on both sides of the Atlantic shows that the reality is rather different.

Researchers at the United Nations University (UNU) recently published what they believe is the first critical comparison of patent and commercialization activity between Europe and the US. They sought to shed light on the so-called European Paradox, the notion that Europe has good ideas but doesn't make any money from them.

They find that for every million dollars invested, Europe produces 20% more licenses, 40% more startups and earns within 10% of overall return on investment enjoyed by investors in the US. Measured in terms of these formal forms of technology transfer, Europe is not such a laggard after all.

In characteristic self-deprecating fashion, the European researchers hail the findings as a warning rather than a sign of success. They believe Europe may be focusing too much on formal technology transfer, in turn threatening the open exchange of ideas.

Borrowing from the language of software development, the UNU publication calls for a strengthening of Open Source Science, that is, for greater sharing of basic knowledge and intellectual property.

The US, they believe, is actually much stronger in this regard. Despite an explicit orientation favouring the Market over sharing, technology transfer in the US is conducted with a strong orientation towards sharing knowledge.

If anything, this is the paradox that deserves attention. How is that the country that believes in unfettered competitiveness could simultaneously be home to the planet's greatest achievements in open source software?

Might this come down to the difference between talk and action?

I recently attended a public lecture in Zurich, Switzerland, in which talk and action came into sharp contrast. A member of Switzerland's seven-member governing committee was warmly acknowledging Europe's communitarian instincts.

The Swiss governor explained that competition created jealousy, and that jealousy wasted precious human energies. Much better to do research as a network and share, said the Governor.

There followed a talk by a high profile Harvard professor. He began with the words "I luuurve competition". The lecture hall froze as he described how competitiveness was the foundation of the US dominance in research.

The Swiss Governor's face tightened visibly.

But as the Harvard professor went on it became clear that competitive advantage was not the only factor behind the US's superior research profile. The professor acknowledged a much simpler, and insidious factor behind US successes.

That factor was access to journals.

US journals, he acknowledged, had a clear bias towards US research. Everyone else was somewhat off the radar, he explained.

You can talk the talk, but the action came down to jealous US journal editors.

Talk. Action.

If the US can't resolve the disparities between the two, let's hope Europe can, and that Europe's Open Source Science will flourish.

Filling the gap between R&D and commercialization

2006-11-19T18:44:00.000+01:00

The European Institute of Technology (EIT) moved back onto the agenda on October 18th with the publication of a revised proposal for its funding and organizational structure. According to its supporters, the EIT will bridge the gap between Europe's rich knowledge-base and commercially valuable innovation.

What began as a plan to create Europe's answer to the MIT has now changed considerably. In the new proposal, the EIT is a two-tier institution comprising a small organizational body and a network of collaborative groups called Knowledge & Innovation Communities (KICs).

The KIC's comprise researchers and entrepreneurs employed at universities and other public sector bodies, and the private sector. They will be expected to come up with the innovation, as well as €2.1Billion of the €2.4Billion budget.

Industry and academic interest in the proposal is lukewarm. Industry groups wonder why they should give generously to something that is, in effect, little more than an administrative department of 100 people.

Supporters of the EIT battle on. One name that stands out at the moment is Polish MEP Jerzy Buzek. Buzek talks about Europe's poor ability to deliver innovation, by which he seems to mean, products and services that generate a direct profit.

"It is impossible to finance innovation directly through FP7", remarked Buzek in a reference to the EC's research funding program. He believes the task comes down to filling a gap between research and commercialization.

The EIT would fill this gap, claims Buzek, and would not participate directly in either research or education. This would create unnecessary competition between the EIT and Europe's universities and research institutes, he claims.

Some comment that the latest proposals for the EIT pose more questions than answers. Eurochambres, the 17 Million member association of European chambers of commerce raise several questions.

They believe the proposal lacks clarity about how the KICs will be organized. They also claim that the proposal leaves open the question of how the EIT will rate, and therefore rank, the projects it will become involved with.

Buzek claims these questions reveal the EIT's strengths rather than its weaknesses. On the issue of how KICs would be organized, Buzek believes that the innovation programs will benefit from being able to decide themselves on their composition and organization.

This is a curious response from Buzak.

