Managing the new biology

On August 29 The Times ran an editorial called "The coming of age of biotechnology". It expounded to educators and policy makers alike, the interesting wake-up call being highlighted by the MCST's EU-funded eFORSEE foresight exercise.

Biotechnology has come of age indeed, but this was a while ago. It is already contributing large chunks to the economies of first and third world nations. One public piece of evidence was the Americas cup - the most expensive sporting event in the world, won by a boat owned by a Swiss biotechnology billionaire.

Will biotechnology ever play a useful part in the Maltese economy?

In order to increase biotechnology in Malta, one necessity is a good output of highly trained and technologically skilled science graduates and post-graduates. Companies do not want to have to train their recruits from scratch.

In summer 1994, while studying for my PhD in Scotland, I sent a letter relating to the need of the University of Malta to specialise in certain key areas of post-graduate education/research. I sent this letter to various local authorities, including the then rector, health and education ministers and the MDC. At the time, I had suggested a couple of potential niches. These were biotechnology (which I supported by an article from the Financial Times which said that biotechnology was already the fastest growing industry in the world), and renewable energy engineering. I received one recognition of my letter from the MDC and none from any other authority.

Ten years down the line, the potential of biotechnology in Malta is largely unrealised. The number of science graduates and post-graduate students exiting our university is very low. The university employs many of its non-medical science post-graduates to teach biochemistry and genetics to medical doctors who generally avoid a research-based career.

On the other hand, the biology B.Sc. is generally very light in areas that are exploding, while it is very heavy on classification, marine biology and ecology. I have absolutely nothing against marine biology, where Maltese biotechnology may corner part of the niche market, capitalising on local expertise. However, the major areas of the new biology can be identified by the titles of the new Nature journals which have mushroomed in the last few years - cell biology, neuroscience, genetics, immunology, biotechnology, structural biology.

None of these elements occupies pride of place in our biology B.Sc. course. Nor does the associated area of bioinformatics, an area where we can rope in Maltese computing skill to help wade through some of the masses of information thrown at us by a decade of high speed sequencing.

It is no use having a biology degree creating mainly teachers and marine biologists, while biotechnologists teach doctors who are unlikely to follow the option of such a career. How best can one maximise the benefits and minimise the costs? - through sharing of resources! One option is to create a new Faculty of Biotechnology, serviced by other departments. Another is to fuse the pre-clinical medical sciences and the biology department into an Institute of Biomedical Sciences, servicing both the faculties of science and of medicine and surgery.

Has biotech industry made any inroads at all into the Maltese economy? It has - just about. Synergene Technologies Limited has set up shop offering contract DNA sequencing to international labs and genetic identification services.

More importantly, Charles Saliba has shown, with his companies InCyte Pharmaceuticals and IBA that it is possible to succeed with very little resources in our small island, having adequate training and using one's own entrepreneurial skill to develop an idea. An important benefit of biotechnology is that with relatively little money, ideas can be used so as to attract investment and realise a new company creating new, knowledge based wealth. As Charles Saliba has succeeded, others can too, with basic training and a suitable package of incentives from Malta Enterprise, MDC's successor.

In order to create such an output of new graduates and biotechnology entrepreneurs, the University of Malta needs to invest in science. Just as Malta is encouraging girls to follow a science career with Michelle Grech's posters, it needs to provide education facilities to train these scientists of tomorrow. Science education needs laboratories, expensive equipment and experienced trainers. This is a heavy investment, but it is a necessary one. It may require a relative shift of funding away from the arts and toward the sciences as is being done in many universities in the UK.

Arts can contribute to the economy - we already compete on a world market when it comes to the teaching of English as a foreign language. Maybe we should look into teaching Arabic in the same way.

However, the world is heading into an always more knowledge-dependent economy. Science (and in particular biology) will be driving much of this economy in the future. The human genome project is only the first step. The large bulk of biological knowledge and application is still waiting to be unravelled and understood. This is not about GMOs only, not at all. It is about possible new treatments for an aging population, about new detergents for washing machines, about degradable bio-materials made by microbes, about new ways of bioremediation, helping remove toxic and non-toxic waste, about new bio-computers, new ways of harnessing energy. The possibilities are endless.

Investment in engineering (largely driven by the colonial need for training as a naval base) helped prepare us for business in the last century, the century of physics and chemistry, attracting the likes of ST Microelectronics and Brandstatter.

The present century has been dubbed, across the world, as the one of biology and bioinformatics. Today, we make the choices. Will we make the right ones? Will we have the skills to compete?