Soft Machines, by Richard Jones – Science, innovation policy, economic growth, nanotechnology

Five glosses on Andy Burnham’s big speech

The leading candidate to replace Keir Starmer as the UK’s next Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, gave a speech on Monday in which he laid out his proposed governing plan. There was a lot in the speech – lots of politics, some immediate priorities, but also a lot more policy than many commentators were expecting. This piece is not a systematic review of the speech, and I won’t touch on the proposals for institutional change, as exemplified by the announcement of No 10 North. Instead, here are some of my reflections prompted by a few key passages, focusing on my interests of innovation, universities, industrial strategy, and regional economic growth.

Bottom up growth:

“It is time for Whitehall to accept that growth cannot be ordered from the top down. Instead, it can only be nurtured from the bottom up … It comes from running sound finances as we have done here in Greater Manchester, which in turn gives businesses the stability and the confidence to invest, increasing their productivity and adoption of new technology. It comes from placing our universities at the heart of local economies, as all the mayors do, and bringing the innovation-lead approach through start-ups and scale-ups.”

This is the central statement of Burnham’s economic thinking – we need economic growth, growth comes from improvements in productivity, & productivity growth is achieved by businesses investing and adopting new technology, and new businesses starting up and scaling. The argument is that this is most effectively encouraged at the level of a place, archetypically a city-region like Greater Manchester.

The singling out of the role of universities is interesting here. This is in part out of necessity – in England’s big cities in the Midlands and the North, in Belfast, Cardiff and Glasgow, universities remain as some of the few really sizeable public institutions with the scale and agency to make a difference. The question remains as to the degree to which universities, as autonomous bodies with a complex variety of missions, embrace this role “at the heart of local economies”. The University of Manchester, together with other GM universities like Salford and Manchester Metropolitan, have done this very consciously, but there are tensions here, both with the aspirations of universities to see themselves competing on an international stage, and with the very real financial pressures that most universities are struggling with. I think it’s an important moment for university leaders to seek to articulate and develop their contribution to their communities in the broadest terms, while stressing the positive benefits of the national and international dimensions of their mission to their cities.

Different kinds of places:
“Seeing the positives in all places and there are positives in all places, in all postcodes across this United Kingdom. Let’s always remember that.
Powers for our rural economies to address issues specific to them like inadequate transport.
Powers for areas undergoing industrial transition like Port Talbot, Scunthorpe and Aberdeen.
Powers for our proud coastal towns to reimagine themselves for the 21st century.
And yes, more powers for London too over education and housing so that London can do more for itself and remain the world’s greatest capital city.”

This passage tackles a really important point of tension in the argument for place-based economic development head-on. There is an economic argument for putting investment in the places where it brings the greatest return, which is a natural underpinning of the Treasury world-view. In practise, this has been used as an argument for focusing investment on London and the Southeast (and, now, perhaps with some reluctant acknowledgement that investment in Manchester could yield returns).

Even amongst policy thinkers more disposed to regional rebalancing, there’s a fear of “jam-spreading” – dividing up limiting resources so much that the investments in any single place are too small to make an impact. In many places, the result of many years of centralisation and the starving of local government is that institutional capacity to drive place-based economic development is lacking.

But the politics here is difficult – at a time when our political instability has been ascribed to the “revenge of places that don’t matter”, it’s not helpful to say to people in Blackpool or Burnley, “sorry, there’s nothing for you, because we need the resource to redevelop Ancoats”. Burnham has himself talked about the “Makerfield test”, and a big feature of his Mayoralty has been the need to spread the economic success of central Manchester to outlying boroughs like Rochdale, Oldham and Wigan. Burnham nails his colours to the mast with his slogan “Good growth in every postcode.”

A formula that I think is due to Diane Coyle is perhaps helpful here: “You can’t do everything everywhere, but you need to do something everywhere”. A good first step is to recognise that different kinds of places have different problems; to misquote Tolstoy, all prosperous places are the same, but every poor place is poor in a different way. A distinction that I’ve found helpful is between underperforming core cities, deindustrialised towns, and rural and coastal peripheries.

Burnham frames the issue in a positive way, arguing that there is potential everywhere; to put this in the language of economics, everywhere has some area of comparative advantage, even if it has no area of absolute advantage.