If the EIT will not participate directly in research, then its existence will be justified in terms of its guidance in technology transfer and commercialization. Filling the gap and all that.

But if it cannot describe how those goals would be translated into some kind of organizational formula or plan, how can we evaluate its quality as an organisation? Seems that the gap between research and commercial success is as empty and unclear as ever.

Around the world in patents

2006-10-31T19:42:00.000+01:00

This month's international research roundup looks at patents, the deceptively simple method for earning money from ideas.

First stop India. India's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research filed 542 US patents between 2002 and 2005. With the cost of filing a patent standing at about $25 thousand, and maintenance costs of $4 thousand per year, it's no surprise that this feverish activity has come to receive scrutiny from a skeptical public.

Nature ran an editorial arguing that India's state subsidized program for registering US patents is being abused and having a detrimental effect on research. Successful patent applications have come to be used in leu of peer-review publications. They provide a short cut to promotion and grant success.

The Indian newswire teluguporta.com carried a story (September 7th) entitled "Public Money Wasted on Useless Patents". The story described a patent for a substance extracted from cow pee that purportedly conferred an antibiotic action. The claim was not supported by any experimental evidence.

Moving East to China. 20 Chinese delegates flew even further east to San Francisco on the 9th of October for a training course on intellectual property rights. The course was given by Berkeley's Haas School of Business, no less than a paragon of righteous money making.

The US, and Europe too, would like to curb infringements of their patents in China. Beyond platitudes about getting to know each other, the press release on the event mentioned the need to address "Chinese misunderstanding of US values and priorities".

Now let's spin the compass around to examine Europe and its West-ward gaze towards the US. Here the issue is not about policing patent infringements. It's about Europe's desire to replicate the US's success with making money from ideas.

What caught my eye recently was a report published by the EC in September about the benefits of intellectual capital reporting for small to medium sized enterprises (SME's). The EU is pulling hard on all the levers to help SME's. This particular was report gave the advice that "articulating intangible resources" (intellectual property) could drive value creation.

Unfortunately the report seemed to struggle to back the claim. It cited evidence that investors presented with information about a company's conceptual crown jewels were more likely to give the company a thumbs down, in the form of lower forecasts. And anecdotal evidence suggested that fund managers and financial analysts don't take the information seriously.

Keep pulling on those levers, everyone! After all, money makes the world go around.

Productivity and Innovation

2006-10-23T21:29:00.000+02:00

Briefly:
The focus on productivity issues in pharmaceutical research seems to ignore the trade off between efficiency gains and the investment required to refine production methods

---

Productivity is an oft used word. In drug research, it is the focus on nearly all discussions about how the pharmaceutical industry will cope with a combination of rising research costs and a downward trend in the number of drug discoveries.

If the goal is obvious, what then should be the approach to reducing the costs of discovering new drugs?

The logic of productivity is attractively simple. Reduce the cost of a single production step, and the overall productivity will rise. Want improved cupcake productivity? Then head over to the cake factory and have a detailed look at the process in which the ingredients are mixed, placed in a small paper cup, cooked, packed, and distributed.

None of this is rocket science. Or even science. It's process engineering and the engineer's job is to study a process that works reasonably well and make it work even better.

An obvious difference between cupcake production and drug research is that between 99%-99.9% of the products will fail somewhere along the development "pipeline". As cupcake industry insiders will know, the occasional cupcake does go awry before it reaches the light of day. But nothing like 999 out of 1000.

Which pipeline?
Alarm bells should be ringing. Investment in productivity enhancement is a trade off between the cost of studying a process and the benefit of making the process work better. Drug discovery, indeed innovation in general, is just not the place for it. For those few successful drug research pipelines, the efficiency gains will pay out. But for the other 999 cases, the whole exercise is little more than a wasted overhead.

Once I thought that the productivity mantra was confined to the pharmaceutical trade press. Now I see that it dominates international research conferences and falls from the lips of research heads, even in private conversation.

Why focus on increasing the productivity of the drug discovery pipeline if it means that we will spend most of our time peering long and hard down the wrong pipe?

Europe takes lead in safe chemical production

2006-10-11T22:01:00.000+02:00

Briefly:
New safety rules applying to Europe's chemical industry will squeeze low value-added chemical production

The European Commission will shortly take the final vote on REACH, a brave new world in safety regulations for chemicals in Europe. The REACH initiative, which stands for Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals, aims to improve Europe's industrial competitiveness and prompt innovation towards the use of safer chemicals.

