Perceptions of bioscience are misleading, argues Monica Winstanley

The popular acclaim of David Attenborough’s latest TV natural history series must have been amongst the least surprising media events of last year. ‘Life in the Undergrowth’ made largely unseen aspects of the natural world visible to millions. Ironically, much of modern bioscience remains stubbornly invisible to most people.

The public is not only fascinated with the life of plants, animals and microbes, but also with the application of bioscience. This is true for the newer bio- and nano- technologies as well as for traditional areas such as food and medicine. But in both curiosity-driven research, and in the development of new technologies, the underlying science can become ‘invisible’. The connection between the two can also become obscured.

Problems of disconnection
This has several important and undesirable consequences. First, the contribution of bioscience research to everyday wellbeing in areas such as new cancer diagnostics and treatments, safe foods, and greener but sustainable agriculture may be undervalued. At a time when researchers are being urged to ‘make the case’ for public funding, this could potentially disadvantage the bioscience community. We have to make visible the underpinning contribution of bioscience research to the UK economy and to a range of public goods.

Secondly, ambivalence in public mood about bioscience means that demonstrating successful commercialisation or the growing quantitative power of biology, for example, in design-led plant breeding, and in predicting disease epidemiology, or patients’ responses to new drug interventions, risks misinterpretation as ‘industrialising nature’ or  ‘playing God’.

As a society we seem to want it all ways:  to have better, quicker diagnostics; new and safer drugs; inexpensive wholesome foods; and all in harmony with a romantic and non-commercial notion of ‘nature’. It’s a tough call! Yet some of the most publicly inaccessible areas of bioscience actually are promising just this.

Methodologies eclipsed
Informatics and ‘omics’ technologies enable us to begin to understand in a formal and predictive way how systems work from the level of individual genes and proteins down to small molecules in cells, and up to cell to cell communication and whole organism systems such as immunity and ageing. But challengingly, insights emerge increasingly from mathematics and computation, rather than from observing the natural world. 

In the area of agri-food science, such advances may become inextricably linked in the public mind to particular applications of the science. So, the imagery suggests, traditional biology yields a nature-friendly traditional agriculture, whereas genomics and proteomics generate high-input or GM-dependent farming that the public at large does not want. Not so. The new technologies can be used to develop low input, organic, high-input, or GM agriculture – or any combination of these.

In medical and pharmaceutical arenas, the background bioscience may be completely lost to sight. Cancer research is an obvious example, where the roles of cell biologists, biophysicists and bioinformaticians are easily eclipsed by publicity surrounding the medical and social contexts of advances in diagnosis and treatments.

Maths declining
Beneath these issues of perception is a particularly disturbing trend. It seems that, while bioscience is evolving into an increasingly quantitative subject that uses mathematics, engineering and the physical sciences to solve biological problems, the mathematical skills of students are declining. Overall, only 9 per cent of undergraduates entering biological sciences courses have a full Maths A level. There is concern that some postgraduates begin their research careers seriously unable to deal numerically with life science problems.

This situation needs urgent attention if the UK is to retain its top-flight bioscience research community. At a meeting with heads of leading research departments at the end of last year, BBSRC considered a range of possible actions. 
Revision of the Quality Assurance Agency’s Benchmark Statement (which specifies the content of undergraduate degrees) would seem to be a good starting point. The meeting of Heads of University Bioscience in March will provide an opportunity to push for the inclusion of mathematical skills. This would complement BBSRC’s recent introduction of an annual statement of research skills priorities for its postgraduate funding.

In the meantime, BBSRC has invited researchers to identify ways in which it might support mathematical skills training more directly, for example through targeted MSc courses and ‘vacation bursaries’.

We need to find a way of conveying to young people the importance of mathematics to modern biology, without deterring them. Given the high public interest in the life sciences, and the exciting insights emerging from more quantitative approaches to biological systems, perhaps this could be the basis of David Attenborough’s next series!

Dr Monica Winstanley is Head of External Relations for the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)