Two Fully Funded PhD Opportunities

I received a notice from the Hutton Institute who are offering two fully funded PhD studentships for international students in 2012.  Topics include: plant genetics, plant pathogens, land use, socio-economics, soils and biodiversity.

Full details of the projects offered can be viewed on FindaPhD.com.

Closing date for applications is 13 February 2012.

“The James Hutton Institute recognises and values the expertise, talent and knowledge international students can bring to our research community and the important contribution they make to the development of our scientific excellence and are offering two fully funded PhD studentships to international students for 2012.

PhD opportunities are offered from all our science groups and cover many aspects of our work including plant genetics, plant pathogens, land use, socio-economics, soils and biodiversity. The James Hutton Institute’s International PhD Studentship programme is highly competitive and attracts international students of the highest calibre.”

Food security and the need to educate the public

In the May/June issue of Foreign Policy, Lester Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute writes about The New Geopolitics of Food.

Brown’s launching pad:

Already in 2011, the U.N. Food Price Index has eclipsed its previous all-time global high; as of March it had climbed for eight consecutive months. With this year’s harvest predicted to fall short, with governments in the Middle East and Africa teetering as a result of the price spikes, and with anxious markets sustaining one shock after another, food has quickly become the hidden driver of world politics. And crises like these are going to become increasingly common. The new geopolitics of food looks a whole lot more volatile — and a whole lot more contentious — than it used to. Scarcity is the new norm.

The bottom line?  Consumers in the North will be the last to feel the impact of increasing commodity prices, while – as we know from food riots over the last few years – consumers in the South feel these impacts immediately.  Positioning the acquisition of agricultural land in Africa by countries like China, Saudi Arabia and South Korea, Brown argues persuasively that we have now entered an era in which the food supply, rather than oil, will be the key geopolitical driver of the global economy.

Food Ark (National Geographic, July 2011) addresses a more mainstream audience and approaches the same challenge.  Its tight focus is, however, on the increasing threats to biodiversity and on the key role of seed.

The headline for this comprehensible primer:

A crisis is looming: To feed our growing population, we’ll need to double food production. Yet crop yields aren’t increasing fast enough, and climate change and new diseases threaten the limited varieties we’ve come to depend on for food. Luckily we still have the seeds and breeds to ensure our future food supply—but we must take steps to save them.

What is of note is that both articles address non-scientific audiences and both explain the role of agricultural research, underlining the need for more of it.  As “food security” hits the mainstream, it seems important that consumers understand the issues and the critical role that research plays.  This may be a good time for the ag research community to get involved in further increasing public awareness.  It’s not just about money; an informed press and public can create an environment in which challenges to progress can be more easily navigated.  It’s called public relations.

Post written by Peter Bloch

How to cite e-books

I spotted an item today in which a blogger was pondering how one should cite an e-book, in particular the kind you download to read from a device such as the Kindle (note to fellow book lovers: don’t knock it until you’ve tried it, I was actually pleasantly surprised!)  The post was called “The Future of Footnotes” and it talked about the difficulties of using these non-traditional sources when one needs to cite for academic purposes.

He (Jonathan Rees) said:

“…I think I expected e-books to look something like the screen on Google Books: All the pages are intact, but they’re electronic [however] … at least when using the Kindle for iPad app, there are no page numbers at all. There are these long 4+ digit location numbers, but they don’t precisely match the words on the page and I don’t see any way to use them to locate particular snippets of text. I suspect this is because page numbers would differ depending upon what device you read the e-book on or even at what magnification you set your own device. While this is perfectly fine for reading a novel that you’ll never open again, for historians this ought to pose a problem. How can we tell people where we found what we found?”

There is some help online, and not surprisingly Mr Rees wasn’t alone in his frustration.  The question of page numbers was dealt with on Teleread.com “How do you cite an e-book’s ‘page number’?”

From the teleread.com article :

 “In the follow-up discussion of the article, some readers point out that the Chicago Manual of Style offers a guide to citing e-books:

“If a book is available in more than one format, cite the version you consulted. For books consulted online, list a URL; include an access date only if one is required by your publisher or discipline. If no fixed page numbers are available, you can include a section title or a chapter or other number.”

And it includes an example of a “Kindle edition”. A “location” number would seem to be a perfect example of an “other” number. In fact, it might even be more useful than a page number, because the “location” would be about the same no matter which device you read a Kindle e-book on, whereas a page number only applies to one specific version of the printed book.”