The examples Burnham chooses are interesting. One obvious point is that Aberdeen & Port Talbot are in devolved nations, and the governments of Scotland and Wales have their own views and their own traditions about regional economic development. Burnham’s comments about seeking a more collaborative style of politics will need to have an early application in relations with the nationalist parties running our devolved nations.

A further point about Aberdeen is that the industrial transition Burnham refers to is, of course, the long-term decline of the North Sea oil and gas industry since its peak in output in the early 2000s. The transition to low carbon energy isn’t explicitly mentioned by Burnham, but it is going to be a major backdrop of politics for the next decade.

Finally, the politics of being positive about London are obvious – but there are some interesting economic lessons there too. London has a very high level of productivity, and its success is crucial for the economic health and public finances of the nation as a whole. But the rate of productivity growth has stalled in recent years – in fact, the narrowing of the economic gap between London and Manchester is as much a story of London’s progress slowing as Manchester’s accelerating. Part of this issue must be the falling productivity of the financial services industry since the Global Financial Crisis.

So there is an element of industrial transition in London’s story too – a move from financial services to wider knowledge intensive services, including in areas like artificial intelligence and life science. Here there are some stories of successful place-based industrial strategy. Tom Forth & I have shown that heavy investment in public sector R&D in London is now bearing fruit with big increase in private sector R&D. The Kings Cross area is now the outstanding example of an urban “Innovation District”. Here publicly funded institutions like the Crick Institute, the British Library, the Turing Institute, and the headquarters of ARIA, coexist with anchor private sector tenants like Google DeepMind, and supported by a flourishing network of support businesses such as Venture Capital. This all exists in an extensive modern real estate development, with attractive public realm and outstanding public transport links. Similar developments are in hand in White City and the Olympic Legacy Park – place-based industrial strategy does work.

On reindustrialization:
“We will support every region to set clear and credible industrial ambitions and provide the support to achieve them, encouraging more cross-UK partnership between places with complementary industrial clusters, as Cambridge and Manchester have done on life sciences. We will consolidate public and private investment at a place-based level and help all areas establish good growth funds as we have done here in Greater Manchester. We are such an inventive country and going forward we can be the world’s leading innovation nation. This is the key to higher growth and I want more world-beating British manufacturers and service providers at the frontier of new technology and exporting to the world. I will back our scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs and creatives as I have done here and show how Britain will be the innovation nation of the next decade.”

Burnham talks a lot about re-industrialization. Is this just a doomed nostalgic call for a return to coal mines, steel furnaces, and cotton mills? I don’t think so. It’s significant that Burnham talks about both manufacturers and service providers, and stresses exporting to the world. So in my understanding of “reindustrialisation”, one isn’t just talking about manufacturing, important though I think that is. The key point is to support and grow regional businesses that produce tradable goods and services. This is important in economic terms – these are the activities that bring money into communities. But I suspect that it’s also important in that it gives communities a sense of purpose, a sense that they too are contributing to the nation more widely,

The practical steps here are for places to produce a clear and credible local industrial strategy. Again, there is a tension here as the boundaries of industry clusters don’t always coincide with the political boundaries of city-regions, and supply chains are usually national or international. There does need to be a national dimension to industrial strategy. Part of this can be driven by region to region collaborations – of which the Cambridge-Manchester partnership is an important example that has clearly made an impression on Burnham in his time as Mayor.

On reshoring:
“We need to safeguard sovereign manufacturing and production capability across the country in critical sectors like steel, defense, energy, food and farming rather than just being prepared to let it go as we have sadly done in the past.”

This is a brief section, but an important one, as it recognises that industrial capacity isn’t just a question of economics, but is crucial to national security. Steel of course is highly politically salient at the moment, and with the Ministry of Defence having taken over Sheffield Forgemasters under the last government a precedent has been set, with more focus on defence manufacturing capacity inevitably to follow. The gas price spike that coincided with the invasion of Ukraine demonstrated the UK’s vulnerability as an energy importer, leading both to an inflation spike and to a big hit to the government’s debt position. I wonder whether we will be seeing the transition to low carbon energy being framed more in terms of security than net zero in coming years.

