Gluckman: 250 years of UKNZ scientific engagement

OFFICE OF THE PRIME MINISTER’S SCIENCE ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Professor Sir Peter Gluckman, KNZM FRSNZ FMedSci FRS

Chief Science Advisor

From Endeavour to opportunity: 250 years of UKNZ scientific engagement, and the opportunities ahead

Address by Professor Sir Peter Gluckman, Chief Science Advisor to the Prime Minister, at the New Zealand High Commission in London

22 June 2010

Tomorrow her Majesty the Queen will attend a special convocation to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the founding of the world’s oldest, most prestigious and most influential scientific academy – the Royal Society. And it is fitting that New Zealand should play a role in those celebrations.

For James Cook’s rediscovery of New Zealand 241 years ago involved the Royal Society. The Endeavour’s voyage was partially scientific, sponsored by the Royal Society to study the transit of Venus from Tahiti. Cook loved punning when naming geographical features and so while some historians claim that the name he gave to Tahiti, that is the Society Islands, relates to the clustering of the islands, others suspect he was also paying homage to the Royal Society.

The Royal Society nominated one of its fellows to join the Endeavour as a naturalist, and on 6th October 1769 Joseph Banks became the first Fellow of the Royal Society to set foot on Aotearoa. He was to go on to become the longest serving President of the Royal Society, and some 6 years later James Cook himself was elected a Fellow.

Charles Darwin himself, soon to become a Fellow, visited New Zealand in December 1835, but he was perhaps rather grumpy and wanted to get home – it was his last Christmas away from England. He stayed in the Bay of Islands as the guest of the missionary William Williams. As he left New Zealand on the 30th of December 1835 he wrote in his journal “I believe we were all glad to leave New Zealand. It is not a pleasant place. Neither is the country itself attractive”. Perhaps even the great Darwin could get it wrong.

Over the last 240 years roughly 30 Fellows of the Royal Society including Banks and Cook conducted much of their work in New Zealand. Other early Fellows associated with New Zealand included Joseph Hooker, the great botanist and Darwin’s close friend, also to become President of the Society, and Johann von Haast and James Hector, both geologists; those of you who know New Zealand will recognise their names linked to many features of our geography and fauna. Karl Popper and the Nobel laureate John Eccles the neurophysiologist were arguably the most noted of the later foreignborn fellows to do a significant component of their work in New Zealand.

Another 38 Fellows were born in New Zealand although less than 10 have carried out their research there – unfortunately we export scientists as effectively and with as high a quality as the food we export.

The first New Zealandborn Fellow was William Buller, the ornithologist, elected in 1879 and whose book of birds is well known to those interested in New Zealand fauna. Ernest Rutherford was the second, but Rutherford never worked in New Zealand although he was to become President of the Royal Society. Maurice Wilkins, who received the Nobel Prize alongside Watson and Crick, was New Zealand’s second of three Nobel laureates.

There are only three currently active fellows of the Royal Society in New Zealand – Sir Paul Callaghan, Peter Hunter and myself – representing three very different domains of science: nanotechnology, bioengineering, and biomedical science.

By the mid 20th century scientific communication between Britain and its old colony was very broadbrushed – many of our academic staff did their training in the UK and until relatively recently the bulk of our academic staff had had some UKbased scientific experience that they exploited in their ongoing research when they returned to New Zealand. We think that currently more than 30% of New Zealand scientists still have a significant association with a British counterpart and Britain remains the New Zealand science community’s most important partner.

And there were many reasons why it should have developed like that. Common culture, common language (which some would argue we do not have with the United States), common university system and an interdependent history. A number of bilateral funding arrangements existed through the 1980s. For example, at that time the Wellcome Trust was very active in providing stepwise change funding for New Zealand medical research. Indeed, my own career would have gone nowhere, at least in New Zealand, had it not been for a major research award, a bit like a MacArthur Fellowship, from the Wellcome Trust in 1983.

But when the Wellcome Trust withdrew in the 1990s, that was the last of the special schemes that fostered New ZealandUK science relationships. Perhaps it is a little ironic given that Glaxo, which later became Glaxo Wellcome and whose fortunes allowed the Trust to become what it is now, started in New Zealand as a small infant food company and was started by one of my wife’s relatives, but somewhat unwisely he sold out 100 years ago. My life might have been somewhat different.

Now it is only through the EU Framework 7 agreement that funding systems exist to support relationships with New Zealand and that has put it into a very different frame.

New Zealand is only 4 million people and its challenges in undertaking science are very different to those in Britain. Indeed we have even had to ask the question, why do it all? We cannot do everything, we have the challenge of how to take science to scale, especially when our capital markets are so small and our markets so far away, and that is why international partnerships are increasingly important to us. Until very recently, matters intellectual did not sit high on New Zealand’s priority list. As a result we have one of the lowest public and private investments in R&D of any western nation – just 1.2% in total, and about half of that from the public sector.

I have been reflecting on why. Perhaps it is that we saw ourselves as a lucky country, one that could make its way in the world literally on the sheep’s back, forgetting that it was science and technology that allowed us to become the world’s leader in producing pasturederived food that could be transported efficiently, cheaply, and with high taste and texture qualities around the world. We saw ourselves as innovative without a strong research underpinning.

But gradually the realisation has emerged that knowledge is critical to our health as a nation and we are now seeing a very marked change in mindset. The new government elected in late 2008 has put science at the heart of its agenda.

