Barry McSweeney trained as a biochemist, then worked as a researcher and senior manager in biochemicals corporations in Ireland, Switzerland and Belgium. As chief science adviser to the Irish government, he gives independent advice on science, technology and innovation, and evaluates science policy. He was the director general of the European Commission鈥檚 Joint Research Centre, which involved seven institutes, four countries and 2500 people.
Why is banning smoking so important to you?
I don鈥檛 think of myself as an anti-smoking zealot. I have never smoked, but I don鈥檛 mind if my friends do, provided I am at a safe distance. The most important aspect for me is the public health benefit, which is absolutely huge. One of the most important is the raw decrease in the number of cigarettes sold. Smokers like the ban as it helps them cut down. And there are benefits we had never anticipated. We thought that pubs were the smokiest places, but in fact betting shops were worse and they are far more pleasant now.
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The ticket for high office in Ireland is jokingly said to be the BTA, or Been to America. Do you hold this qualification?
I did a BSc, MSc and PhD in Ireland 鈥� the doctorate was in biotechnology 鈥� and then worked in the US for Warner-Lambert, a pharmaceuticals company, and for American Hospital Supply, a firm with a strong interest in medical equipment. Then I worked for AHS in Belgium and Switzerland before moving to the European Commission (EC), where I was director of the Joint Research Centre (JRC) between 2001 and 2004.
Why come back to Ireland now?
I was offered this terrific new job, of which I am the first holder. And my wife 鈥� who is from Liechtenstein 鈥� said that if I didn鈥檛 go back to Ireland now, I probably never would. In any case, Ireland had too many people in top jobs in Brussels. There was pressure to make room for people from the new European Union member states.
Are you having to work hard to make yourself known in Ireland?
No, because Ireland became the first country in Europe to ban smoking in the workplace. Work carried out by the JRC鈥檚 group at Ispra in Italy provided much of the science base for the ban. It showed that only a level of ventilation akin to sitting in a wind tunnel could remove smoke adequately. I appeared a lot in the Irish media throughout that debate, especially in argument with bar owners, who insisted the ban would wreck their trade.
Did you win the argument?
Here we are in a bar in Dublin. The ban is now supported by Irish people and by tourists. Look at this place! The air is completely clear and you can see everything. A while ago near here a drayman came into a pub delivering barrels of beer. He had a lit cigarette in his hand and was nearly lynched 鈥� by the customers, not the staff. Support for the ban is now high. I am being asked to help with similar initiatives across Europe. Liverpool, Scotland, Italy, Norway and the Netherlands have all been in touch and are making moves to ban smoking in public.
What is the wider lesson of the ban?
It is a great example of how science and politics should work together. The idea did not come from scientific evidence, but could never have happened without science to back it up. That provided the final push for something that was obviously needed as a health and safety measure for both staff and customers. Smoke is a cancer hazard, of course, but it is also implicated in cardiac disease. We have had huge support from heart charities. In Ireland people also bring children and babies into pubs, and smoke triggers many childhood diseases.
In the coming years our new knowledge of the human genome will allow us to get at the environmental factors behind diseases such as asthma, which has been increasing rapidly in the industrialised world.
What attracted you to science?
My brother was a hospital biochemist and I worked in his lab while I was at school. I studied biology at University College Cork. To begin with I was more interested in other activities, such as the debating society, but then I went to London for a youth science fortnight. It was an outstanding experience.
What I remember most was the breadth of the material. I went straight from a talk on the tropical disease bilharzia to another on particle physics in the Soviet Union. Some of the contacts I made then are people I still know 鈥� not bad considering that this took place in 1968.
And what sort of scientist are you?
I am comfortable with maths and physics, and ran nuclear research at the JRC. I鈥檓 attracted to a broad range of sciences, but I am a biologist by training. Many of the methods I developed in industry are still in use. It used to be necessary to take a huge amount of blood from a newborn baby to test the amount of ammonia it contained, but I developed a resin-based method that needed far smaller samples. While in industry I also developed techniques for freezing and reconstituting blood without damaging it, which allows the analyses being carried out in labs across a country to be compared.
What excites you?
Bringing scientists from different disciplines together and then moving on is what I do best. For example, I鈥檇 like to get geneticists, environmental scientists and mathematicians together to data mine for real evidence about disease patterns, or get all the world鈥檚 asthma researchers to collaborate. I think of myself as a stimulator of science.
鈥淏ringing scientists from different disciplines together is what I do best. I think of myself as a stimulator of science鈥�
Outside science, I love horse racing and have a complete obsession with jump horses. I have told the government that if I am really successful, the reward I want is to be chairman of Horse Racing Ireland. I am a biologist, so I have the right skills.
How does your old job relate to the new one?
The Irish government wanted someone with a broad international perspective and with knowledge of the public and private sectors. I had shown that I could be tough. When I took over the JRC, most of the big EU members had just one question: 鈥淲hen is it closing?鈥�
It was seen as being too dependent on research into old technology, such as nuclear power. I moved seven of the JRC鈥檚 nine directors in a weekend and managed major change without a strike, which was remarkable considering how intransigent the unions could be.