The inclusion of food and farming as critical sectors is interesting; some may see this as a political gesture to rural communities. In fact it may be as much an acknowledgement of the new geopolitics, where global supplies are threatened by climate change and access to food exports are used as a weapon.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, and there will undoubtedly be suggestions of other critical sectors. One could point, for example, to the chemicals sector, underpinning production in many different sectors, still important for the UK economy, though struggling, and of particular regional importance in the North of England. Semiconductors, perhaps the most important industry of the 21st century, is one area that we did “let go”, with the exception of a few niche areas.

Discussions of sovereign manufacturing and production capability do need, however, to confront the difficult questions of ownership and control. We’ve had several decades where governments have been immensely relaxed about the sale of productive assets into overseas ownership, to the extent of celebrating such acquisitions as “a vote of confidence in the UK”, and there are certainly examples where such overseas ownership has been beneficial, through better management and closer incorporation into global supply chains. But overseas ownership leads UK governments with fewer levers for aligning the strategic decisions firms make with national priorities.

On further and higher education:
“We need a complete rethink of how we support the next generation to succeed and it has to start with the education system. The days of a school system configured entirely around the university route will be brought to an end. University is great for those who want it. But when are we going to focus on the life chances of those kids who want something different? When the country hasn’t done that for a long, long time. People have argued over many years for an education system based on par between academic and technical and that is what we will build. Giving every young person growing up here a clear path into a reindustrialized Britain.”

No-one who has followed Burnham’s most recent priorities as Mayor will be surprised at this. Some of my old friends and colleagues in the HE sector will be uneasy about this direction, and we certainly need to avoid false polarity of university vs vocational education (given that about half of university students are doing directly vocational degrees, e.g. in business studies, health related professions, engineering & computer science). Burnham has been a big champion of the FE sector, which has undoubtedly been starved of funding and respect over the last decade and a half.

One aspect of technical education that Burnham has emphasised is the important of working with the private sector to provide training placements for young people. He regards GM’s success in increasing the number of placements as a key positive outcome of its partnership approach to the private sector, and he hinted at a quid-pro-quo for British firms, being favoured in government procurement, in return for more involvement in training.

Final words

None of this represents new thinking, and the surprise of many national commentators at being confronted with this ambitious policy agenda seems a little baffling to me given what Burnham has been saying and writing since he became GM Mayor, as well as its wider history in policy debates.

There’s much wider support for this line of argument; from the academic world there’s been important work from the University of Manchester’s Phillip McCann, MIT’s Anna Stansbury, and, with a focus on skills and institutional aspects, Andy Westwood. This highly incomplete list is brought up to date with eg two papers from The Productivity Institute on Manchesterism, here and here, and there’s a nice summary of recent work from the University of Birmingham’s Rebecca Riley.

For more direct attempts to influence policy, there was the 2017 Sheffield/Manchester Industrial Strategy Commission, the 2020 UK2070 Commission, and some aspects of the Resolution Foundation’s Economy 2030 inquiry.

Perhaps even more influential has been the one-man think tank that is Tom Forth, who has been an indefatigable proponent of regional devolution. I wouldn’t be human without mentioning my own efforts on this blog and elsewhere, for example here.

A nice reflection of Burnham’s engagement with this body of work can be seen in an appearance he made a few months ago at Cambridge University’s Bennett Institute of Public Policy, where he was in conversation with the economist Diane Coyle. In reply to the question, “How do you account for Manchester’s economic success?”, he replied “We just did what you told us to do, Diane”. This was not just flattery; Diane Coyle was one of the key contributors to two important economic reports that have guided strategy in Greater Manchester, the 2009 Independent Economic Review, and the 2019 Independent Prosperity Review. This underlines the importance of evidence and external input in guiding GM’s economic strategy, which goes back well before Burnham’s time as Mayor. Greater Manchester has never “had enough of experts”.

