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.
— Mark Walport
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.
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.
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.
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.
Industrialisation, mass transit, and the Internet are technological revolutions that have reshaped lives, nations, and the planet.
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.
We may know the chemical structure of medicinal drugs, but we frequently have a very incomplete understanding of how they work.
Common sense, proportionality, and judgment are the skills we must seek in those we choose to regulate our lives.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The best approach to risk is to identify and manage it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Research must be central to healthcare if healthcare is to improve.
It's been an enormous privilege to be the government chief scientific adviser.
I've never been a proponent of something monolithic.
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.
Science, engineering, and technology discovers and invents new ways of doing things - but it doesn't dictate how we should do them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