Now all the member states are keen, even the UK, which was our biggest critic. Although it still does discovery research, the JRC has been reorganised as the scientific back-up for European policy. About 30 per cent of European legislation has a scientific component. The JRC is also going to be central to Framework 7, the commission鈥檚 next research programme.
How well have European states tackled big scientific controversies?
Not well. The genetically modified food debate showed that European countries seem willing to let a promising technology go by the board. Europe makes less use of GM than the US, so it has less public support here. Now we risk losing a future generation of plant geneticists who could pursue innovations such as expressing live vaccines in banana or tobacco plants. We need to have a law on the subject that is not flouted, to make sure that criminals cannot disrupt legitimate experiments as we have seen them do in field trials in the UK.
GM technology has great value for human life, as the availability of human insulin and growth hormone has shown. Next we could use GM to produce smallpox or anthrax vaccines, for example. The use of GM is complicated because there are undoubtedly big questions about its environmental effects.
Would the same apply to stem cell research?
With stem cells we again have a different baseline from the US, but here the difference is more to do with abortion. I think the European debate has been extensive but too focused on religion and ethics. The debaters do not seem to know the difference between a fetus, an embryo and a blastocyst.
This is a subject on which I am formulating my advice to the Irish government, which will set the policy. There is undoubtedly potential here and I cannot understand wanting to restrict research in such a promising field. It is certainly possible to engineer an embryo so that it cannot be implanted into the womb to develop into a fetus. People taking part in the debate should understand this.
What does your role as chief science adviser mean in a debate like this?
The vision is to make the recent growth in Ireland鈥檚 wealth sustainable in the long term. I do not have a government department to run. I was appointed as an independent adviser, on the recommendation of an international panel appointed by the Irish government. As an adviser rather than a manager, my main task is to talk to government and not to be a protagonist in public debates.
Are you really going to stay out of public debate?
I have made some public appearances and statements. I think there is a clear need to get education right because Ireland is producing too few scientists. We are good at science in schools but there is a bad drop-off between school and university compared with the UK. Irish schoolchildren seem to see science as being more difficult than other subjects. We need better-quality students applying for science, because science departments often take people who cannot get onto other courses.
I would like us to poll school-leavers about why they are taking the decision to drop out of science. I have been doing radio and other media appearances to try to put some excitement into the Irish public鈥檚 perception of science. Polls show that they are far less positive about science than people in the US.
鈥淓urope makes less use of GM than the US. We risk losing a future generation of plant geneticists鈥�
How much of your job is about encouraging economic growth?
Ireland is already turning into a place where major multinationals do original research. The US communications group Bell Labs is setting up a research lab near Dublin and establishing a centre at Trinity College Dublin, which will involve nine Irish universities and institutes of technology. Bell Labs will be carrying out 11 per cent of its global research in Ireland. The things it is interested in include nanotechnology and biotechnology. This could revolutionise areas such as smart manufacturing.
Bell decided to come here because it saw the Irish government putting more into research in these areas. Now it is going to be in a technology cluster, with IBM and Intel among its neighbours. I want to make sure that as wages in Ireland rise we do not lose our ability to attract inward investment of this type.
There is a tremendous buzz about Ireland at the moment, but not everything we do is sold well to the outside world. The smoking ban helps Ireland鈥檚 image as a progressive nation. But we need to add to that by enhancing our research base and adding more discovery research to our existing applied research.
So just how good is Irish science? And will Ireland meet the EU鈥檚 Lisbon target of spending 3 per cent of GDP on research and development by 2010?
The figure now is 1.2 per cent. I would like to think that it will reach 2.5 per cent soon. My job description talks about the 鈥渟cope and balance鈥� of Irish research so I want us to have both.
One of my priorities is to have a proper international assessment of Irish science and its potential. This is tricky because most current assessment of research impact is based on citations, which are discipline-related. If we expanded research in areas that do not generate many citations, we could find our citation rate falling as we did more science. In any case, you can get plenty of citations for bad research. So we need some new ways of seeing how good we are.
Science Foundation Ireland, our main agency for basic research, is putting most of its budget into IT and biotechnology. This means that we are likely to get discovery research in these fields. That should allow us to stay at the cutting edge, which in turn will bring in fresh investment.
If you could attract any sort of research to Ireland, what would you choose?
I would go for research groups at the interface between IT and health. For one thing, that is my own interest. For example, at the JRC we worked on the use of Bayesian logic to allow prior knowledge to be used to help assess chemical safety, which increases our ability to get safety judgements without using thousands of animals in trials.
Look at the potential. Ireland already has a huge clinical trials industry: one firm in this field, Icon, employs 1800 people here.
Now imagine if we re-examine the health sector and the technology it uses. The information technology we have developed for remote sensing is of direct use in Ireland because we have many small, local hospitals. New sensing and communications technology could allow them to offer more advanced diagnoses.
In Ireland we already have research groups in areas such as the convergence of nanotechnology, IT and cognitive neuroscience. If we know how to assemble nanoparticles we will be much closer to being able to repair damage to the memory centres of the brain, for example. There is every reason to suppose that Ireland can be the site of such exciting breakthroughs.