Industry has reacted strongly to the plan, which will require that as many as 100 thousand chemicals undergo a round of health and safety testing at the expense of manufacturers. Europe's chemical industry employs 1.7 million people and creates a trade surplus of €41 billion annually.

The Commission received 6000 responses from industry, NGO's and governments during a short consultation period in 2003. And a trial of the program in 2004, involving 29 chemical producers, spawned a report with more than 40 recommendations on how the program could me made "workable".

Of the two stated aims of REACH, the safety argument is mentioned most frequently in reports and press releases made by the Commission. One press release claims that safety information is "sketchy for around 99%" of chemicals in the market place, "raising questions about the possible impact on human health".

Supposing this is true, the question on my lips is how REACH will prompt innovation towards safer chemicals? The toxicologists I speak to are fairly divided about which direction this innovation could take. Some talk about the new field of toxicogenomics, which combines conventional toxicology insights with genome-wide experimental investigations.

Others talk of computational approaches involving machine learning algorithms, Bayesian prediction and other exotic methodologies. REACH makes no mention of these new methods. Indeed, the only statement I could find about how REACH would work in practice was a lonely objective that it should not increase the amount of animal testing.

Wading through the flurry of recent reports and press releases on REACH, I found a small section that compared the new proposals with the existing chemical safety rules. REACH will exempt chemicals used in quantities of less than 1 tonne from the new screening requirements. Currently, all new substances produced in quantities of more than 10 kilograms require safety screening.

With this change in policy, only 30 thousand of the 100 thousand chemicals classed as "sketchy" by the Commission will qualify for screening. So safety compliance will actually become easier under REACH, assuming today's annual production rates.

My guess is that this new rule will have an impact on the second stated aim of REACH, namely, improving Europe's industrial competitiveness. Many of the nano-particle producers should be able to satisfy demand by producing less than the 1 tonne annual threshold. An exotic component in a high-end memory device might weigh less than a microgram per unit.

The same rule will make large scale production of low added-value products unprofitable under REACH. That is because each product made currently could contain 10's or even 100's of individual chemicals that require testing under REACH. With testing costs eating into low profit margins, production is likely to move away from Europe.

So in summary, REACH looks to me like a friendly move for manufacturers of low-volume, high value-added chemicals. For my money, this could have a positive impact on Europe's tradition as a place of high value-added chemical manufacturing.

Arise, European entrepreneurs

2006-09-22T22:21:00.000+02:00

This month's international research roundup focuses on policies designed to foster entrepreneurialism in European research.

Ján Figel, the European Commissioner for Education, Training, Culture and Multilingualism called for stronger support for entrepreneurial mindsets through training and education. He cites figures showing that 60% of EU citizens had never considered starting a business and that 50% were overly averse to taking business risks.

Meanwhile the European Science Foundation has announced an new initiative to foster "a more coordinated approach to R&D investment", according to its Director, Wouter Spek. EuroBioFund will have an annual conference, this year in Helsinki December 14-15th, and separate divisions to take care of networking and brokerage, the organization of grass roots research communities, and joint investment and funding tasks.

EuroBioFund's launch has been timed to coincide with the inauguration of the EU's new Framework Program 7, due January 1st 2007. Organizers hope the initiative will re-dress fragmentation in the funding of life science research in Europe.

France declared a success of its public-private innovation and technology clusters, the 'poles de compétitivité', in a press release made on September 4th. The purpose of the Poles is to raise the international profile of French technology and promote regional growth and job creation in high value-added industries.

A total of 67 clusters, 6 of which were deemed internationally competitive, have been selected to share €1.5 over 3 years. The French government claimed that small to medium sized enterprises (SME's) account for 40% of the business beneficiaries. The money is split between corporate tax exemptions, lower social security charges and direct funding. Funding will cover up to 35% of R&D costs incurred by business partners.

Finally, the European Commission's (EC) plans to establish a European Institute of Technology met opposition from Euroscience, a grass-roots research advocacy organization with 2100 members across 40 European countries. Euroscience argue that the EC's proposal would not achieve its goals of promoting innovation and would ignore existing structural problems with academic research and education in Europe.

