Ready, steady…GO!

So that’s it. Preparation phase is over and we are on our way! Last day of the seminar (Friday) was totally hectic, with a last couple of sessions, including a sort of team-building exercise. Then it was getting sorted, going through the blue sheets with Tiffany, taking stuff down to EF house to leave it there while I’m travelling around, packing and so on. Then there was a last reception at the house of one of the trustees, Ravi Saligram. A gorgeous house, full of beautiful artefacts from the travels. But I think we were all beginning to feel that we wanted to get started properly, much as we have really enjoyed being together.

So this morning it was into a limo-minibus (another OIA* moment…) for a whole bunch of us and the drive to Washington DC. There was Deema (Jordan), me, Bolormaa (Mongolia), Chak Hee (Korea), Nafees (Bangladesh), Hassan (Nigeria), Omar (Malaysia), Christian (Colombia), Nona (South Africa), Zuzana (Slovakia), Peter (Hungary) and Somkiat (Thailand). We had a nice day in Washington and have got tomorrow before we start in earnest. I’m here till Monday evening and the days are packed full, then I head to Tennessee for my visit to Oak Ridge – and driving in the US for the first time. Wish me luck!!

*Only In America

Marmite!

After a fun day on 25 March, reported above, we had a free night, so I went to the theatre with 7 of the other fellows. Good to see me moving outside my comfort zone, n’est-ce pas??!! We had a later start on Wednesday and had a great session with Viveca Novak of factcheck.org, which bascially checks what candidates are saying during the campaign and highlights the inaccurate, the misleading and the downright wrong. It really got the group going and we had some heated discussions. She seemed to enjoy it, but the Eisenhower people seemed a little taken aback!

After lunch we went on site visits to 3 different places and I was on the team that went to the Enterprise Center, a business incubator and entrepreneurship training centre in West Philadelphia, an area with high poverty and a large African-American community. It was great to see what they’re doing and hear about this community involvement – plus they’re based in the original American Bandstand studio! Having said that, there was a more social/community element than would be the case for the kind of start-ups or incubators we’d be looking at in science and research. One very interesting idea came out of it. The Enterprise Center has teamed up with local schools to design business studies curricula and to help deliver those to a certain extent. How much more people would get into science if doing chemistry included working with research scientists in a company, or at a university?

After the site visits, we had another reception, which was our first chance to meet the Fellows going from the US around the world, and that was continued this morning, when they officially introduced themselves. 2 will be going to the EU, one from the Mass. office of refugees and immigrants and one from Boeing. So be warned, people, you may have me approaching you to talk to these people later in the year!

Our last session this morning was with Michael Useem of the Wharton School at Penn U, looking at leadership. Very inspiring, well-run session, and well-designed for such a diverse range of backgrounds as we have. I still can’t get my head round this idea of being an “emerging leader” but who am I to argue??!!

Forgot to mention that I also did a podcast for the 2007 Fellows’ website. You can come and listen if you fancy a laugh!

I should mention why this is called Marmite. I contacted Tiffany, my Programme Officer before I came over, because two months without Marmite seemed impossible – and she found me some! Had it on my bagel this morning and it was a lovely little taste of home. As I said in my last post, EF teaches you about yourself and where you come from and it’s amazing how comforting as Marmite on toast can be!

Getting to know each other – and ourselves

Our first offical week starts here, though in typical (I am coming to learn) Eisenhower fashion, they managed to squeeze in a few meetings before the beginning of the seminar. On Saturday we were invited to a US fellow’s home out in New Jersey. Before we went to her house, her husband showed us around his work-place, the EcoComplex at Rutgers University. They are working on issues such as recycling gas from landfill sites and other recycling/renewable technologies. He showed us round their greenhouses which are used as incubators for small companies as well as test-beds for new technologies. Absolutely fascinating and a really cool guy. And we had a lovely evening at their home, so thanks Lisa and David!

Sunday was a continuation of the social interaction that is so important here (albeit with a slow start).

