S100:
Anything else you would like to say about UK science – for example is it
globally competitive?
CMN:
Oh, absolutely.We lead the way in so many fields associated with
healthcare technologies – just look at imaging and regenerative medicine.
I was recently hugely privileged to chair a selection panel for the EPSRC
Centres for Doctoral Training (a £350M initiative which funded over 70 new
centres) and the quality of the applications and training environments was
breath-taking. If EPSRC had the funding, they could have supported many,
many more centres with no loss in overall quality. Are you listening MrWil-
letts?
S100:
Can we talk about you? Are you still teaching?
CMN:
To the great chagrin of some of my long-term collaborators in the
physical and engineering sciences, I’ve never had a large formal teaching load
– at its height it was about 10 lectures per year.The day I started in the then
Department of Clinical Biochemistry at Newcastle University I was told that
I wouldn’t be teaching medical students.Apparently they had no interest
in how the biochemical parameters they would use to aid in diagnosis and
treatment were measured, they just wanted the numbers. I often wonder
how many misdiagnoses there were when people moved from an environ-
ment which reported results in molar units to one which reported in mass
units.That must have been a shock the first time they saw a glucose result.
Continued...
The Multi-Corder project is a Programme
Grant led by Glasgow University which
proposes to create the world’s first broad
spectrum sensor technology. It is proposed
to create technology to sense the personal
metabolome. EPSRC Programme Grant
(£3.4M, May 2013 - May 2017)
14
Sensor100 November News 2013