Euroscience cite large student numbers, dispersed research capabilities and "a serious lack of differentiation" among the woes of the existing research and education system in Europe. They call for centers of excellence and a more "bottom-up" research policy and believe the EC should instead establish a European agency that would stimulate innovative companies, provide training and foster technology transfer.

A narrative, darkly

2006-09-13T17:38:00.000+02:00

Nature published some interesting pieces on narrative over the last few months. What is narrative, you might ask. For me, it is the idea of sharing knowledge by telling a (true) story. I tend to see narrative as a way to help my audience understand and remember. But there is a darker side of narration, as Nature discusses.

The discussion (Nature 441, pp922) revolves around a new film, A Scanner, Darkly (Dir. Richard Linklater), which is based on a Philip K. Dick novel. The film exploits a technique called rotoscoping, in which real film images are overlaid with a cartoon-like skin, frame-by-frame, to create a cartoon film based on real-life action.

This unreal-imagery is experienced to be somehow more real than the real thing. Various lines of evidence suggest that people find things more believable when the original content is papered over with an engaging exterior. In the Nature piece, several prominent neuroscientists claim this to be evidence that "the brain will swallow almost anything, provided it comes in the form of a story".

A scary conclusion. Can it be that the act of creating a narrative is motivated, deep down, by the desire to manipulate? Next came a piece on "interactional expertise" (Nature 442,pp8), in which sociologist Harry Collins, of Cardiff University, claims that a non-expert can develop a kind of scientific expertise without possessing the underlying scientific knowledge.

As evidence, Collins duped several physicists into believing that his treatise on gravity-waves could have been written by one of their own. One of the physicists admitted that "it's not obvious that [Collin's brief explanation of gravity-wave measurement was] not by a graduate scientist".

Collins claims that interactional expertise might be important for grant reviewers, who must evaluate topics outside their immediate field. And the author of the piece claims that interactional expertise constitutes evidence that one can understand a culture vastly different to one's own, a hot topic among anthropologists who claim that we don't.

I must confess to being mystified by all this. Did Collin's text make sense from a physics perspective, or not? If the reasoning is flaky, then his text must surely be regarded as neither interactional, nor "contributory": the other kind of expertise discussed, and the stuff that is required for "doing experiments and developing theories".

These themes are close to my heart. If I could distill my writing activities to a single sentence, it would be that I make digestible stories from indigestible lists of technical content. But I have developed a special review process to ensure the content is valid. And I'd like to think that my theme, that research is valuable, isn't an especially sinister message to get people to swallow.

Who watches the Watchperson?

2006-09-05T21:41:00.000+02:00

Nature's letters section recently included a piece entitled "Reviewers' reports should in turn be peer reviewed" (Nature, July 6th 2006, pp26). The letter explains how peer-review of reviewers' comments would hold reviewers more accountable and result in a fairer process.

At first, this might sound like another example of over-regulation: an endless regress over "Who watches the Watchperson?" ...until, finally, researchers have no time left to do research.

But I have recently come to wonder whether peer review, the 350-year-old foundation of research publishing, is in need of a health check.

I recently read the peer-review comments returned on a paper submitted by a former colleague. Having been out of the business for a couple of years, reading the comments gave me the impression that I had landed on Mars.

It was not just the menacing tone I found alien, it was also the lack of any meaningful review commentary on how the paper could be improved, or how the methods could be refined; experimental controls added and so on.

Indeed, within the space of 4 lines the reviewer had opined that the paper would damage my colleague's reputation forever, and moreover, had proposed totally new experiments and recommended that, in all reasonability, the paper should apply itself to a rather different question. This was not peer-review as I recalled it.

Would the scrutiny of peers have moderated this tirade, or at least encouraged the reviewer, perhaps, to address the paper rather than focus on his/her own research agenda?

I can only hope so. Somehow, extra checks and balances in peer-review doesn't seem like such a bad idea....

Research roundup - August 2006

2006-08-27T18:00:00.000+02:00

Here is another roundup of international news about research. Some problems confront the entire global research community, while other issues seem to be more unique and country-based.

Singapore continues to flex its muscles in the international research arena with the announcement, on July 7th, that it would increase its research budget to 3% of GDP over the next 3-5 years. Its newly established National Research Foundation will have S$13 Billion in the pot for the budget period 2006-2010 and will focus on biomedical research, the environment and digital media.

