Talking science with the UKRI CEO
Ottoline Leyser talks candidly about lots of stuff happening in the UK and EU
This was on my blog over at Science. So much great stuff in here.
Ottoline Leyser has not only had an outstanding career in plant biology at the Regius Professor of Botany at the University of Cambridge, but she has been the Chief Executive Officer of UKRI (United Kingdom Research and Innovation) since 2020. Today’s editorial in Science highlights her hopes for UK science, expressed to me in a recent conversation and shown below (lightly edited for clarity).
Holden Thorp: Yep. Okay.
So I think that some readers may not know who you are or what UKRI is, so my first questions are: Tell us about UKRI. How many schools are in it? What part of the government are you in? How did you get this job?
Ottoline Leyser: So UKRI stands for UK Research and Innovation. It's an organization that's now 5 years old, and it was formed by bringing together multiple preexisting organizations. That included seven research councils that were focused on particular disciplines, so things like the Medical Research Council, the Natural Environment Research Council, the Arts and Humanities Research Council. So all of those plus Innovate UK, which is the UK's Innovation Agency, and also an organization called Research England, which funds block grants into English universities working in collaboration with similar bodies in the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
The higher education system in the UK is almost entirely in the public sector. There are a very small number of private universities. All the public universities receive funding for their research activity through two routes. One is through a block grant. The other is through competitive funding that we are all very familiar with involving research grants and so on, which run through our research councils.
So that's who we are. We came together to make one organization, which is actually an extraordinarily exciting opportunity in the 21st century because everybody appreciates that disciplinary boundaries are very fuzzy these days. All kinds of exciting and important things need to happen across disciplines, so we bring together all the disciplines. And of course, it's really important to try and shorten, as far as possible, the pathway from discovery to impact, to adoption, to diffusion, and to creation of value in our economy, in our public services.
And we hope that, by having all the sectors together along with all the disciplines, we'll be able to create that research and innovation ecosystem that really drives progress in as rapid and efficient way as possible.
Holden Thorp: Wonderful.
And are you appointed by the Prime Minister, or how does that work?
Ottoline Leyser: We have multiple appointments across the senior leadership of UK Research and Innovation that are so-called ministerial appointments. I am appointed by the Minister for the department, the Secretary of State, who is the senior Minister in the Department for Science Innovation and Technology.
I don't know whether people noticed a small thing going on globally, but quite a big thing in the UK, which is a reorganization of our governmental departments to create a new department that's focused entirely on science, innovation, and technology. My organization, UKRI, is a so-called arm's-length body of that department. So they sponsor us—our funding from government comes through them.
I report to the Secretary of State on how we are delivering her priorities. I'm an appointment, a ministerial appointment, that goes through a complex public appointments process. But the principles that underpin the public appointment process are free, open, and fair competition. So it's not a political appointment, it's a public appointment.
And I have had five secretaries of states in the time I've been doing this job. Because as you also might have noticed, there have been quite a number of changes in our government over that period of time. My role doesn't change just because the minister who appointed me has changed.
Holden Thorp: So if there's an election in the UK in the next year or two, you'll still be the head of UKRI?
Ottoline Leyser: That's correct.
Holden Thorp: Good. Well, we all want that to be the case.
Ottoline Leyser: Thank you.
Holden Thorp: It's interesting—in the United States, the National Science Foundation director, you probably know this, is appointed by the president. But, it's a hard 5-year term. So if a new president comes, we don't get a new NSF Director right then.
Whereas, with the NIH director, that is a presidential appointment. And as you probably know, we don't have a permanent NIH director right now. We're unlikely to get one because it's now too close to the election.
Ottoline Leyser: I mean, it's overall really an interesting question, the relationship of public funded research and innovation with politics.
On the one hand, it's obviously close and it needs to be close. And we are spending taxpayers money, so of course, our role is to deliver the government's priorities. On the other hand, we all know that research and innovation are very long-term endeavors. A key part of my role is to ensure that the UK's research and innovation system is healthy in 20 years’ time, as well as in 1 year's time.
So balancing the immediate needs and the long-term needs of the country are a key part of what we all have to do in managing the public money that we spend.
Holden Thorp: I certainly agree with that.
So let's just get this out of the way. Horizon Europe and the association are on people's minds. And here's a great opportunity for you to get in the pages of Science what you want to say about that.
Explain how all that works and what happens to the money that would've gone for the association if association can't be achieved.