Along with the guide in the quote above there are many  other sites to help with citation such as “How to Cite E-Books” from ehow.com.  And as the Teleread article concluded:

“the academic world does need to come to terms with how to do citation of e-books without page numbering, because e-books are only going to get more popular from here”

Licensing of Modified Virgin Coconut Oil in Malaysia

The National Partners Initiative (NPI) of CAS-IP is publishing 5 working papers from 5 Agricultural Research Institutions in developing countries.  These case studies aim to share country experiences from developing countries in the areas surrounding IP policy making, policy implementation and use of IPRs by researchers for leveraging more benefits to the stakeholders, people, institutions and countries. The results of the five studies have been prepared as five working papers.

The first one from MARDI in Malaysia is entitled: “Pre-Commercialisation and Licensing of Modified Virgin Coconut Oil” written by Guat Hong Teh (CAS-IP) and Rafeah A. Rahman (MARDI).

Commercialisation of publicly-funded research in Malaysia is low. Studies have shown that a complex interaction of policy direction, funding mechanism, innovation structure, diffusion mechanisms and manpower availability is necessary to increase the interaction between public research institutes, universities and the private sector, in order to bring research to market. In this paper, the authors showcase a recently patented product known as modified virgin coconut oil and how the Malaysian Agricultural Research and Development Institute (MARDI) has been able to up-scale its production and licence the technology to two private companies. Factors leading to its success include the newly-launched TechnoFund scheme by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MOSTI); the selection of the right private sector partners and the building of trust and confidence between them; an extremely dedicated and proactive inventor who is business savvy; and the internal MARDI support to research staff for IP management and business development needs.

The paper concludes by looking into further steps that MARDI can take to exploit the potential of this technology, investments that it should continue to make for augmenting its current internal skill sets, and a recommendation to consider the pros and cons of future models of collaboration with the private sector.

The full text can be viewed HERE.

Post written by Karine Malgrand    , Facilitator of the National Partners Initiative for CAS-IP

“ResearchGATE and Its Savvy Use of the Web”

The ResearchGATE site links researchers from around the world and is driving homegrown, locally relevant innovation in developing nations.

You can read the story at:
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/dec2009/id2009127_441475.htm?campaign_id=mag_Dec10&link_position=link35

“When Dr. Kelvin Leshabari was studying in 2008 for his medical degree in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, he felt isolated from medical researchers in the rest of the world.  But then he stumbled upon a U.S.-based Web site, ResearchGATE, that takes the social networking concepts underlying popular services such as Facebook and LinkedIn and applies them to the research community.”

We are familiar with The Honeybee Network, a database of grassroots innovations developed by Indian farmers, but a LinkedIn style network for agricultural researchers represents a quantum leap.

ResearchGATE serves a variety of communities of interest, from law and physics to earth science and economics.  And it serves agricultural research at: https://www.researchgate.net/science/748_Agricultural_science
(Subsets (19) include agronomy, irrigation and horticulture.)

ResearchGATE claims 180,000 subscribers, is free of charge, and offers tools that support collaboration and professional networking.  And there is an associated blog at: http://blog.researchgate.net/masterblog/

The rationale for the site is explained by the founders:

“We have also experienced that research collaboration, the exchange of promising ideas or a cooperative grant application work best if the co-researcher is a trusted and known person. In the best case, he’s a good friend.

“Social scientists have long recognized the importance of boundary-spanning individuals in diffusing knowledge (Allen 1977; Tushman 1977), and recently, several papers have rigorously demonstrated that technological knowledge diffuses primarily through social relations, not through publications.”

Sorenson, Olav and Singh, Jasjit, “Science, Social Networks and Spillovers” (December 26, 2006)”

Post written by Peter Bloch, consultant to CAS-IP

A “new biology” for the world’s most pressing problems

Ref: item on MITnews.  An interview with MIT institute Professor Phillip Sharp who recently called for the US to “build upon recent scientific developments” and work towards solving some of the world’s most pressing problems; food, energy, climate and health.

Victoria Henson-Apollonio Senior Scientist and Manager of CAS-IP, spotted the link and made the following comment:

“Agriculture is likely going to get an influx of “new blood”.  Those scientists that have been working in health are going to be looking for conquering new territories.  We should welcome them with open arms.  We are soon going to be in the fast lane and we’ll make lots of technical progress.  We all need to do a better job of translating this into reducing poverty and improving livelihoods in a sustainable way.”

New ideas for the CAS-IP System Dynamics Modelling team

https://casipblog.wordpress.com/2009/07/29/system-dynamics-conference-2009-and-cas-ip-using-sdm-technique-for-research/

Further to the recent posting about the CAS-IP System Dynamics team participating at the 2009 System Dynamics conference the following is an update from the trip report written by Sebastian Derwisch and Sebastian Poehlmann:

 “For this project we are creating a generic model of the seed value chain in West Africa, depicting every step from variety creation in the research and development sector down to the adoption by smallholder farmers.