Then there was news, also in July, from Nigeria that oil revenues have made possible a new $500 million annual research budget. To put that into an African context, South Africa spends $200 million annually. President Olusegun Obasanjo has asked that publicly funded research be "one of his legacies", according UNESCO science policy advisor Folarin Osotimehin.

First step will be to mint, freshly, a US-style national science foundation for Nigeria. Organizers are working quickly to launch the plan before the end of Obasanjo's presidency, now only months away. "It has to be set up before he leaves. Otherwise we could have a president without enthusiasm for science", a key Organizer said.

Meanwhile the EU's Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) has seen cuts to its future budget. An announcement was made in June that total funding would be cut and that current funding would be "backloaded": released at a later stage than initially planned.

I find the news saddening because of the potential knock-on effect it could have on the EU's efforts to encourage partnerships with small to medium sized enterprises (SME's). SME's, - companies with less than 250 employees and < €50M annual turnover, make up 99% of the companies in Europe and create 50% of new jobs.

Innovation: the new business mantra

2006-08-06T21:27:00.000+02:00

Harvard Business Review's June edition carries a long interview with Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric since 2001, about the importance of innovation-driven growth.

I enjoyed reading it as a welcome relief from the productivity mantra uttered by so many captains of industry. Immelt believes that growth and future contributions to shareholder value will be achieved by "innovation", or research as it used to be known, rather than by increased productivity alone.

But what interests me most is Immelt's comments on where this innovation will come from: India and China. With developed nations growing only very slowly, Immelt is talking about developing technologies "in China, for the Chinese market".

John Thackara's December 2005 blog (www.doorsofperception.com) has a lot to say about the movement of innovation to developing nations. He cites a UK trade and industry report (the Cox Review of Creativity in Business) that heralds this process as all but complete.

Thackara describes a benchmarking exercise revealing that "innovation processes taking 24 steps in the US took seven steps in Bangalore", and concludes, "They are cheaper, and better".

In this regard, I read with interest a recent article in Nature's business section (K. S. Jayaraman, Nature, July 6th 2006, pp 17) about IBM's activities in India. According to the article, Cold War-time India saw IBM leave the country completely in 1978 and operate little more than a skeleton crew during the 1990's.

It is only since 2003 that IBM has had a serious Indian presence, totaling 43 000 employees at the last head count - its largest outside the US. Compare this to the 2200 scientists and engineers at GE's John F. Welch Technology Centre in Bangalore.

But according to Jayaraman, research and major product development in India is "modest". Consider the facts: a mere 110 IBM employees in India are involved in basic research - 3% of IBM's research staff. The remainder work in Zurich, Switzerland, Yorktown, NY and Almaden, CA.

So. Does Big Business have a new answer to servicing the globe's need for research and innovation? Let's wait and see.

All in the genes?

2006-07-30T22:56:00.000+02:00

Two startling things can be said about the picture to the right, which shows two generations of a high pedigree race horse.

First, notice that there is no genetic father. Smart Little Lena stands alone as the genetic forbearer. The five horses pictured beneath Smart Little Lena are her clones, produced by surrogate mothers. That is startling enough, because it has been a long hard road to producing substantial numbers of horse offspring from adult somatic cells.

But there is something else that I hope has not escaped your attention. Ask yourself: do any of these kiddies look like their mother? (it might have helped if they had used a baby photo of Smart Little Lena ;-).

The clones don't even look like each other.

But don't go rushing to the conclusion that I am breaking a scandal about faked clones. These are clones, alright. Their obvious differences arise from what are broadly called "epigenetic factors". This is a nice neat term for a host of poorly understood mechanisms that affect how the genetic code, which is identical in all 6 horses shown, is translated into a living, breathing, animal.

The picture shows the state of the art in horse cloning. The situation would, in all likelihood, be the same for humans. Serious ethical questions aside, would anybody want to clone themselves under these circumstances? No matter what you look like, your cloned offspring could turn out looking just a little bit like Alex, Bogy, Camby, Dave and Eli.

