Bob Geldof | O'Really?

July 25, 2008

How to spend a £400 million Science budget

Filed under: biotech,funding,politics — Duncan Hull @ 11:45 am
Tags: Alan Sugar, bbsrc, bioinformatics, biotech, Bob Geldof, cheminformatics, DIUS, DNA mania, Douglas Kell, fantasy, fellowship, Gordon Brown, Ian Pearson, John Denham, NIH, OBO, Open Access, Peter Suber, PubMedCentral, sciblog, Science, Stevan Harnad, systems biology, The Apprentice, thought experiment

A thought experiment with lots of money

The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) is the United Kingdom’s funding agency for academic research and training in the non-clinical life sciences. It supports a total of around 1600 scientists and 2000 research students in universities and institutes in the UK. The head of our laboratory, Douglas Kell, has recently been appointed Chief Executive of the BBSRC [1]. Congratulations Doug, we wish you the very best in your new job. Now, according to bbsrc.ac.uk, their annual budget is a cool £400 million (just short of $800 million or €500 million). This has left me wondering, how would you spend a £400 million Science budget for the life sciences? For the purposes of this article, imagine it was you that had been put in charge of said budget, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown (texture like sun) had given you, yes YOU, a big bag of cash to distribute as you see fit. A mouth-watering prospect, I think you’ll agree. Here, is my personal opinion of how, in my dreams, I would spend the money. (more…)

Comments (9)

April 13, 2007

Collaboration, collaboration, collaboration!

Filed under: Uncategorized — Duncan Hull @ 10:05 pm
Tags: bioinformatics, Bob Geldof, careers, collaboration, collaboratory, Phil Bourne, PNAS, publish or perish, Ten Simple Rules, tony blair

What should your three main priorities be as a Scientist? Collaboration, collaboration, collaboration. Quentin Vicens and Phil Bourne have just published Ten Simple Rules for a Successful Collaboration [1] to help you do just that, as part of a continuing series [2,3,4,5].

Tony Bliar once said “Ask me my three main priorities for government, and I tell you: education, education, education.” In Science, its not so much about education as collaboration, collaboration, collaboration. The advice in Ten Simple Rules is all useful stuff, but what caught my eye is the fact that collaboration is on the rise, at least according to the number of co-authors on papers published in PNAS. The average number of co-authors has risen from 3.9 in 1981 to 8.4 in 2001. So before you publish or perish, it seems likely that you’ll also need to collaborate or commiserate… less laboratory, more collaboratory!

Photo credit Garret Keogh

References

Quentin Vicens and Phillip Bourne (2007) Ten Simple Rules for a Successful Collaboration PLOS Computational Biology
Phillip Bourne (2006) Ten Simple Rules for Getting Published PLOS Computational Biology
Philip Bourne and Iddo Friedberg (2006) Ten Simple Rules for Selecting a Postdoctoral Position PLOS Computational Biology
Phillip Bourne and Leo Chalupa (2006) Ten Simple Rules for Getting Grants PLOS Computational Biology
Phillip Bourne and Alon Korngreen (2006) Ten Simple Rules for Reviewers PLOS Computational Biology
This post originally published on nodalpoint with comments

This work is licensed under a

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Comments (1)

O'Really?