 The Institute has been involved over the last couple of years and a very new initiative, an exciting initiative to try and raise support for the Institute from wealthy individuals. This is a mechanism for financial support to various endeavours in Europe and in North America that has a long history. The establishment of philanthropic foundations and giving to good causes, etc. There's a track record in North America and in Europe. This is not the case in Asia. In the early 2000s, not long after I had taken up my position as director for programme planning, I had a phone call from I think it was the International School of Manila to say that there was somebody from a fundraising consultancy company based in London that was working with the International School. And would I be interested in talking to them? Well, I didn't really have much idea about this and what was involved. But the managing director for Asia, this was a company called Breakly, they had an operation in North America but they were based in, they had been founded in London. And the guy I talked to was an ex-academic from the UK but based in Tokyo and he was their managing director for Asia. And he came down and we had a couple of hours discussion about and it managed some of those funds. It's hard to say how successful we'll be. I mean, it really is. The omens are good, the prospects I think are good. But it's not something that is going to happen by itself and of itself. It's something, an initiative that is going to have to be pushed forward and that's what's continuing. Well, I think one of the other centres had a look at this, SIMIT did, but they didn't get very far with the whole idea. And of course, it's caused a few eyebrows to be raised both within and around the system and with the donors. You know, what's Erie up to? Is Erie going independent? Well, no. I think the sorts of funding that is coming into the system right now are just not sufficient to sustain an institute of this size. We have a large infrastructure in a tropical country that is, unless it's maintained, will and does deteriorate. It's constant effort to keep our facilities in a good standard, but at the same time to be able to move forward with new facilities that are required for the new types of work that we're getting into like the C4 work, for example. Some of which will be covered by the type of grants that we've received from, say, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But the accounting procedures under which we operate and that we depreciate, we're all not getting any younger. And in some countries, Indonesia is, I think, a classic example where those that have received graduate training are all coming to the end of their professional lives and will be retiring and there's nobody coming up to replace them. Now, when I first joined Erie on a regular basis, agencies like the Asian Development Bank and others provided funding for graduate training. That's no longer the case. It's very hard to raise money just for scholarships. If it can be built into another grant, that may be possible, but even that's difficult. So, whereas we had a very robust, vigorous training program in terms of bringing in lots of people funded through Erie funds, a large number, I was on the committee that helped select these people, that's no longer the case. We've got a good number of scholars, but they're coming in under different arrangements. So, where the next right side is going to come from? Well, somebody hopefully is going to put resources in to help reinvigorate that whole approach and the philanthropic approach is one way that we might be able to do that. The budget has grown dramatically in the last two or three years. But the majority, most of those funds are tightly linked to particular activities. And it's interesting. The implications of that swing, I don't think is fully understood by the Erie staff and what it means. And it's certainly a nuance that our partners in the national systems don't understand. All they see is the bottom line, Erie has a budget of X million dollars. Erie is the same with X million dollars today as it was with Y million dollars 20 years ago. And in a sense, there was a lot of large yes spread around by Erie through using unrestricted funds in that way. That's not the case. I'll give you an example right now. The DG has asked me to chair the scientific committee for the International Rice Congress that's taking place in Hanoi in November. And we've been putting together a program and soliciting abstracts for papers and posters. And one of the common requests is, I'd love to present a paper, will Erie support me to attend the conference? So that's airfare, registration, accommodation, etc. In the past Erie did this, put up several hundred thousand dollars to pay for these people to come to a meeting. That sort of funding is not available now because although even if we had the same level of budget, it's monies of a different type that we can't just take and spend like that or spend like that. It's all tightly linked to particular contracts. And so that is quite a challenge. And I hope it won't affect the relationship. I mean, the other thing that is also interesting is that there's still a lot of funding that is going out to the national programs to support the research links that they're involved in with Erie. I sign transfers of funding under Memorand of Agreement every day. So they see the money coming, but they still don't fully understand the nature of that funding and that it can't be used just for any sort of activity. And I'm sure most of the centres are finding themselves in the same boat. I've often said that Erie dwells on its glorious past without spelling out what its glorious future might be. I think that has been changing. And of course, 50 years ago, there were no other Eries. There was a relatively weak rice research community anywhere. And through the success of Erie, other national capacity has come along and has tried to emulate, whether or not it was a good thing, tried to emulate what Erie has done. But let's just take an example in the Philippines. We have fill rice. Fill rice is about 25 years old now. Before that, there was no fill rice. So mapping out what that relationship will be with the national programs, matching what their expectations are with what we can deliver. But at the same time, trying to determine where the best opportunities for an organisation like Erie do in fact lie. The fact that it's an apolitical organisation can work across borders allows it to have a rather different perspective on things. And because of its scientific pedigree, I think it's quite good at mapping out where some of the scientific opportunities lie. And clearly, those in my opinion are going to continue in the area of molecular biology. Supported by what are undoubtedly going to be the even bigger changes in data management through computational changes and data exchange through communications. I mean, I know that Bob Ziggler goes on about this quite a lot. But as I've reflected on what I've done over the past 40 years and thinking that, you know, when I was in Costa Rica, if I wanted to talk to my bosses in Lima, I had to book a phone. This was only in the late 70s. I had to book a phone call two days ahead. And we used snail mail to send information. And you planned out what you wanted to do and you got on with it and your bosses let you get on with it. And the donors let you get on with it. Now everybody wants information now. They wanted it yesterday. And that has brought both opportunities and challenges. And I think finding the real successful niche for the Institute in its science, given what everybody