Monday started badly. I had a meeting alongside Iyad and Omar, but I got it all wrong and we were in completely the wrong part of town.  So we were 20 minutes late for our meeting with former Congressman Jim Greenwood, who is now President of the Biotech industry organisation. It was a real shame, as he was very interesting and it would have been good to have had more time with him. We spoke about GMO acceptance in Europe and the R&D dilemma for US drug companies, where US consumers feel they are subsidising drug development for the rest of the world and Congress is trying to gain some control over the pricing structure. I told him about IMI – I’ve been selling the JTIs all over, as I passed details on to Dave Specca at Rutgers as well.

After that the three of us went over to BioAdvance, a life science/biotech start-up fund. Great woman called Barbara Schillberg leading it. We talked about some of the issues around Bayh-Dole, getting technology out of universities and the publication v patenting debate. She felt that there needs to be a revision of Bayh-Dole, because its time has been (and very important it was too) and gone. There was a frustration that universities are over-selling, or over-estimating, the value of their technology. This fund started out of the tobacco settlement and has been doing extremely well (not that I could really follow all the venture capital jargon!).

Then we headed back to EF house for the session with the Chairman of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission – the state-level equal opportunities body. It was a session with quite a few of our group, with the President of the Commission and its Chief Counsel. It was nostalgic for me to hark back to some of the issues I dealt with when I was doing Employment and Social Affairs!

After a quick lunch we started the opening seminar, with a session where we all introduced ourselves to the group and explained the photo we sent in advance. I don’t have mine with me, but it was of a glacier taken from a helicopter over Svalbard. That was a trip of a lifetime and I think Svalbard symbolises simultaneously the mess we’ve got ourselves into and the means we have of getting out of it – science and co-operation.

Today was great too. We started with a brief session by Amb Wolf about how to get the most out of our fellowship and then moved on to the “getting to know each other” session. It was a kind of “speed-dating’ arrangement, where we spent 6 minutes talking to one of the other fellows about a topic – our hobbies, or how we found out about the Fellowship, or our professional challenges. It was very instructive to scratch the surface of our colleagues and at the same time to realise quite how much we have in common, even though we seem so disparate.

This afternoon we went down to the Pew Charitable Trust to discuss the role of civil society in American society. Their NGO sector is enormous, responsible for about 10% of GDP, if you can believe it (it includes many of the universities, colleges etc) with an overwhelming amount of the money donated coming from individuals. One of the issues I am going to be looking at during the programme is the role of foundations, charities and philanthropy in science, so this was good background. One interesting point was made – are Americans more at ease with donating, and likely to do so, as the flip-side of having a political system where the power is with the people and the power of the governments proscribed. “If we want to keep government out of some areas of life then we need to put our hands in our pockets.” Something to explore with some of my interlocutors.

And if anyone has any good synonyms for interesting please leave them in the comments section, because I’m already over-using it!

It’s becoming ever more clear to me what the potential of this programme is. Yes it’s going to be interesting to talk to people in the US. And yes it’s going to be such a bonus getting to know these people from around the world. But there’s also going to be a considerable element of getting to know myself, and what I want out of life, because I’ll have the time to think about that. And I’ll also have a chance to think about where I come from – I’m already realising all sorts of things about myself as a European, or a Brit, that never really occured to me before. This is a rare luxury and I hope I’m able to make the most of it.

The US is a country of risk-takers

19 March was my visit to Rohm and Haas. I was met by Katie Hunt, Head of Technology Partnerships and former President of the American Chemical Society. She had set up a series of meetings with people from across the company and I had a fascinating afternoon with them.

We discussed (again) the cultural issues of innovation dividing the US and the EU, and an interesting thesis came to me. The risk-taking culture here can be seen as Darwinian, because just about everyone who has made the US what it is had taken a risk to do so. As the study of the Galapagos showed certain traits developed on certain islands when populations split, so the US has been built on a gene pool of risk-takers. Whereas in Europe, we’re the ones that stayed behind, that made the best of what we had. So maybe there’s not much we can do about it!

