This is Denis Murphy again.
I think this has been a very useful discussion in bringing out some important genomics related issues from the wider community.
One point that I raised earlier (Message 25) was about more regional collaboration, especially in developing countries, and the establishment of larger and better resourced regional centres for genomics and related disciplines. This echoes some of the sentiments of a previous e-mail conference entitled "Learning from the past: Successes and failures with agricultural biotechnologies in developing countries over the last 20 years" which was held by the FAO Biotechnology Forum in 2009 (http://www.fao.org/biotech/biotech-forum/conference-16/en/). To quote from the report from this conference:
"Several participants suggested that increased regional and sub-regional cooperation would increase the benefits of applying biotechnologies. For sub-Saharan African, Danquah concluded that biotechnologies had failed to deliver on their promise in the past and, to change this, he highlighted the importance of education, capacity building and close collaboration between institutions and universities in sub-Saharan Africa. He also proposed the establishment of sub-regional centres of excellence and innovations in sub-Saharan Africa to train the next generation of African biotechnologists......Hash noted that for breeding programmes wishing to use molecular markers, it would be very useful if service laboratories, providing high quality and cost-effective marker data, could be established at sub-regional hubs. Agreeing with Danquah, Caesar stressed the need for capacity building and outlined the key features of a potential global biotechnology capacity building project, building on regional and sub-regional groupings of developing countries and including a comprehensive scholarship/fellowship programme for developing countries. Commenting on the many messages describing the lack of facilities and capacity for biotech R&D in developing countries, Murphy felt it might be unrealistic for each country, however small, to have its own research programme and he advocated increased collaboration with neighbouring countries and with centres in developed countries".
Obviously we are now four years on and there are few if any regional centres. Indeed I now realize that it may be unrealistic for nations, however small, to agree to fund a regional centre rather than a national one. However irrational, this is simple realpolitik. Luckily there may be another way forward and one message I am getting from the current conference is that a virtual Global Genomics/Breeding Forum might indeed be feasible both to practitioners and policymakers. I was pleasantly surprised by the information from Rajeev Varshney (Message 53) about the CGIAR initiatives and these could certainly be important resources in the future. But I also agree with Adrian Dubock (Message 54) that there are merits in a dispersed approach - after all we know that the most resilient systems, from engineering to the human body, should contain overlapping redundant components.
Therefore I favour the use of a stable long-term platform such as FAO to host such a forum. As for funding, set up costs would not be high but what is far more important is the management and curation of such a forum. Set up costs might be solicited from charities such as Gates or Rockefeller or transnational entities such as the EU. For example, I am currently involved in a bid for $1.5 million from the EU TEMPUS programme to establish a bioinformatics network including databases and collaborative training for Kazakhstan, Belarus and Russia. In the longer term the running costs should be modest and much of the work could be dispersed throughout the community - but we would need a reliable host organization and FAO seems one of the better candidates.
Professor Denis J Murphy,
University of Glamorgan, CF37 4AT,
United Kingdom
email: dmurphy2 (at) glam.ac.uk
website: http://staff.glam.ac.uk/users/184
Google Scholar outputs: http://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=GQc6wQsu-BkC
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