For the first time, science was the subject of a separate budget announcement by the Prime Minister, the post of Chief Science Advisor to the Prime Minister was established, and major structural changes are now occurring in the way the science system operates. Despite fiscal constraint, the science system has received the third largest increase in the last budget, after health and education. A considerable emphasis has gone into how to improve technology transfer – that is, getting knowledge out of the research institutes and universities to make a difference. New schemes for advancing infrastructure and recruiting and retaining world class staff have been funded, although details have yet to be worked through.

The understanding is now clear – science is not a cost to society, rather it is an essential investment in a knowledgebased future. A clear set of principles for setting research priorities has been established and one of those is highly relevant to today’s topic – ”Priority will be given to assisting research partnerships both in scientific research and in accessing science infrastructure in domains where clear advantage can be obtained for New Zealand”.

The reason for that statement is the recognition that we cannot do everything and that science is increasingly international in its approach. We need to get far more strategic in our international science relationships. To that end, the Prime Minister has established an international science coordination committee, cochaired by myself and the Chief Executive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, to ensure clarity in our international science relationships. Science and diplomacy intersect in many ways – much science now relies on formal international partnerships, science can create relationships where none existed before, and science can advance broader objectives in the international arena. Already I am in significant discussions with the new British High Commissioner to New Zealand, who only arrived three weeks ago, as to how we can work together more closely.

The Global Research Alliance on agricultural greenhouse gas emissions reflects this new approach. This initiative, which New Zealand developed and was one of the few positive outcomes of the Copenhagen Climate Conference, has now been signed up to by 30 countries including Britain. Its goal is to coordinate research aimed at reducing the sixth of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions coming from agriculture through coordinated international research partnerships. The Alliance held its first meeting in Wellington in April and New Zealand continues as the interim secretariat; the formal governance relationships were in large part agreed and are expected to be signed off by member nations within a few months and the science has been structured around three major themes – livestock related, arable related and rice related. New Zealand and the Netherlands colead the first. In addition, there are a number of crosscutting themes such as measurement and sequestration. The science groups are now working through a stocktake of current research activities to see where gaps and priorities exist so as to go back to member states for funding future work. Importantly, this work involves both developed and developing world nations and the work to date augurs well for a successful research alliance.

An exciting possibility may emerge in the area of big science. Britain hosts the SKA project development office – the SKA is the proposal to build the biggest radio telescope network, one that will have a baseline thousands of kilometres long and will able to be see back some 11 billion years in time. It will be the hub of amazing new technologies that will affect our everyday lives. The best site technologically is one that runs from Western Australia to New Zealand and we and the Australians are committed to working closely with the UK to advance the case for the development of this project by the international community.

One area where New Zealand and the UK could do much more together in science is in the developing world. New Zealand’s aid programme is understandably focused on the small Pacific States, many of them part of the Commonwealth. But the potential for that aid to have a scientific component is increasingly obvious. Areas such as sustainable energy, protecting biodiversity, improved agricultural systems, maintaining health through the nutritional transition, managing severe undernutrition and science education itself are all areas where we have joint interests and real expertise. Such research could support the aid agenda and involve scientists from the developing world. While our focus is the Pacific, I know of New Zealand funded activity that extends to the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent and Africa where science and aid come together.

But of course the real potential of our engagement is primarily in building off extant scientific relationships, creating new ones and using those to undertake really impactful research exploiting the latent synergies of two nation’s scientists who have a very strong common heritage. The impact could be in terms of new knowledge, a better environment, better societal health or economic enhancement.

I mention extant collaborations because often we tend to focus on the new when building off what has already been established can be very productive. I can only mention a few examples – the relationship that Peter Hunter, our most distinguished bioengineer, has with the University of Oxford has led to really important new ways of modelling the human body with very broad implications for drug design. There are a number of other scientific interactions in the drug space, some of which have already led to commercial exploitation. At the more applied end, the modelling done by Massey University's EpiCentre led by Professor Roger Morris was a central part of the scientific response to the foot and mouth outbreak in the UK in 2001. Another partnership between the Liggins Institute and Robert Winston’s group at Imperial College is exploring quite novel ways of developing science education.

And I cannot help but be selfserving and mention the collaboration between institutions in Southampton – both the University and the MRC Epidemiology Resource Centre – and my research group in Auckland that is applying new ways of using epigenetic information to understand biological development. This collaboration has engendered both large grants and commercial spinoffs and is leading to the formation of an exciting new model of an international centre of research excellence involving Singaporean partners as well.

So where do I think the scientific relationship between Britain and New Zealand will go? If we do nothing specific it will remain random and capricious, largely built on the training, experiences and relationships of individuals in both our countries. If we thought about ways to encourage and assist relationships we could do a lot more. For even in this modern electronically connected world, nothing in science replaces personal interaction.

The question is – why should we? After all, Britain is increasingly looking to Europe. Britain has a large research enterprise whereas New Zealand’s is very small. I would argue that there are many reasons beyond history and emotion. New Zealand has increasingly focused its research effort and in some areas it is truly outstanding. Beyond those areas I have already mentioned there are others —such as food safety, food tracing, biosecurity, evolutionary biology and medicine, biological mathematics, neuroscience and bone research – where New Zealand has something deep to offer. I think it is generally recognised that we have done rather well in the business of technology transfer. I am pleased that the UK HIgh Commission in Wellington has an official, Steve Thompson, devoted to looking for interactive opportunities.

There are many natural synergies, few if any of which have been exploited optimally, that could advance the national interests of both our countries. The challenge is to identify ways to maximise the unique opportunity that 240 years of shared history brings us. In many ways it started with science – let us find ways to renew that vitality.

ENDS

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