Forensic science offers great potential, as it draws on almost every discipline and, in doing so, creates widespread opportunity for innovation.
Mark Walport
Science is not finished until it is communicated.
I am honoured to be appointed as the first chief executive of UKRI. My ambition is to make UKRI the world's leading research and innovation public funding agency.
We're learning how infections are travelling around the world and, sadly, how cholera in Haiti was brought in by U.N. peacekeeping forces from south Asia.
When the correct tests are done, GM products are as safe as their non-GM counterparts.
Of course methane is a fossil fuel, but as long as it is burned efficiently and fugitive emissions of methane gas are minimised, it is a less harmful fossil fuel than coal and oil and is an important way-station on the global journey towards low-carbon energy.
Banks and credit agencies learn continuously about the purchases we make. This is convenient and diminishes the risk of theft. It also means that banks can know more about our lifestyle than our close relatives.
As a medical student in the 1970s, I was taught that the foundations of diagnosis and treatment were to take a detailed history and to perform a comprehensive clinical examination.
Public trust is a vital condition for artificial intelligence to be used productively.
I think publishing is a cost of research in the same way as buying a centrifuge is a cost of research.
One has to understand the functioning of the normal brain before studying the badly malfunctioning brain.
We may know the chemical structure of medicinal drugs, but we frequently have a very incomplete understanding of how they work.
Industrialisation, mass transit, and the Internet are technological revolutions that have reshaped lives, nations, and the planet.
Common sense, proportionality, and judgment are the skills we must seek in those we choose to regulate our lives.
Forensic techniques are enormously useful in a wide range of fields outside the criminal justice system.
It would be silly not to admit that there are some sections of the public who are unconvinced by the benefits or have doubts about the motives behind it. We have to be clear that GM is not all about profits for multinational companies.
Many families would like to avoid burdening future generations with inherited diseases such as haemophilia or severe developmental disorders. But most would think it wrong to edit the genes that influence the 'normal' range of human variation, from eye colour to intelligence or athletic ability.
Sharing data allows us to research, communicate, consume media, buy and sell, play games, and more. In return, businesses develop products, scientists undertake research, and governments use data to enable voting, inform policies, collect tax, and provide better public services.
Henry Wellcome certainly was a talented character with a colorful and amazing personal story.
We are extraordinarily lucky in the U.K. to have inherited a diverse range of cities that bear the imprints of many centuries of human habitation.
The Wellcome Trust will retain a level of financial flexibility which will enable us to react quickly to unexpected developments and new ideas.
When governments work well, they safeguard citizens' health, well-being, resilience and security, and they increase prosperity. To do this, they must respond effectively to the new, the unexpected, and the game-changing.
Like Israel, the U.K. is a democracy, and like Israel, we would never want to muzzle political voices, whatever their opinions - and that is especially true for universities.
Distributed ledgers are inherently harder to attack because instead of a single database, there are multiple shared copies of the same database, so a cyber stack would have to attack all the copies simultaneously to be successful.
We pretend that the debate about genetically modified crops is a debate about science when the reality is, actually, that the science is very clear. It is really a debate about values.
The question is, are there useful things that we can do with the results of a genome sequence that would bring benefit? And the answer is, today, should the majority of people go and have their genome sequenced? Probably not. But are there particular circumstances in which genome sequencing is really helpful? Yes, there are.
My job is to advise politicians, elected officials, and government ministries of the best way to deal with important issues, both localized, national, and the grand challenges facing humanity.
In medicine, there is always a balance between risk and benefit.
People go on exploration; they're trying to find places that weren't known before. But it is an inevitable fact of research, as is in any other form of exploration of the unknown, that some people find they go down a dead end.
I look forward to working closely with the Research Councils, Innovate UK, and Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), as we work together to create UKRI. I also look forward to working closely with all of our research and innovation communities to provide a strong and coherent voice for U.K. science and innovation.
Science, engineering, and technology have transformed the infrastructure of the modern world and have a vital role to play at the heart of policy making.
It seems paradoxical that, as medical scientists make huge advances in discovering the mechanisms of common diseases, fewer and fewer innovative drugs are reaching the market.
We all want our drugs to be safe - and so an essential part of the pathway to the development of a new drug is approval by a regulator.
The principle of treating cancer is to kill the abnormally dividing cells. Many drugs achieve this in a relatively unselective way, killing any cell that is dividing.
There is a particular set of values commonly associated with being professional. Experience, expertise, trustworthiness, wisdom, and good judgement are all attributes aspired to by senior professional people, be they doctors, engineers, lawyers, civil servants, or the clergy.
A computer, by definition, cannot be held accountable for anything because there is no mechanism to hold it to account, short of turning off the electricity supply or destroying the hardware. Only humans can be accountable.
New technology creates a new marketplace of words, creating totally new words and changing the meaning and application of existing ones. In doing so, it has a potent opportunity to create new misconceptions and confusion.
Science, engineering, and technology discovers and invents new ways of doing things - but it doesn't dictate how we should do them.
The best approach to risk is to identify and manage it.
People have extreme beliefs about whether it is right for humans to tamper with embryos in any way at all. Sometimes the values discussion gets conflated with the science discussion. We shouldn't pretend we're having an argument about science when we're having an argument about values.
I've never been a proponent of something monolithic.
If you look at U.K. science, we collaborate with people across the whole world, and it's extremely important we continue to do so in the future.
If you look at my track record as government chief scientific advisor, I've always recognized that all of the sciences are important to all of research, and we need a balance.
It's been an enormous privilege to be the government chief scientific adviser.
As medical data has such power to deliver better understanding of disease and better patient outcomes, it is important we find the best way of sharing it.
Research must be central to healthcare if healthcare is to improve.
It is a fiction to imagine that the haphazard paper chits of old are more private than the modern digital alternative. Paper records have always presented a security risk.
Cities are central to the shaping and delivery of national policy objectives, and in return, they are the places where social, environmental, and economic policies play out in practice.
An important task for government is to think about the future as well as to learn from the past, and the Foresight Programme, run by the Government Office for Science, helps in the development of this thinking.
Living in areas with a high population density does not need to be synonymous with overcrowding. Manhattan has an extremely dense population and is considered by many to be a highly desirable place to live.