Ottoline Leyser: There are a number of layers to this issue, some of which are quite nerdy and technical, and some of which are more big picture, what we actually want to achieve.
There is huge consensus in the research and innovation community, right across the UK, that association with Horizon Europe is extraordinarily good value for money and brings all kinds of benefits beyond the straightforward issues of cash flow. There is I think a huge desire to maintain those really close strong collaborations with Europe to be part of the world's biggest research and innovation program and to be able to collaborate and work in a common framework with our European colleagues.
Of course, we also have collaborations with others across the world and huge deep collaborations with the US. We want to make sure that those are also strong and prioritized and that overall, our international portfolio is as we would think.
Nonetheless, as for association with Horizon, arguments of the community that it was excellent value for money were won during the time that we went through the so-called Trade and Cooperation Agreement. That was the agreement we established with Europe as we exited from the European Union.
We signed up to associate, and then that process got tied up with various other elements in the Trade and Cooperation Agreement. The European Union was unwilling to start discussions about association until after the issues around the Northern Ireland Protocol were fixed.
So very recently, the Windsor Agreement was signed, which forged an agreement over the Northern Ireland issue. It allows us to move on in the context of association with Horizon Europe, and to have the conversation directly about association with Horizon Europe, which is a big move forward.
A critical element of this is that we have been outside of that program for more than 2 years now. The government has put into place really well-received schemes that are working very effectively to allow UK participants to bid in to all of the calls, in the same way that they would've been able to were we fully associated. And the European Union has been okay with that, on the grounds that we were waiting for the association agreement to be signed.
There is, for example, almost £1 billion worth of projects that have been successful through the process that the UK Government has funded through us, because the funding can't come from Horizon Europe. So that's effectively a billion pounds that the government has put in to Horizon Europe–type projects while we were waiting to associate.
The critical element of the whole thing now becomes how much money the UK should put in to association because it shouldn't be the same as it would've been right at the beginning. We've already put a billion pounds in through this UK Government scheme, for example.
That will be, I think, the crux of the ongoing discussion from various people's point of view. How much should association now cost? Those kinds of conversations will go on, and we are waiting with hope for the outcomes of those conversations. But it continues to be the case that there are hurdles to cross to get to the point where we can associate. The timing of that is still rather unclear.
The other element that may or may not have hit the news in the US is that there is a major difference in the way that UK government budgets work and European budgets work for Horizon Europe. For Horizon Europe, you put the money in, essentially, upfront and then you get it out over a very long period of time, whereas UK Government budgets are annual budgets.
So we negotiated with the Trade and Cooperation Agreement a staged buy-in with significant chunks of money going in over the first years of the Horizon Program, but it would've come out over a much longer period of time. It's a 7-year program. If you get a 5-year grant in year 7 of the program, you're still receiving money in year 12; whereas, all the money would've gone in during the first few years. On UK Government budgets, it's strict annual budgeting, so if you don't spend it in the year when it's sitting in the budget, it goes back to the Treasury.
Last tax year's component that was set aside to associate with Horizon Europe mostly went back to the Treasury, except for the part that we used to fund programs through that underwrite guarantee. Of course, that's only the elements of those that we paid this year because UK Government funding is annual. So if you win a £1 million grant and it's a 5-year grant, it's £200,000 a year. It's not £1 million in year 1.
All of that kind of slightly nerdy government technical budgetary stuff has been a headache to manage from our point of view. It's an inevitable consequence of wanting to associate and waiting to associate, that the money you've put aside to associate will wind up going in chunks year-on-year back to Treasury for every year that we can't associate. And that's just because you can't have your cake and eat it.
Holden Thorp: Great, that's awesome. Well, we have lots of policy nerds who read Science, who will love hearing all that directly from you.
One last question about that. Was this association any kind of leverage in getting the deal with Northern Ireland? Or was this just some side issue that's only important to scientists?
Ottoline Leyser: That's an interesting question.
The European Union, I think, took the view that they wanted to negotiate the Trade and Cooperation Agreement as a package and there was quite an active campaign by European scientists to try to dissociate association from the Northern Ireland agreement. That, obviously, didn't get anywhere. They stayed linked.
I've been pleasantly surprised in a way by how much wide press interest there's been in the UK’s association to Horizon Europe and I think it signals a much wider, very positive trend of real and deep interest in research and innovation right across the UK system.
