Category: Funding

Posted on

The great Gatsby teaching resource

The Gatsby Charitable Foundation, which funds plant science research in the UK, established Gatsby Plants as a National Teaching Facility for Plant Sciences 4 years ago. The project has received continued funding until 2011.

Gatsby Plants aims to enthuse undergraduate students to study plant science further through two initiatives which expose them to the exciting developments in plant science and the scientists leading this research. These are:

  • an annual Summer School for high-achieving 1st year undergraduate students from UK Universities
  • a Teaching Resource providing plant science lecturers with access to novel and inspiring teaching material

Very worthy. I’ve been having a look at the teaching materials in particular. You need to register to get access.

The majority of materials have been kindly contributed by members of the plant science research community (see Terms of Use for how to credit their efforts). Gatsby Plants has also negotiated access to material from some commercial organisations and is actively involved in generating novel content.

There’s a number of lectures with definite agrobiodiversity interest, for example one by Prof. Peter Beyer, University of Freiburg, Germany on “Golden Rice on a Mission” and another from Dr Peter Craufurd on “Crop Science for Development: A Journey from the Laboratory to Farmers’ Fields in the Tropics.” And another: Prof. Monique Simmonds of Kew entitled “Plants in our Lives: from Beauty to Death.” You get a video of the lecturer delivering the talk, with accompanying slides. If you want your students to view the lecture you contact Gatsby Plants and they send you a username and password which allows access to a URL.

You also get practicals (there’s one on pea genetics), images and movies.

I would imagine they could be very useful to trainers, although I must say it would have been nice to be able to also download the presentation and adapt it to one’s particular situation and audience. Anyone out there with training resources on agricultural biodiversity to share? How about on CWRs, for example?

Posted on

Excellent acronym

From a press release:

The National Science Foundation (NSF) today announced a nearly $50 million partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support innovative, solutions to critical agricultural challenges in developing countries. Each organization will provide $24 million over five years to support a competitive awards program for science research projects that address drought, pests, disease and other serious problems facing small farmers and their families who rely on their crops for their food and income.

The award program will be called BREAD–Basic Research to Enable Agricultural Development–and will support a competitive award program for science research projects that develop innovative approaches and technologies to boost agricultural productivity in developing countries.

I wonder whether agricultural biodiversity will get a look in, or will all the innovation be of the silver bullet sort?

Posted on

Zoos in trouble

The financial mess is wreaking havoc with the funding of zoos in the US. Conservation of globally important fauna, you say?

When you’re the mayor of Philadelphia or governor of New York or Minnesota House minority leader, and you’re trying to keep libraries open and children insured and state troopers paid, the preservation of, say, South African’s Humboldt penguin can seem a little less pressing.

Entertainment and education?

…the first is a no-brainer for financial paring, and the second has already been pruned through the elimination of after-school programs and cuts to state college budgets, among others. In this way, the multiple purposes of zoos — a trifecta once highly valued — have today made the institutions a target on government balance sheets.

Are botanical gardens in the same boat? And are genebanks next?

Posted on

Nibbles: Conference, Funding, Borlaug, Bananas, Indian genebanks, Cassava cooking, Bees, Beer

Posted on

The Bioscience Behind Secure Harvests ignores conservation

The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) invests £78m (€80m) in plant and crop research at universities and institutes across the UK, sometimes in the form of international partnerships. They have a pamphlet out called The Bioscience Behind Secure Harvests, highlighting “key BBSRC-supported research into achieving global food security.” There’s a lot on breeding, in particular as a way of adapting to climate change, and a section on “Harnessing natural diversity.” ((Actually that turns out to be mainly about Arabidopsis.)) There are even a couple of — albeit brief — references to the use of wild relatives in wheat breeding. But nothing at all on the conservation side of things. I guess the BBSRC figures that funding the long-term availability of the raw materials of all this breeding it is supporting is someone else’s problem.