Source: Publication by Stephanie L. Church, Nature Biotechnology 24, 605 - 607 (2006)

Massively Multi-User Medicine

2006-07-20T22:07:00.000+02:00

I've just had a medical check-up. In my working life I am saturated with news about biomarkers and translational medicine, so I was curious to know just what goes into a health assessment these days. To what extent has medicine embraced biomolecular science?

There are thousands of genetic variations associated with disease and disease states. I wanted to put myself under this microscope. I figured here in Basel, Europe's pharmaceutical capital, I would have as good a chance as any to experience the state of the art.

I was not prepared for the perfunctory taps to the knee, and the ear, nose and eye spying that awaited me. As a child, I had tapped and spied using the same tools taken from my father's medical kit.

I told my check-up story to a colleague. He had developed software for a medical diagnostic kit that used 5 markers to detect periodontitis from a mouth swab. What struck him about the project was the sheer triviality of the analysis and the enormous emphasis placed on usability: it all had to be dead simple.

What can we conclude here? Things being as they are, translational medicine is progressing at a snails pace. It will need to speed up if we want to see anything resembling the state of the art in a clinical setting. Change is unlikely to be driven internally, from doctors. It will only come when people ask for it.

More than that, people will themselves need to develop, collectively, methods of using this information. It doesn't take a genius to do this and there are ample numbers of qualified people who could make a start. Genome-wide assays of the transcriptome and, more recently, DNA, are now in the $1000 range. All that's needed beyond that is a familiarity with the data itself.

High throughput biological data, such as SNiP (single nucleotide polymorphism) chips, can be analyzed at different levels of detail. A simple analysis needs no more than a spreadsheet and some gene annotation data, which is readily available on the Internet.

Using these resources alone, a SNiP assay could reveal all kinds of insights about ones susceptibility to disease and sensitivity to different treatment alternatives.

This simple kind of analysis is the sort of thing that could develop very quickly in a collaborative setting. With some basic coordination and peer review, important gene annotation could be gathered and developed quickly as people pooled their knowledge.

Data's in on importance of diversity

2006-07-04T20:58:00.000+02:00

Nature has published (Vol. 441:629-32) an empirical study linking diversity to ecological stability.

Tilman et al show that ecosystem stability, - the ratio of mean above ground biomass to temporal standard deviation, is positively correlated with the number of separate perennial grassland species growing at Cedar Creek Natural History Area, Minnesota, USA.

Skeptics won't have much wiggle-room with the findings of this 12-year field study. The methods section describes an experimental labour of love involving 30 replicates per experimental condition and a design that painstakingly manipulated biodiversity by carefully weeding 168 9m x 9m plots so that there was either 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16 grasses, legumes and woody species in each plot.

Be glad that scientists have now had sufficient time to silence dubious arguments that modern industrial agriculture is sustainable. But have we enough time left to save the rainforests and myriad other sensitive ecosystems harboring the secrets of a stable biosphere?

Lacking a sticky solution

2006-06-30T07:01:00.000+02:00

I was recently reading a bbc news item describing an orb spinner spider trapped in amber 115-121 million years ago (the lower Cretaceous period). The webs of the orb spinner have a combination of strong, rigid silk and weaker, but more stretchy silk. This combination is ideal for netting fast moving insect prey. The authors emphasize the evolutionary success of this adaptation. This ancient specimen's descendants are still spinning 121 million years later, and are represented by more than 2800 separate species.

It made me think about gene-based evolution and just how sticky (!) it can be. Once an adaptation is in the genome, it is there for the duration.

What about cultural adaptations? Generally speaking we don't talk of cultural adaptations being inherited directly via our genes. Each cultural adaptation must be passed from generation to generation through schooling. This provides much more scope and flexibility for adaptation but comes at a cost: each new generation runs the risk of missing out on beneficial schooling.

Compared to spiders, humans lack a sticky solution to guarantee that their most important adaptations are passed on.

Three types of models...

2006-06-23T23:43:00.000+02:00

I distinguish three kinds of models used in research.

The first kind generates unexpected predictions that can be tested and thus reveal new insights. These models are necessarily quite simple, because simplicity and elegance is a precondition for acceptance of a model that makes novel predictions. Why? Because simple models can be understood readily. This makes it possible for people to evaluate how the model's unexpected predictions come about.

