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.
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 may know the chemical structure of medicinal drugs, but we frequently have a very incomplete understanding of how they work.
In medicine, there is always a balance between risk and benefit.
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.
Industrialisation, mass transit, and the Internet are technological revolutions that have reshaped lives, nations, and the planet.
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.
