{"id":7700,"date":"2017-12-18T15:31:12","date_gmt":"2017-12-18T15:31:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sustainableagriculturewaitrose.org\/?p=7700"},"modified":"2017-12-18T15:31:12","modified_gmt":"2017-12-18T15:31:12","slug":"agriculture-needs-a-champion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sustainable-agriculture\/2017\/12\/18\/agriculture-needs-a-champion\/","title":{"rendered":"Agriculture needs a champion"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Research investment in the life sciences has focused too much on medicine and biomedicine at the expense of agriculture and biotechnology more generally, acknowledges Sir Paul Nurse<\/a>, Chief Executive & Director of the Francis Crick Institute<\/a>, a biomedical research centre in London.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne has only to take a short trip in this country to see how important agriculture is,\u201d said Nurse, speaking today at Rothamsted Research<\/a> after he had delivered a\u00a0livestreamed talk on \u201cScience as Revolution\u201d<\/a>, introduced by the institute’s chief Achim Dobermann\u00a0in a crowded conference centre.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey don\u2019t realise how much science is contributing to that, and how much science will contribute in the future,\u201d he noted. \u201cThere is a real need to get that message across\u2026What\u2019s required is a champion for agricultural bioscience to get it on the agenda.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nurse sees the government\u2019s new Industrial Strategy,\u00a0announced last month by Greg Clark, Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industry Strategy<\/a>, as a boon for science and a route to greater appreciation of agriculture\u2019s role.<\/p>\n

Clark has \u201conly just become aware of the issue, because the life sciences have been dominated by biomedicine,\u201d said Nurse. \u201cI think one is now pushing at a door that is opening.\u201d But beware of moving too fast to translation of ideas into products before understanding the science, he said.<\/p>\n

Nurse, a Nobel laureate since 2001 for his work on the cell cycle and President of the Royal Society<\/a> from 2010-2015, used his talk to students, staff and visitors at Rothamsted Conference Centre to argue that \u201cscience is truly the most long-lasting revolutionary activity known to humankind\u201d.<\/p>\n

He spoke about the need to avoid burdening students with too many facts, when there is little to be gained. \u201cWe need to turn biology back to the principles behind biology, and to the excitement of biological discovery\u2026 it\u2019s almost biological discovery plus the ability to Google.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nurse hinted that he has been pondering the next steps for biology. He first drew a parallel with physics, describing how, if you leaf through a book on relativity, it\u2019s just about possible to convince yourself that you have a rough idea of the ideas.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou sort of understand it. You then close the book and you find that it all drifts away; and it\u2019s slipping away because it\u2019s no longer part of the common-sense world,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd if you now turn to high energy physics and atomic theory, you are in deep trouble.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cModern physics is utterly incomprehensible. It\u2019s a revolutionary shift \u2013 where explanations work beautifully, but they\u2019re not within our normal common-sense understanding.\u201d<\/p>\n

But where physics goes, biology often follows: \u201cAnd I sometimes wonder if the complexity of living organisms and the way they work will also lead to strange and non-intuitive explanations,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t really know what I\u2019m talking about, but I sense that something is there.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the seminar, we recorded a video interview with Nurse (linked here<\/a>) on the role of agriculture in the government\u2019s new Industrial Strategy, announced last month, and on how best to focus policymakers on the importance of food production and food security.<\/em><\/p>\n

Article source\/image credit: Rothamsted Research<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Research investment in the life sciences has focused too much on medicine and biomedicine at the expense of agriculture and biotechnology more generally, acknowledges Sir Paul Nurse, Chief Executive & Director of the Francis Crick Institute, a biomedical research centre in London. \u201cOne has only to take a short trip in this country to see […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":381,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[33,261,469,527,1004,1045,1051,1059,1081,1297],"class_list":["post-7700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-press-release","tag-agriculture","tag-conference","tag-francis-crick-institute","tag-greg-clark","tag-rothamsted-research","tag-secretary-of-state-for-business-energy-and-industry-strategy","tag-seminar","tag-sir-paul-nurse","tag-speech","tag-youtube"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sustainable-agriculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sustainable-agriculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sustainable-agriculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sustainable-agriculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/381"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sustainable-agriculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sustainable-agriculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7700\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sustainable-agriculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sustainable-agriculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sustainable-agriculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}