One can speculate this is partly due to the importance of research and innovation during the pandemic. It brought science much more centrally into public discourse, which I think is a tremendously positive development; coupled with the fact that research and innovation are a central pillar now for government policy in, really, building the kind of high-productivity innovation-led economy that we absolutely have to restore in order to be able to afford the kind of public services that we're used to.
There's a sort of anchoring triangle that we need to get back to, that can drive a really fantastic positive feedback between those really high-productivity businesses and the high-productivity public services. We have a national health system, obviously the education system, the defense system, all of those things, which are critical public services. If those are more innovative, not only are they more affordable because they're more productive, but also we can use public procurement as a lever to drive high-productivity, high-innovation business growth and success. That's something that's done really well in the US. It happens in the UK, but it really needs a boost.
And then, if you have those really high-quality public services and the high-quality jobs, then you've got to have the highly skilled population who are benefiting from your high-quality public services to be able to fill the high-quality jobs. You've got this kind of golden cycle between the thriving high-skilled people, the thriving high-productivity businesses, and the thriving high-productivity public services.
Investment in research and innovation is the fuel that drives that cycle. It drives the cycle by being a core part of university business that not only delivers new ideas, but also trains the highly skilled people. The new ideas clearly fuel the high-innovation businesses that also invest their private money in research and innovation. And then all of that is also equally true of the public services.
So we need that triangle and we need it to be properly connected. We, therefore, need the way that our research innovation system works to drive those virtuous cycles that really pulls the economy out of what otherwise could easily become a kind of economic debt trap that, I think, Western economies are quite familiar with at the moment.
Holden Thorp: So what's your role in making sure that research happens across the UK and benefits everybody?
Ottoline Leyser: You are absolutely right that the Golden Triangle, which is Oxford, Cambridge, and London, has a huge concentration of universities, of researchers, and of headquarters for companies and therefore of research and innovation investment. There is a tremendous interest in trying to spread that across the country for a whole variety of reasons. Not least, if you think about the whole issue of productivity, that's also incredibly unevenly distributed across the country, and it's extraordinarily important for local communities and economies that high-productivity opportunity is everywhere. Obviously, there are areas of tremendous strength in particular industries, particular subjects in universities as well, right across the country. It is by no means the case that the Golden Triangle is where the good stuff is—it's everywhere. It's a question really of driving up capacity.
So for example, we run an awful lot of funding competitions all year round through all of those parts of our organization I mentioned at the beginning. The success rates for those are essentially flat across the country. It doesn't give you a higher percentage of success to be in the Golden Triangle, it's just that we get way more bids in from those regions than from outside. So there's an important role in capacity building.
This is partly where the fact that all our universities are public becomes useful, because one can think about universities, the role they can play, locally in particular places as anchor institutions to drive that high-productivity growth, both because of the research and innovation expertise that they anchor in that place, but also in their skills role. They build the skills space in those places, amongst the PhD students and so on. But also, if you think about all the technical staff and wider professional staff that you need to run a high-quality research innovation program, the university can really be a driver for anchoring people with those skill sets in particular places. So through the direct investment into universities, in that flexible funding pot, for example, it's possible to think about how you can really expand the centers of excellence in particular topics right around the country, aligned with innovation investment.
There have been a number of programs looking at doing exactly that. The so-called Strength in Places Fund that tries to build partnerships between universities, local government, and local industry, that's been very successful. And more recently, there's been a so-called Innovation Accelerator pilots that have put, again, blocks of money into places for them to prioritize in the context of local need to drive that connection between the higher education institutions and local industries. I think this is something that is a really interesting area: how we can use R&D investment as one part of a much broader package of measures to drive that agenda, which in the UK, is called leveling up. The idea is to bring the level of investment and prosperity up, right across the country, to the same level that it is in some of the more prosperous parts of the UK.
Holden Thorp: Wonderful. So tell me about some science that you're excited about. There's a lot of bureaucracy in a job like this. But hopefully, the fun part is getting to see some of the exciting things that happen.
Ottoline Leyser: Absolutely. There's an infinite number of things, and one of the joys of this job is getting to go around the country, around the world, indeed, seeing the things that we invest in. There’s a huge variety of really interesting things, and it's the things that I've never even thought about before that I'm finding particularly fascinating. I was in the northeast fairly recently at the Center for Process Innovation, which is Catapult Center. It's absolutely one of these organizations that connects local university expertise with local business expertise. They're particularly interested in formulation of medicines and do a huge amount of work on how you reliably make pharmaceutical tablets that have the right amount of the active ingredient in each one. That's obviously very crucial, and I'd never thought about that before.