There’s also been serious thinking about regional economic growth in both main political parties. For the Conservatives, Michael Heseltine’s 2012 paper – No Stone Unturned called for “reversing a century of centralisation”, while, in Theresa May’s government, Greg Clark’s Industrial Strategy White Paper had kicked off a process of co-creating Regional Industrial Strategies, working with the Mayoral Combined Authorities set up by George Osborne’s “devo deals”. This process lost momentum after May resigned, and was finally killed off by Kwasi Kwarteng. Under the Johnson government, Michael Gove’s 2022 Levelling Up White Paper set a mission that: “By 2030, every part of England that wants one will have a devolution deal with powers at or approaching the highest level of devolution and a simplified, long-term funding settlement”. Once again, another change in Prime Minister, in the form of Liz Truss’s brief tenure, led to a loss of momentum.

Meanwhile, in the Labour Party, Gordon Brown’s 2022 “Commission on the UK’s future”, remarked on “an unreformed, over-centralised way of governing that leaves millions of people complaining they are neglected, ignored, and invisible, all too often left to feel as if they are treated as second class citizens in their own country” and complained that “when we should be unleashing the potential for growth and opportunity in every part of our country, the continuing over-concentration of power in Westminster and Whitehall is undermining our ability to deliver growth and prosperity for the whole country.”

The Labour Party campaigned in the 2024 election on a manifesto that promised “good jobs and productivity growth in every part of the country making everyone, not just a few, better off.” The 2024 English Devolution White Paper, and the 2025 Industrial Strategy White Paper – offered a serious programme for government to decentralise power in England, and to implement an industrial strategy with a significant local and regional dimension.

What’s different now? I think it’s clear that Burnham intends to put this agenda at the centre of his government and to implement it consistently, and he has shown that he can effectively communicate it. There are many practical difficulties, and some serious global headwinds, so success is not guaranteed. But, what is certain, though, is that whatever else we’ve been doing for the last fifteen years, it hasn’t worked.

Life, death and active matter

“The force that drives the flower drives my green age”

At the dawn of modern chemistry, in the 18th century, the prevailing view was that there was something special about living tissue compared to inert matter. In conventional accounts of the development of chemistry, this view – known as “vitalism” – is widely believed to have been definitively killed by Wöhler’s synthesis of urea from inorganic starting materials in 1828, opening the way to a purely mechanical concept of biology, full of pumps and levers.

And yet, there is something special about a swimming bacteria, a crawling amoeba, a growing plant, a muscle, a heart, a brain. We know now that what’s special about these forms of living matter isn’t some occult life-force; it’s a continuous input of free energy. These systems are driven systems, sustained far from equilibrium by this constant free energy input. In soft matter physics, we call this kind of matter active matter. This encompasses not just biological tissues, but increasingly, synthetic analogues.

Active matter is characterised by the free energy input being, in some sense, internal, rather than external. The fluid in a stirred tank or a heated pan is not at equilibrium, and this continuous free energy input can create considerable structure – for example convection cells, shear banding, or indeed, on a large scale, the wind patterns in a tropical storm. Yet we don’t refer to these systems as active matter. In a muscle, or the active gel of an amoeba’s cytoplasm, the free energy is being converted internally. Active matter is characterised by a hierarchical structure, and the free energy is deployed at the scale of the sub-units of the structure.

It’s important to stress that what we’re talking about here is free energy – that fraction of total energy that can be converted into useful work, given the requirement of the second law of thermodynamics that the total entropy of the universe can never decrease. Active systems typically operate at constant temperature, so the total energy that enters must be balanced by the energy that leaves. The inputs – in the form of light and chemicals in a high free energy state – have a lower entropy than the heat and waste products that leave the system.

Active matter exports entropy, and this allows it to generate order. This is what makes all the marvellous complexity and order of life consistent with the second law of thermodynamics.

We can see how this works at the level of the whole earth. The earth is constantly receiving energy from the sun, in the form of the high energy photons characteristic of a white-hot object with a temperature of about 6000 K. But, given that the earth is not getting (much [1]) hotter, it must be re-radiating the same amount of energy into outer space. Since the earth is much cooler than the sun, this radiation is in the form of many low energy photons, in the infra-red, which carry away much more entropy than is brought by the fewer, higher energy photons arriving in the sun. The earth exports entropy, and this allows it to generate order.