The second kind are modifications of simple, established models that explain things the established models couldn't explain. An established model may fall from favour because it does not predict important new observations. Models that are modifications of existing models can save the original model, which may otherwise have been abandoned for a completely new, and perhaps immature model. The usefulness of this second kind of model lies in conserving and preserving valuable accepted wisdom.

Finally, there is a third kind of model. For my taste, all models belonging to this category should undergo refinement until they fall in either of the first two categories.....

So. Don't you agree there are only two kinds of useful models?

Taking the high throughput plunge

2006-06-17T20:26:00.000+02:00

Scientists hesitate before embarking on a genome-wide investigation because some future shift in technology could reduce massively the time and cost of doing large scale work. But without making a start, these technologies won't come into being.

Without a genome-wide, high throughput approach an investigation could remain confined to a search beneath some lamp-lit corner of the genome, when the true key could be languishing elsewhere…

Or as Thomas Jenuwein of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology, Vienna puts it "One can never be 100% ready... The rest will happen once the momentum is built up" (ref).

Jenuwein is referring to proposals by the International Human Epigenome Project to catalogue epigenetic features including DNA methylation and histone modification, the most well understood mechanisms underlying epigenetic influences on gene activity.

DNA methylation and histone modifications are tissue and developmentally specific. That means that they must be studied in each tissue separately, and at each developmental phase.

And neither process can currently be studied in a high throughput context. Methylation assays are accurate but slow and expensive, while large scale identification of histone marks is prone to problems with accuracy.

As with the Human Genome project, there is no alternative but to take the plunge.

Ref: Jane Qiu, Editor Nature Reviews Neuroscience in Nature May 11th 2006.

Solving differential equations?

2006-05-31T12:50:00.000+02:00

Just now I wandered up to a colleague, a physicist with the bioinformatics team, lost in thought.

He was standing in the canteen line for lunch, face expressionless and oblivious to all around him.

"Solving differential equations?" I asked.

"No," he replied, calmly. "I've got to work out the model first".

Funding novel technologies

2006-05-10T21:31:00.000+02:00

Australia's research universities received additional funding in this year's budget. For example, the government announced Aus$200M in new initiatives to assist small to medium sized businesses to commercialize new technologies.

Virginia Walsh, executive director of Australia's Group of Eight top research universities, welcomed the increased spending. But Walsh also highlighted the lack of funding for so-called "proof of concept", pre-commercial research investment, arguing that this lack "restricts the flow of new technology ventures".

It's a brave advocate of research that raises such a point during the relatively tight economic conditions that prevail today. But if Walsh is right, shifting investment from pre-commercial to commercial "innovation investment" might stymie the very conditions necessary for such investment to be a success.

The Group of Eight has also been outspoken about the way research budgets are allocated, giving special attention to the Research Quality Framework. Group of Eight Chair Glyn Davis pointed to the “lack of detail about the amount of funding to be distributed on the basis of RQF performance”.

I found Davis’ quote most interesting of all. When performance measures are used to determine funding levels, one should be reassured that performance would be rewarded. Otherwise, it would seem that the stick remains in place, but the carrot is nowhere to be seen.

Future shock

2006-04-27T09:17:00.000+02:00

We look to advanced technologies to solve our problems, but what happens when we are presented with a solution that is cutting edge?

Talk to a researcher these days and they will tell you that the rate limiting step in research is no longer the gathering of data, but rather the interpretation of it. Gathering information is highly automated, but analyzing it remains a fairly manual process.

This problem is felt acutely in industrial research. I have some experience with two industrial research fields confronting this problem: pharmaceutical research in toxicology and financial risk management.

Both industries claim to be overwhelmed by the volumes of data that they must analyze and interpret. This has triggered interest in quantitative methods to analyze large, complicated (high dimensional) datasets.

These fields produce experimental results that are just too large to hold in your head. Methods such as Self Organising Maps, principal components analysis (PCA) and supervised machine learning algorithms are ideal for analyzing such data. They have been around for years, but fast, inexpensive computers and user friendly interfaces have made them available on everyone's desktop.

PCA can be used to create a view of complex (high dimensional) data based on a few dimensions. Supervised machine learning can fish out patterns in data that exist in high dimensional spaces; patterns that have a complexity that our mind cannot grasp.

So you might expect that industry would jump at the chance to use these methods. Well, not so fast.