There’s a huge amount of really interesting work on how you bring the components together in a way that properly mixes stuff like that.
I was even more recently in Leeds, at a center we fund in sustainable fashion, where they had 3D weaving. You essentially weave a pair of trousers on one loom, with separate legs and all the rest of it, which saves on a lot of fabric waste and time in sewing all the bits together and so on.
And just an infinite array of really cool things that you get to see a long way away from the science I started with, which was all about biological systems, developmental biology, and how plants decide how to invest their resources, which I'm still fascinated by. But it's been an absolute joy to see the extraordinary breadth of different things that are really changing the way the world works, I suppose.
I could mention one thing, which links back to the work I did. Many years ago, I was involved in a whole range of discoveries, a number of us were, aimed at understanding how a plant hormone auxin works. It's a central regulator of plant growth and development, and it turned out to work through a very different perception system than was typically thought about. It works as a kind of molecular glue that sticks together components of the protein degradation machinery with a target for degradation, which in the case of auxin, is a transcription factor. So it brings this transcription factor to the degradation machinery, and the transcription factor is degraded, and as a result, it's an inhibitor of transcription, various genes get switched on.
That glue mechanism was a relatively underexplored mechanism. A few weeks ago I was in Dundee. There is an entire institute that is open now that uses that in new drug discovery. So the entire model for it is, you design small molecules that bring targets like misfolded proteins in dementias to the endogenous protein degradation machinery in those cells. It was just amazing to see that concept completely repurposed in a different situation to do something amazing and completely different. That kind of science.
Holden Thorp: The regulation of protein degradation is something we're seeing a lot of.
Ottoline Leyser: Plants absolutely love it as a mechanism, really. It's everywhere, so it's exciting.
Holden Thorp: Speaking of all that, you're an outstanding researcher. You've done lots of great science. Your students are all over the place, changing the world. Is your lab still going?
Ottoline Leyser: Oh, I have one very wonderful PhD student left. I moved into this job two and a half years ago, reasonably suddenly, and I was running a group, it's a wonderful group. I haven't taken on anybody new, and people have gradually moved on to their next step. I have one very wonderful PhD student left who keeps me sane when I'm tearing my hair out, which sometimes, one needs with this job. I just had a wonderful conversation with her about the latest thing she's found on branching control in plants, which is what I've done for many years. It's very uplifting.
Holden Thorp: But after that, that'll be it?
Ottoline Leyser: Well, I'm very much enjoying this now and not really knowing what will happen next. I'm open to all possibilities, including going back to my research, which I love and I miss badly.
Holden Thorp: Right, but you're not planning to be the head of UKRI and run a big group at the same time.
Ottoline Leyser: Oh, that's not possible. If I thought my job was busy before, I was wrong. This is busy.
Holden Thorp: Well, there are a lot of people who try to do a job like yours and run a big group at the same time, and when I became a dean, I made the same decision that you have. I would say, sometimes when we see things go wrong with research, often it's because some people are trying to do a job like this and run their group at the same time. I came to the same conclusion that you did—that you can't give your students what they deserve if you could be called off to Downing Street for a meeting at any moment.
Ottoline Leyser: My feeling was that neither this job nor my lab would get what they deserve if I tried to do both.
Holden Thorp: Well, thank you for being willing to do this for the UK and for science. It's certainly a comfort to all of us knowing you're there. Do you have anything else you want to add for our readers before we sign off?
Ottoline Leyser: No, I don't think so. I do think this is an extraordinary time globally for research and innovation. The possibilities are so huge, and capturing those for the benefit of people around the world, I think is critical. We have to do it carefully because of course, all of that power also has negative uses that we need to be sure we're mitigating.
Holden Thorp: Right on. Well, that's perfect. Well, Ottoline, thanks for doing this for us.
Leyser writes...
"I don't know whether people noticed a small thing going on globally, but quite a big thing in the UK, which is a reorganization of our governmental departments to create a new department that's focused entirely on science, innovation, and technology."
I'd be interested to learn which part of this new department is focused on learning how to manage the pace of science and innovation. Where to speed up, where to slow down, where to say no to some research, etc.
Are science and government elites in the UK interested in learning how to manage the pace at which the knowledge explosion unfolds? Or is the mindset more "do as much as budgets will allow as fast as possible"?
Thanks.