As in the macrocosm, so in the microcosm. Photosynthesising bacteria – cyanobacteria – and the chloroplasts in plants harvest high energy photons from the sun, using their free energy to split water molecules. The resulting hydrogen ions are pumped across membranes, and the free energy thus stored is used to synthesise the universal biological free energy vector ATP. Almost [2] all other organisms, directly or indirectly, exploit the free energy that cyanobacteria and plants have captured from the sun.

What do biological systems do with this constant input of free energy? It allows them to export entropy, and thus create a little oasis of order amidst the increasing disorder of the universe as a whole. We can roughly divide their entropy-defying activities into three categories:

Construction, Assembly and Growth. The molecular components of life – proteins, lipids, nucleic acids and polysaccharides – generally have a higher free energy than their building blocks. So making the molecules of life needs to take place through the coupling of “uphill” reactions, that need an input of free energy, with the “downhill”, free energy releasing, reaction of ATP hydrolysis. Then these molecular components need to be assembled to produce the functional structures of cell biology. This usually involves the shepherding of the molecules to the right places, so that the self-assembly mechanisms of local free energy minimisation can produce functional structures.
Motility. Only in the smallest and simplest cells is diffusion sufficient to move molecules to where they are needed, so mechanisms for active transport are a precondition for the evolution of size and complexity. At the level of whole cells, many bacteria can swim towards food sources and away from toxic chemicals. In multicellular organisms like ourselves cell motility is involved in the creation and repair of tissues, while molecular scale motors permit the muscular contractions that underlie wriggling, walking, running and swimming in animals of all sorts.
Information processing. The human brain accounts for a disproportionate amount of the energy we use; there’s a deep relationship between information processing and entropy, which means that computation necessarily uses free energy. But an organism doesn’t need a nervous system to do information processing; the basic unit of biological computing is the molecule. Many bacteria are able to sense their environment and respond accordingly, and these kinds of capabilities underly the much greater complexity of cell-signalling in multi-cellular organisms.

Active matter, then, incorporates molecular scale components that use free energy – usually in the form of chemical fuels like ATP – to accomplish these goals. What are the physical principles that underlie how they work?

Biological active matter is soft matter, in the sense that it operates in an environment dominated by Brownian motion, and interaction energies comparable to thermal energy. Molecules are moving around by diffusion, weak interactions bring components together, and thermal energy breaks them apart.

There’s an important difference between active matter and soft matter at equilibrium, though. At equilibrium, every possible interaction can happen in reverse, with the same probability. This “principle of detailed balance” is broken in active matter. In biological systems, the origin of broken detailed balance arises because the concentration of the free energy vector ATP is clamped at a high, and out of equilibrium, value. It’s the resulting directionality of time which underlies the apparently purposeful nature of what active matter enables. It permits the construction of complex functional structures, and, by in effect rectifying Brownian motion, allows directional motion.

These are molecular machines – devices that convert chemical free energy into useful work – but they are machines that don’t depend on mechanism as we understand it macroscopically. It’s not Newton’s laws, (or, indeed, the Schrödinger equation), that governs the behaviour of these “soft machines”. Inertia is essentially negligible, there’s constant agitation from Brownian motion, and weak forces leading to components constantly sticking and unsticking to each other.

In biology, we see these principles at work in the molecular motors that make our muscles work, and in the active gels that allow amoeba to propel themselves by oozing along surfaces. We’re now starting to see synthetic examples, too, in the form of self-propelled colloid particles and synthetic molecular motors made using supramolecular chemistry.

Understanding the principles of active matter gives us a new insight into what makes living matter different. There is a difference between the matter of life and death, but we don’t need any occult vital forces to explain it. Living matter is active matter – it uses a constant supply of free energy, it constantly exports entropy, and it creates its own order. Without a constant flux of free energy, the second law of thermodynamics drives everything to equilibrium, and equilibrium is death.

[1] The fact that the atmosphere is less transparent in to outgoing low energy photons than to incoming high energy photons means that at steady state the earth is warmer than it would be if it were a pure “black body” – this is the greenhouse effect. As currently the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is currently increasing, largely as a result of human action, the steady state temperature of the earth is increasing.

[2] A few ecosystems – notably those around deep-sea hydrothermal vents – rely on chemical sources of energy rather than the sun.