When I asked how Europe was perceived as an R&D destination, the answer was pretty depressing. Social costs are high, employment rules too rigid, there are inherent barriers to investment and Europe is seen as anti-science, with REACH and to an extent the GMO issue.

Contrary to the perception in the EU, there’s a strong interest here, both at Rohm and Haas and the previous day at DuPont, in environmental issues and alternative energies. Reasons as to why ranged from “it’s the right thing to do” to “it’s what our customers want”. Nevertheless, this is clearly seen as an area where Europe is in the lead, but if we don’t take the opportunity to use it, we will quickly get overhauled. Other areas mentioned where Europe was seen to have an advantage were carbon capture, biomedical (because of our approach to hESC) and high-efficiency vehicles.

Rohm and Haas is working with a Swedish NGO called Natural Step to address its environmental and energy issues – proof they’re serious or proof of a different approach which is about buying in expertise? Difficult to tell. The people I spoke with seemed genuinely motivated, not just driven by profit.

My final meeting of the session was with on communication. Back on familiar ground! Nothing particularly new or earth-shattering in what was said, but it confirmed much of the approach we have taken in the Potocnik cabinet – the need to change the means of talking about science, to focus on people’s/society’s values and what matters to them and if there is an issue, explain it. “The science” isn’t enough in itself nowadays. And rightly so, I reckon.

Then we got a couple of days off and went up country. No meetings, just beautiful Frank Lloyd Wright architecture and getting to know the others. Normal service resumes on Monday!

First meetings

A great first day of meetings! If it’s all like this, it’ll be a) super-interesting and b) quite hard work!

I started off with a visit to an organisation called Wireless Philadelphia, a public/private/NGO tie-up to deliver broadband to as many Philadelphians as possible. A bit out of my knowledge zone, but interesting on the nature of public/private partnerships and the lack of any broadband roll-out policy in the US, even at State level.

Then to 30th Street station to get the train to Wilmington, Delaware, where I met a number of people at DuPont. A fascinating afternoon. This is a company whose life’s blood has been science, and for much of its life, BASIC science. In the early 20th century they recruited a research scientist from Harvard who brought others along and what did they get – Nylon! For the mid-20th century they were invention-led and only recently has the emphasis moved to more “applied research”. They  have research centres all over the world, with new ones just opening in China and India, but interestingly this is less to do with the scientific potential of the people there than the commercial potential of those markets and the need to do research that is related to consumer needs.

In terms of university/business links, they do have sponsored research, where they work with universities perhaps because that gives them access to specialised equipment or skills. They also licence some IP from universities where needed. They also have grant programmes such as Young Professorships.

There were concerns voiced about the US education system (primary and secondary) when it comes to science and many of the same concerns we have in the EU about losing graduates, either people not taking science, or going into other careers after graduation (more prestige, more money or both!). We talked about what they do on biofuel development, including second generation and beyond. They also are focusing a lot on nanotech, where Du Pont have worked with an NGO to develop a framework for safe nanotech – interesting relation to our code of conduct.

As I said, a very interesting day. Some preconceptions were blown away, some reinforced. Also Wilmington was a side of the US you don’t get to see when your usual destination is Manhattan!!

Arrival in Philadelphia

So, here I am! I got here totally hassle-free, which is always the best way. Things started this morning with a coffee with Tiffany my Programme Officer and then we headed to the Eisenhower Office. I met lots of people there, including short meetings with the Director, Vice-President, Alumni Director etc. Got my laptop (they’re lending me one), and talked some details of the itinerary with Tiffany. Still not clear quite how things will pan out at the end. I may yet go to New York and not to Boston. Not quite clear where in California I’ll go. And we might be slipping a day or two in Dallas in there as well! The Eisenhower people are remarkable efficient and well-organised, as well as super-friendly. Looks like it’s going to be a great 8 weeks!