Publicly backed R&D in Science Vale UK boosts economic performance

9th August 2010

On 9 July David Willetts, the new science minister highlighted the importance of science in tough economic circumstances and specifically mentioned the Culham Science Centre and Harwell Campus, both of which are located within Science Vale UK.

In a keynote speech at the Royal Institution, Mr Willetts talked of the importance of science and technology as a driving force for rebalancing the economy. He said:

“This Government wants science to emerge from this period to be strong, sustainable and effective. Vince Cable and George Osborne both understand the key role of science, technology and innovation in rebalancing the economy.
 
I am an optimist about science’s capacity to do this, because the deep forces driving its growth and popularity are as powerful as ever. A very important stimulus for scientific advance is, quite simply, technology. We talk of scientific discovery enabling technical advance, but the process is much more inter-dependent than that. For example, imaging technology is driven by the demands of astronomers, and then enables those same astronomers to make new discoveries. It’s because of this process that we’ve been able to view this week those awe-inspiring images of the oldest light in the cosmos, gathered by the Planck space telescope. Meanwhile it allows medical imaging to advance along the way, almost as a by-product of our age old desire to look into the heavens.

That is why one of my ambitions is to try to ensure that the exciting intellectual advance of nuclear fusion – we are world leaders at Culham – also drives British technological and industrial development.

I’m a firm believer in clusters – best defined as a low-risk environment for high-risk activity

First, it makes sense for government to back shared facilities – research platforms if you like – which private companies could not develop on their own. So I’m delighted that a state-of-the-art laboratory is opening today at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire. The new £26million lab is next to the Diamond Light Source, the ISIS neutron source and the Central Laser Facility. It will allow researchers to work side-by-side with beam line experts in fields ranging from drug development to novel materials. (They might even find that the most important room on the site is the coffee bar, as at the Hauser forum in Cambridge.) To date, experimentation at Diamond alone has helped firms like Rolls Royce to apply synchrotron techniques for aerospace and energy applications; Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline on drug discovery and development; Johnson Matthey on improved emissions control catalysts. This is how publicly backed R&D boosts economic performance – one OECD study found that a 1 per cent increase in public R&D increased overall productivity by 0.17 per cent.”