SCI has a unique remit and is incredibly influential, and even after 144 years it still has plenty of work left to do, members heard at the society’s annual general meeting (AGM).
The AGM, held at SCI’s headquarters, heard from Greg Clark, chair of the Society’s Board of Trustees, who described SCI as an organisation in “tip top form and going from strength to strength.”
Clark told members that SCI functions as well as it does because it has a clear purpose: to accelerate science out of the lab into industry for the benefit of society. He described this as a unique remit and one particularly valuable at the moment when there is so much interest on the connection between science and industry.
He noted that SCI’s membership continues to grow and said: “It is pretty unusual to see the trajectory that we are enjoying, and that’s a good reflection of both the purpose and the execution of the work that’s done here.” SCI’s membership invests around $25 billion in research and development every year, he said.
“We are interdisciplinary; we were founded as a meeting point for different disciplines by our predecessors and we practice that with even greater enthusiasm now, in a world that is increasingly interdisciplinary when it comes to discovery,” he said.
Among highlights for the year Clark noted the launch of the new SCI Sustainability journal. He also told the audience that SCI had hosted 54 events at its headquarters attended by 3,700 delegates with subjects ranging across themes including health and wellbeing, climate and planet and sustainability. In addition, SCItalk, an online series of talks, have featured a collection of three talks on artificial intelligence and another set of three on developments in dementia science. Over 3,000 articles were published across SCI’s journals over the year, with five million downloads, he added, while the Society also awarded 118 scholarships, prizes and other awards.
Clark also pointed to the work that SCI had done in support of a new industrial strategy for the UK, a policy which the government is now in the process of rolling out.
“For the last three years the society has been one, if not the leading, advocate for a serious industrial policy to be adopted in this country. We have been, as a society, incredibly influential,” he said. The hope is that a new industrial strategy will help to boost economic and scientific opportunities, and help with attracting large scale investment - and improving the position of the UK as a destination for investment.
“It’s a pretty challenging environment here and around the world at the moment, so I don’t think our work is done on this. I hope you will encourage us to continue to press on that,” Clark told the SCI members in attendance.
Helping science-based companies to scale-up and find the skilled staff they need with be a continuing focus for SCI, he said.
“There’s no point getting new investment, no point translating discoveries into application, no point scaling up businesses and getting them the finance if they can’t lay their hands the workers from every level, from technicians to post-docs,” he said.
“That will be an important theme – it has been this year and will be in future as well,” he said.
Sharon Todd, SCI’s CEO said as well as the launch of the SCI Sustainability journal, the last year has seen the launch of SCI’s Strategic Sustainability Group, plus work on further developing the College of Scholars.
“The strength of the network continues to grow and it’s been a real delight to have a many companies come on board to work with us,” she said.
Todd highlighted Flue2Chem, a two-year, £4.4 million project aiming to create sustainable materials from flue gas CO2. This brought together 17 organisations including SCI, and ranging from multinational corporations to emerging start-ups and universities, to develop innovative chemistry to convert CO2 emissions captured from papermills into the chemicals which are key to the manufacture of detergents and cleaning agents.
About 5% of all extracted carbon from fossil sources is currently used to create materials, Todd said, describing Flue2Chem as a great example of industry-on-industry collaboration.
“This is a practical, on-commercial-scale project and what I think is quite fascinating is that it has been developing new chemistries in parallel with different companies,” she said, noting that this collaboration model could apply in other areas such as life sciences and materials.
More broadly Todd said that part of the purpose of SCI is raising the importance of the science and innovation ecosystem for society.
“We believe that universities, startups, large companies, government, funders, patent attorneys are all part of the ecosystem and the ecosystem needs to work effectively. And in our particular case, in the UK, we have significant value leakage out of the UK because this system isn’t working effectively at the moment,” she said.
Research commissioned by SCI had found a gradual but accelerating decline in competitiveness in the UK landscape for life sciences companies. “We feel the development and commercialisation of science is a complex area and there isn’t a voice out there talking about it. We have an expert community that can talk to these things,” she said.
SCI chairman Paul Drechsler said that there is still a way to go to convert the UK’s brilliant science into world scale companies. “That needs to change and an important way to do it is to get people to understand the potential,” he said, describing SCI’s “magic ingredient” as its ability to create a place a network for collaboration, through events, online and internationally.
“I’m more convinced than ever that science, and science in the UK, has a fantastic contribution to make not just to the future of our economy but the future of society, as the means to solve many of the world’s problems,” he said.
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