In the plenary session Sebastian Derwisch presented a paper he co-authored with Birgit Kopainsky on farmers’ adoption in which they are trying to identify a) how farmers’ adoption differs by country and region, b) which policies are suited to enhance the adoption of improved seed as well as c) the role IP strategies play in this process.

CAS-IP at the System Dynamics conference 2009

The discussion after the presentation dealt mainly with following:
– Matching reference mode – did we validate the structure with empirical data

– Including bottom up approaches; IP policies are perceived to be top down approaches and we need to include justifications to what extend working top down is in fact necessary if we speak of framing conditions like intellectual property right or to what extent executing IPR is also bottom up

– Including the price as a variable – including financing issues of enhanced agricultural inputs more explicitly would increase confidence in the structure as this is the main inhibiting factor for adoption

– How can we simulate the impact of catastrophic events like droughts?

– What about combining policies?

– What are factors that would make farmers that once used commercial seed start using traditional farm saved seed again

–  is availability an issue here? What else?

The other paper Sebastian Derwisch presented was his work on the issue of enhancing investment into the development of new seed varieties. In this parallel session he received comments on the problem of validating the structure with empirical data.  It was also suggested the project could benefit from looking at other agricultural inputs for traditional and commercial seed systems as influencing factors.

From discussions at the presentations it became clear that embedding seed value chain in the larger context of energy prices, other food chains and the productivity and capacity of soils would be another interesting aspect.

We observed the current trends towards web-based simulation and modelling collaboration with great interest and plan to invest some time in developing web simulations in order to better illustrate and communicate the System Dynamics approach e.g. via the CAS-IP blog.”

Intellectual property rights (in Mexico) & maize breeding; a case study

http://unisfera.org/IMG/pdf/Leger_-_IPR_in_Mexico_-_June_2004.pdf
This case study was a link on the WIPO SMEs Newsletter July 2009.  It’s a paper dated 2004 from a study that took place in 2000.  Not sure why WIPO included this item now, but given the relevance of the topic it seemed worth blogging here. 

It deals with, and outlines some important issues.  (N.B for the study Intellectual Property Rights were defined and limited as; patents, plant breeder’s rights & trade secrets only.)  Interestingly the conclusions highlighted a:

“need for further, more precise empirical research on the impacts of IPR strengthening on developing countries’ agriculture.”

Cue Sebastian Derwisch who is leading the CAS-IP SDM modelling project and doing just that!  Sebastian said:

“Assessment of IPRs is difficult as they are often related to inputs of upstream research – so using impact indicators one mixes the impact of IPRs with several other influences that determine an innovation friendly environment and that might even interact with the use of an IPR system.

Current studies are econometric so they treat IPRs as a monolithic block and try to assess the incentives or disincentives that arise from them, ignoring:

• the dynamics that result from weak or strong enforcement of IPR,
• the dynamics that result from the specific form or IPR that is applied
• that in specific points of the value chains different forms of IPR perform different tasks
   

It’s hard to come by data to assess the impact of IPR on local industries since in most developing countries IPR frameworks have been implemented only recently – comparisons to developed countries need to be handled with care since local companies in variety development are interacting with multinational actors from developed countries, which can change the structure and the development path of local industries fundamentally”

System Dynamics conference 2009, and CAS-IP using SDM technique for research

http://www.systemdynamics.org/conferences/2009/index.htm

This week sees the 27th International System Dynamics Conference, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA.  The CAS-IP System Dynamics Modelling team were there and on Monday Sebastian Derwisch presented a plenary presentation entitled: “Model-based exploration of strategies for fostering adoption of improved seed in West Africa” (download the paper here)

Sebastian Derwisch had the following to say:

“Two plenary presentations in the morning [Monday] highlighted the potential a contribition from the field of SD could make to global challenges like energy, climate change and food production. The research of CAS-IP (and the CGIAR) relates directly to the long term goals of the SD society. This shows that system dynamicists also see the methodology as a suitable approach to adress these global challenges.”

I am looking forward to hearing more from both Sebastian Derwisch and Sebastian Poehlmann about how their interactions at this conference may influence the future of the SDM work they are doing for CAS-IP.