UK science must deliver on its promise of economic growth

This piece was first published on the WonkHE blog on 18 May 2026. It’s an attempt to condense the arguments I’ve been making in my three longer blogposts – UK Science in a post-liberal world, UK science policy in transition, and Winds of change for UK science policy.

For more than a decade, there’s been a remarkable cross-party political consensus in the UK in support of funding scientific research. Despite the wider pressures on public finances, public spending on science has been increasing in real terms, and further increases are planned. But that consensus is now breaking down – and, in my view, the wider UK research community has not yet woken up to the threat. We can’t take continuing government and public support for science for granted, and the science funding system needs to adapt and demonstrate that it is delivering for the nation, to make sure that support continues.

The recent English local elections made clear that the old political duopoly is breaking up – and what’s driving many supporters of both Greens and Reform is a sense that the old system is broken. “Burn it all down” is an emerging political theme. There are obvious new threats that the country needs to respond to, notably increasing geopolitical insecurity. The Conservative Party’s plan to cut UK Research and Innovation’s funding by 20%, moving the money into direct defence R&D, is a signal that, whoever forms the next government, times are changing.

But perhaps the biggest issue the research community must face is this: the justification for increases in the government’s research budget has been that more R&D will lead to economic growth – but that growth has not materialised. GDP per person is about 29% lower than it would have been if the pre-2008 trend had continued, and this stagnation manifests itself directly in people’s wages and living standards, which on average have barely increased over the last twenty years, and in governments’ difficulties in funding public services.

How Sheffield became Steel City

For the first time for several decades, there are grounds for optimism about the future of Sheffield’s steel industry (very much reduced in scale though it now is). Sheffield Forgemasters (now UK state owned) is building a major new facility, and Special Melted Products (with an infusion of Taiwanese capital) is also expanding. This isn’t about the standard grades of steel for use in construction – the expansion is to meet demand for specialised forgings from speciality steels and other alloys, driven by applications in defense, aerospace, civil nuclear and energy, and influenced by a new focus on UK national resilience and industrial capacity. This gives me a pretext to republish this piece I wrote nearly ten years ago about the history of the steel industry in Sheffield – and the valuable lessons this history can teach us about innovation.

As someone interested in the history of innovation, I take great pleasure in seeing the many tangible reminders of the industrial revolution that are to be found where I live and work, in North Derbyshire and Sheffield. I get the impression that academics are sometimes a little snooty about local history, seeing it as the domain of amateurs and enthusiasts. If so, this would be a pity, because a deeper understanding of the histories of particular places could be helpful in providing some tests of, and illustrations for, the grand theories that are the currency of academics. I’ve recently read the late David Hey’s excellent “History of Sheffield”, and this prompted these reflections on what we can learn about the history of innovation from the example of this city, which became so famous for its steel industries. What can we learn from the rise (and fall) of steel in Sheffield?

Andy Burnham, Manchesterism, and Reindustrialisation

As the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, attempts to re-enter national politics, he’s talked a lot about “Manchesterism” as an approach that underlies the relative economic success of Greater Manchester in recent years, and has argued for the re-industrialization of those parts of the country that lost much of their industry in the 1980’s and 90’s. What is behind these arguments? I can’t claim any direct knowledge of Burnham’s plans, but I do have some insight into the development of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority’s economic strategy, which may offer some clues.

The slow road to digital matter

Ray Kurzweil’s book “The Singularity is Near” is twenty years old, and its thesis has become conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley. The Singularity is an event horizon – a date at which technological growth becomes so rapid that to look beyond it becomes quite unknowable to pre-Singularity humans, a point at which machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence and goes into a recursive cycle of self-improvement. Kurzweil’s target date for the Singularity was 2045, and in the opinion of many in Silicon Valley we’re well on schedule.

The evidence for the accuracy for Kurzweil’s prediction is, of course, recent rapid progress in AI. But that’s not the only technological development that Kurzweil’s prediction depends on. The connection between machine super-intelligence and control over the physical world needs to be established through nanotechnology.

Winds of change for UK science policy

The Conservative Party plans to cut funding for UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) by 20%, amounting to £6 billion over three years, reallocating the funding to military drone procurement, according to a report in Research Professional. Julia Lopez, Shadow DSIT Minister, says “we need to focus our remarkable British scientific and technological capabilities more explicitly on defence”.

