Image: NTNU [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Flickr
UK Research and Innovation chief executive says research will help build back greener economy
Science will have a “central” role in helping the UK economy recover after the Covid-19 pandemic, the new chief executive of UK Research and Innovation has told the BBC.
Prior to this interview—in an exclusive opinion piece for Research Professional News—Ottoline Leyser stated that research and innovation “can be a cornerstone in rebuilding a stronger economy and a more cohesive society”.
Leyser, former director of the Sainsbury Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, who replaced Mark Walport in June, has now described the pandemic as an “extraordinary moment in history” which had created a “major shock to our economy”.
“Not only has science been important in how we navigate the coronavirus crisis, but research and innovation more broadly will be central in how we manage to build back better,” the plant geneticist told BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme on 11 August. “I’m really excited at the opportunity of joining UKRI to contribute to the idea that we can build back a greener and more inclusive economy.”
However, she added: “One of the problems we’ve had with the idea of science is as this thing that goes on behind closed doors in shiny labs. It’s created an image for science as a sort of magic solution-generating machine that tells you the answer and that’s just not how science works.”
Meanwhile, in a separate interview with Times Higher Education, Leyser said she had built up “a well of frustrations” about a number of things the research sector could do better.
In particular, she criticised the image of the researcher “as a kind of Einstein figure beavering away by themselves in a shiny lab or a dusty library, doing brilliant things and that individual comes up with a silver bullet that they fire out in the world and it solves society’s problems”.
“It is not good for research and does not create a healthy system to work in,” she said, adding she was “very keen on shifting our incentive system to value a much wider range of truly excellent contributions”.
Read Leyser’s recent op-ed in Research Professional News here.