Address of the President, Sir Paul Nurse, given at the Anniversary meeting on 30 November 2015

For my final Presidential Address I have decided to discuss the guidelines and principles used for ‘Ensuring a successful research endeavour’ that I recently presented to the government. My first question is: Why do we do research? Research in the sciences, medicine, mathematics, technologies, the arts and the humanities produces knowledge that enhances our culture and civilization and can be used for the public good. It is aimed at generating knowledge of the natural world and of ourselves, knowledge that can be developed into useful applications, including driving innovation for sustainable economic growth, improving health, prosperity and the quality of life, and maintaining the environment. This has always been the case since the beginning of modern science in the seventeenth century, when Francis Bacon argued that science improved learning and knowledge, which ‘leads to the relief of man’s estate’. Today, for advanced nations such as the UK to prosper as knowledge economies, scientific research is essential—to produce both that knowledge and also the skills and people to use it. That is why science should occupy a central place in government thinking, if the UK is to thrive in our increasingly sophisticated scientific and technological age. However, scientific research is not solely utilitarian. It generates knowledge that enhances humanity more generally. In the words of Robert Wilson, Director of the Fermilab particle accelerator: when asked by the US Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy whether the accelerator in any way involved the security of the country, he replied, ‘It has to do with the dignity of men, our love of culture . . . it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending.’ Research and development in the UK is funded by government, by private companies, and by charitable organizations. Government-funded research usually generates openly available knowledge, trains the scientific workforce and develops the skills necessary for the effective running of the country. It is also able to monitor research being carried out throughout the world. Research funded by private companies is most often aimed at developing knowledge into useful commercial applications, and is usually restricted in accessibility to maintain commercial advantage. Charitable organizations support research into specific objectives of interest to philanthropic organizations, often with an emphasis on biomedicine. The research funded in these different ways often overlaps and is carried out in diverse sectors and in different research disciplines, forming a network of discovery science acquiring new knowledge, of translation of knowledge into innovation, and of developments for applications. It is a complex interactive system, with knowledge generated at different