We’re seeing a two-decade old cross-party consensus around science funding now breaking down. It’s notable that UKRI was a creation of the 2015 Conservative Government, with a funding increase balanced with the explicit goal of bringing the UK’s R&D programme more directly under government control. The R&D spending plans of the current government are essentially those it inherited from the 2020 Conservative Government. But, as its leader Kemi Badenoch has taken to saying, the Conservative Party is under new management now.

The place of UK business in the global R&D scoreboard

My last post looked at the growth in UK government support for R&D over the last decade. But if we are interested in restoring economic growth (as we should be, given the ongoing economic stagnation that the UK has been suffering), it’s R&D carried out by businesses that is more immediately relevant in terms of its direct effect on productivity growth, through the development of new, high value goods and services, and through making existing processes more efficient. This post takes a look at R&D done by UK-owned businesses, taking a snapshot in the year 2024.

First, I’ll pose two similar-looking questions. First, how much R&D do UK-owned businesses do? Second, how much R&D is done by businesses in the UK?

The best answer we have to the first question – how much R&D do UK-owned businesses do? – is £32.1 billion. This comes from the EU R&D scoreboard, which uses publicly available data to list and rank the world’s top 2000 R&D performing companies. According to the scoreboard, the world total of business spending on R&D from these 2000 companies in 2024 was £1.2 trillion, so the share of this total done by UK companies is about 2.7%.

For the second question – how much R&D is done by businesses in the UK? – we turn to the ONS’s survey of Business Enterprise R&D, the BERD survey. For 2024, this gives a total business R&D spend of £55.6 billion.

The UK’s big bet on science and technology

Between 2015 and 2023, UK government direct spending on research and development increased by 22% in real terms, and the current government plans a further 12% increase by 2029. If one includes the subsidy for private sector R&D represented by the R&D tax credit (and one should) the total real terms increase in government support for R&D is even larger. From the low point of austerity, in 2011, to 2023, the real terms increase was 65%, a remarkable – and, perhaps, little appreciated – figure in the context of difficult fiscal circumstances faced by those governments. Underlying this increase is a broad consensus about the importance of R&D for economic growth, and the need for the state to invest in R&D, to correct the market failure that means that the private sector will invest less in R&D than is societally optimal.

Given this economic motivation for investing in R&D, it’s inevitable that people will ask whether the increase in government spending on R&D has resulted in a measurable increase in economic growth. So far, the answer seems to be that it hasn’t, with the UK’s economic stagnation continuing well into its second decade. This is an important context for the changes in science policy I discussed in my earlier post – UK science policy in transition. The question that’s going to be asked is, when is the UK’s big bet on science and technology going to pay off?

UK government spending on R&D since 1986, expressed in real (inflation corrected) terms. Sources: spending out-turns: UK government statistics, reduced to constant 2023 £s using GDP deflator. Plans: 2025 Comprehensive Spending Review, corrected for anticipated inflation using OBR inflation predictions.

AI and the problems of protein folding

The problem of predicting protein structure from sequence has been definitively solved by the AI programme AlphaFold, winning a well-deserved Nobel prize for its developers. But structure prediction is just one of at least four different problems of protein folding. Here I introduce four different problems of protein folding: protein structure prediction, the nature of the protein folding transition, the role of proteins that don’t fold at all, and the importance of protein misfolding, particularly for diseases like Alzheimer’s disease.

The most important contributions yet made by machine learning and artificial intelligence to science so far are unquestionably DeepMind’s AlphaFold programmes for protein structure prediction, for which Demis Hassabis & John Jumper won the Nobel prize in chemistry in 2021 (shared with David Baker, for closely related work). Proteins are linear macromolecules; each type of protein has a unique one dimensional sequence of amino acids. For many proteins, this 1d sequence encodes a unique three dimensional structure, and it’s this 3d structure which underpins the function of the protein in the operations of the living cell. AlphaFold takes the 1d sequence of a protein and predicts the 3d structure. This is the problem of protein structure prediction, outstanding for half a century, now definitively solved by AI.