Before I describe my experience of industry's reaction to such methods, it's worth looking at a bit of background on the life of a company toxicologist or financial risk manager.

Toxicologists and financial risk managers don't have it easy. Suppose that a medicine produces a serious unexpected side effect. All drugs have been very carefully tested in development to reduce the chance of this happening. The buck stops with the toxicologist that performs these tests.

In finance there is a similar problem. Fund managers invest money using pre-agreed strategies. The strategies have been assessed in terms of their profitability and their risk. Financial risk managers must answer for financial losses caused by events that were not anticipated in their risk estimates.

Within this context, it should not come as a surprise that these industries do not exactly leap at the chance to use PCA and machine learning algorithms. I would go as far as to say that there can be a disconnect between the eager mathematical physicist pitching a statistical method and the industrial practitioners that are their target audience.

I suspect that the problem goes deeper than mere suspicion of a new and relatively untested approach. Arguably, it lies with the very nature of the methods themselves.

Consider this. Most data analysis begins with a hunch about what the data will ultimately show. This hunch might be a correlation between two known variables, or perhaps a simple pattern of results across two or three experimental conditions. We can create a picture of these results in our head.

PCA and machine learning algorithms don't work this way. They produce projections from high dimensional spaces onto low dimensional spaces.

It is beyond our minds capacity to visualize the exact combination of the original variables that is captured by a principle component. The low dimensional projection is delivered to us without a name. The same goes for patterns derived by machine learning.

Without names, these results don't tell a story.

Skillful interpretation of a PCA can yield a story of sorts. But the power of these methods is that they create an unbiased view of the data, one that doesn't need to adhere to a pre-existing story.

I don't know about you but I find this distinction rather deep. And if you compare these approaches with more familiar analytical approaches - ones that involve hunches, stories and easy intuitions for the patterns of results, then its not surprising that my friends in industry tend to shy away from them.

But analytically, this unbiased view is a big, big plus. These are methods that can reveal unexpected patterns in results and they scale well with the size of the data set.

That is what excites the mathematical physicists.

Collaboration between Biopolis and RIKEN

2006-04-27T09:05:00.000+02:00

My eyes are on Biopolis, Singapore's biosciences research initiative occupying a futuristic campus next to the National University of Singapore. Championed by Philip Yeo, Chair of Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Start), Biopolis is still relatively early phase. But it already includes a crop of several shiny buildings connected by soaring above-ground walkways.

Biopolis has been making impressive connections lately, and actively working itself into the public imagination. Recent news describes a collaborative agreement with Japan's RIKEN (translated as "Institute of Physical and Chemical Research", but these days doing plenty of top biological research).

Biopolis goes into the RIKEN collaboration with an interest to expand its biomedical research focus beyond infectious disease to cancer drug development. The collaboration will focus on the exchange of ideas as well as training programs that will send Singapore's burgeoning supply of enthusiastic trainee scientists to Japan.

Biopolis

RIKEN

Reporting research news

2006-04-22T10:18:00.000+02:00

In journalism one must report Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How. Journalists have methods to obtain this information, and I am interested in tailoring these methods to reporting research news.

A typical reader of research news expects high quality background information surrounding the news. This information gives the reader a crash course on scientific aspects of the news topic.

This raises the reporting challenge. The journalist must describe what, why and how in depth, but can not hope to have first hand knowledge in all cases.

The journalist therefore needs a way to capture expert knowledge to include as background. I'm interested in refining methods of capturing expert knowledge.

To a professional journalist, the methods will probably end up looking like "good old-fashioned journalism". But please humour me while I find out how to give researchers a good hearing in the Press.

mission statement

2006-04-16T21:56:00.000+02:00

I am interested in research and how it can be fostered. Virtually all
kinds of research interest me and I believe research should be defined
broadly to include any activity that creates knowledge.

Why should research be fostered? It's difficult to fund research,
train people in research methods and to do research.

But worthwhile.

Researchers find things out for us. They gather information with which
to make sound decisions. They discover new things. They refine the
methods that make these discoveries possible. If we lost our
researchers we would make less informed decisions, fail to discover
new things and would lack the tools to train new people to replace
them.

My aim is to raise awareness of research efforts and fuel debate about
how these efforts can be refined and improved.