 My name is Gabriel Pursley. I'm here today with Professor Steve Kemp. Steve is the head of Animal Biosciences at the International Livestock Research Centre in Nairobi, Kenya, and also head of ILWIS' new live gene programme. So Steve, welcome. Live gene. That's an interesting title. What's it about? Yes. So live gene is an umbrella that attempts to encompass all of our livestock genetics activities under one, in a joined up format. We have quite a lot of activities ranging from people looking at targeting, asking what genetic interventions we need, people looking at molecular tools and people looking at breed delivery. And this is an attempt to bring all of those together in a very unified way so that we can get through synergy between all of those activities. And we can hand off products between different projects to make a truly a true genetic gains programme. So that sounds like it's extremely interesting in science, but is it difficult to actually deliver new breeds to millions of small-scale livestock keepers scattered all over Africa? Absolutely. That field delivery ensuring that what we imagine the farmer once actually gets to the farmer is without doubt the hardest aspect of this project. That's why the targeting aspect is so important. We need to know what the farmer wants and make sure we're providing the appropriate animals with appropriate characteristics for particular requirements. We need to understand the complexity of the farmer's needs and ultimately if the farmer's not demanding the products that we're producing then we have failed. And all of this very interesting science actually requires some money. Where are you looking to for the investment to support this research and delivery? Well we have a range of donors interested in this work but we've recently benefited from a significant injection of funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They recognise the importance of joining up data systems and mapping systems and molecular systems together with the breeding systems and that's been very helpful to allow us to set this platform up. That's really quite an enlightened investment by the Gates Foundation but there seems to be quite a lot of pressure from some in the donor community for instant impact possibly even only funding research to which we already know the answers. How do you deal with that balance between deliverables available in a relatively short time frame but actually investing in some of the research which can make a step change in the future? Yes, there's no doubt that's the biggest challenge and you can understand that donors want to be able to report to their masters what they've achieved this year with the dollar they gave us this year. And when we're dealing with livestock with generation times of two and three years that's very difficult to do indeed. But that's where the live gene structure comes in and allows us to deliver relatively short term programmes very much breeding programmes on the ground working directly with farmers but ensure that at the same time we capture the information and the data and the biological material to allow us to allow that to feed into high end long term molecular approaches. So tying short term and long term together brings with it great synergies and great opportunities. So one new approach to linking with some of the upstream research institutes is the new centre for tropical livestock genetics and health which is the partnership between the University of Edinburgh, Roslyn Institute, Scotland's Royal College and Ulrich. How will that work? Yes, this is a very exciting new opportunity. So this is the paradigm of live gene. It brings together absolute state of the art, reproductive technology, state of the art, genomics and computing technologies from Roslyn and ties that together with downstream work from a whole host of partners. And I couldn't attempt to list the partners that become pulled into that partnership as a result of the funding from the Bill and the Gates Foundation creating this centre and then pulling in existing projects and generating new projects that bring in a galaxy of new partnerships. I think this sounds an exciting adventure in science. The very best of luck. Thank you very much.