IP case studies from four agricultural research institutions in developing countries

http://www.cas-ip.org/public/uploads/2009/04/compilation_of_4_working_papers_npi_2008.pdf

The National Partners Initiative (NPI) of CAS-IP has published this week a compilation of 4 working papers entitled: “Institutionalization of Intellectual Property Management: Case Studies from four Agricultural Research Institutions in Developing Countries”.  The full text can be viewed by clicking on the lead link above. These case studies aim to share country experiences from developing countries in the areas surrounding IP policy making, policy implementation and use of IPRs by researchers for leveraging more benefits to the stakeholders, people, institutions and countries. The results of the case studies have been prepared as four working papers. The working papers are on the following topics:

Intellectual Property Management Regime in the Indian National Agricultural Research Systems
(R. Kalpana Sastry, India)

This case study presents an overview of the changing environment for public research organizations in the Indian Agricultural Research System with respect to intellectual property management. In its commitment to cater to its broader societal objectives, the system has been challenged with growing sovereignty and restrictions on the sharing of germplasm, privatization of knowledge, and pressures to reduce demands on public finances through the commercialization of research products. Starting with a review of the relevant legal and policy documents to understand the background of the obligations at national and at the international level, followed by a brief review of the role and functions played by some statutory agencies in India, the implications for the National Agricultural Research System were studied. Against the realization of need for IP policy for the large system, the provisions and governance model of the new IP policy of the national agricultural organization like the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) was analyzed. Then the implementation of guidelines now in place for two constituent institutes Project Directorate of Poultry (PDP) and Directorate of Rice Research (DRR), animal- based and crop-based institutes respectively, were studied in detail from the IP policy perspective. The study highlights on the implementation of guidelines, structural adjustments in decision making activities in IP management at institutes and at understanding the specific issues of IP management relevant to the research mandate of these institutes.

Establishment of Plant Breeders’ Rights System in Tanzania: Achievements and Challenges
(Patrick Ngwediagi, Tanzania)

The study is on establishment of plant breeders’ rights system in Tanzania: achievements and challenges seeks to review appropriateness of the current plant breeders’ rights system in Tanzania and its contribution to an effective sui generis system, and attempts to formulate an appropriate model in line with the TRIPS Agreement. The results indicate a need for a benchmark review of process of activities to be useful towards the creation and operationalization of a sui generis system. The involvement of the stakeholders in this exercise in Tanzania proved to be very useful exercise and should be continued as many other developing countries develop models to suit the needs in their niche areas. The findings suggest a strong need of such actions to enable policy makers take prudent decisions while complying with the TRIPs agreement. Issues of benefit sharing and access to biological resources especially in PVP context need to evolve if the IP protection systems are to bring the needed changes for the stakeholders.

A Review of the Nigerian System of Intellectual Property
(Victor M. Ibigbami and Christopher U. Orji, Nigeria)

Nigeria is taking steps to comply with the new IP regime ushered in by the WTO TRIPS and supported by African Union (AU). The issues such as Plant Variety Protection (PVP) and patent for microorganisms are technological in nature and the country should exercise the sui generis option provided in the TRIPS agreement to develop suitable laws. It is necessary that such laws may have instruments to be able to be used beyond the country’s existing IP framework like through the aegis of AU Model Law. This study also points to the need to amend the National Crop Varieties and Livestock Breeds Registration and Release Committee Decree 33 of 1987 in Nigeria to provide space for Plant Variety Protection (PVP), Animal Breeders Rights, and Farmers’ Rights. The Committee is currently administered by the National Centre for Genetic Resources and Biotechnology (NACGRAB) in the Ministry of Science and Technology and institutional mechanism should be put in place. Analysis of two grants relating to biotechnological related inventions and consequent efforts for licensing the technology indicate the need for regulation of such inventions in terms of best practices methods. Providing strong legal mechanisms for biotechnological inventions through National Biotechnology Law may lead to institutionalizing the norms for biosafety through institutions like National Biotechnology Development Agency (NABDA). This will help regulate research on microorganisms in terms of IP creation, benefit sharing and on biopharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals which the patent law presently does not address. It is envisaged that such measures would lead to increased investment in technology development and the resulting products can better the lives of the people of Nigeria.

Establishing a Technology Transfer Office in an Academic Institution in a Developing Country: Experience of Moi University
(Antony S. Mbayaki, Kenya)

The study relates to the experience of Moi University (in Eldoret Kenya) on the establishment of the first technology transfer office in a university or public research institution in Kenya. This study indicates the efforts of the policy makers leading to the establishment of the office at the institutional level. Nuances in the process of establishment, the challenges that faced and continue to open up, the manner of countering and overcoming have been discussed. The success and the roadblocks during the process serve as vital lessons for several other organizations that are now in the process of establishing Technology Transfer Office (TTO) in academic institutions especially in Africa. The study indicates that the benefits accrued through such offices placed in institutions of higher learning are enormous. If technology transfer has to be disseminated to reach to end users in a climate of ‘win-win’ situation, it is necessary to institutionalize the technology transfer in all institutes. Since the provisions in law have to be actualized and enforced, TTOs will have a major role in overseeing that potential and actual through sound IP management reach all stakeholders.

Post written by Karine Malgrand     consultant to CAS-IP