else is doing, and to harness those technologies to the advantage of the Institute and its partners is going to be, I think. I mean, when you think about it, we're doing things today in molecular biology that again five years ago, we wouldn't have contemplated. Where's the next five, ten years going to take us? And we've been very fortunate with the genome work on rice, the understanding of the genetic makeup of the crop, and the fact that we can get lots of people working together on same data sets. I think it's just incredible. But is it worth predicting because, you know, who knows where it's all going to end. But I do see that Erie increasingly is going, as capacity builds up elsewhere, what is it special about an international centre that requires it to remain in existence over and above what national institutions can or should be doing? And I think that's also going to be one of our challenges when it comes to a relationship with the donors, getting them to understand the special role of an international centre and what it can do that can't be achieved by national programmes alone or national programmes working with each other. In terms of genetic resources, it's clear that the policy politics area is going to dominate. I think it's going to dominate still for the next few years some of the decisions that are made. I mean, in terms of conserving rice in a gene bank, I think we've got much of the technology in place. Convincing the institute to provide the resources to upgrade what in some cases is quite aging physical plant is also going to be a challenge. But the institute cannot keep claiming that the last thing to switch off if the institute was to end its days would be the gene bank, that it's the jewel in the crown, et cetera, and not resource it adequately. That was always my big beef when I was there. Put your money where your mouth is. You can't starve that activity of the resources it needs. It's very different growing a crop for next year. It's very different from growing a crop that you want to take seeds and put in a gene bank and survive for 50 to 100 years or more. I'm discovering still not full understanding around the institute about what that really means. We're not dealing just with IR64 or IR72. I was out in the field last week essentially having a last look at the germplasm plots and they were magnificent, a great credit to the GRC staff responsible. But you've got 4,500 lines, all different heights, slightly different flowering times, which mean that how the farm is managed has to accommodate that diversity many, many times over. Most of the other experiments are done on one or two varieties that mature in 110 days. When you've got varieties that take 200 days or we're going to manage the farm this way etc. It makes life very complex for managing a germplasm collection. But many of the technical aspects of managing the collection have essentially been dealt with. They will be refined, they will be improved upon and with the appointment of a new seed physiologist Fiona Hay. Shear no doubt is going to continue some of the work that we did start in the 90s looking at the variation in seed storage characteristics of the different varieties and of course all the wild species. The continuing work in molecular biology, which is throwing out so many interesting perspectives on the germplasm collection is undoubtedly an area that is going to be extremely promising. Again, it's hard to predict now where we'll be in 10 years, but some people say we won't need the seeds anymore, we'll just have the DNA. I doubt it somehow. In any case, I like my DNA in a rather more recognisable form than a series of bands on a gel. I like to go and see my DNA growing in the field. Obviously one's career is a continuum and your different age and your expectations at different times in your career are different. As my career developed, I moved into more and more senior positions. Having said that, when I joined SIP, we were just a few members of staff and essentially setting up the institute. That was a tremendous experience. Then when I went to Central America at the age of 27, became a program leader and working backwards and forwards between all these countries and doing lots of different things, I actually learnt how to grow potatoes successfully. I trained as a taxonomist and ended up doing plant pathology, agronomy, post-harvest storage, you name it. It was a sort of get stuck in. That in itself was a very challenging and fruitful. The move to Erie was a move into... I never managed a germplasm collection before I came to Erie. That was a bit of a learning curve for me. Erie had an enormous reputation that one sort of got sucked into. I think I can't say this was better than that. They gave me satisfaction in different ways. What I can say is that I think that my time overseas in both CG centres was a better experience overall than my experience in the university. Looking at that, I enjoyed teaching. I loved working with the students. When you get good students who were keen to learn and do things, that was really very satisfying. From an early age I wanted to go abroad. I knew I wanted to work in agriculture. Although I partly come from an agricultural farming background, my brother has been able to trace my ancestors back, 18 or 19 generations to 1480. A very quintessential surname on one branch of the family, Bull. If you think of the quintessential Englishman, John Bull, my great-grandfather, about 17 times removed, was William Bull and born in 1480 in a part of England, not far from where I currently have a house, and they were farming families. That's the closest to farming I ever got. My father was a photographer. My mother trained in the United States as an orthopedic nurse. But they had travelled when they were young. I and my two brothers and sister have all travelled. We've not stayed put in one part of England. We've just moved all over and taken those opportunities. I think that it was good that I went back to England for that period of my career. It was even better that I decided to give it up. I had a tenured position. Better than I gave it up and came to Erie. I will leave Erie feeling that I've made a contribution, feeling that I've left some things better than I found them, and having made some great friends in the process. I feel better for having worked at Erie, and I hope that Erie also appreciates the contributions that I've made. The role of the Director of Programme Planning and Coordination, Communications as it became, was that I was also picking up things in the senior management team that didn't clearly fit under a particular umbrella. It was quite a lot of cross-cutting, institute-wide responsibilities. Why would I have taken on the annual report for it? It's an institute responsibility, but it sort of was linked to the donors and what have you. But there was a number of other things that I have taken on that didn't clearly fall on this desk or that desk. To tell you the truth, I'm not quite sure why I got roped in as much as I did. Having said that, working on those two events that we had last December, and which I probably spent nearly 18 months working, were some of the best times I had at Erie. I mean, I got to know people in the institute that I hadn't really got to know, and some of them are real jewels. You know, you see them on there, you don't really know too much about them, and if you ask such and such, they'll help out. Now, you know me, I'm not much of a committee man. In fact, I hate committees. And I'd rather form a committee that's going to meet on a regular basis. I'd rather get together a group of people who will get stuck in and do things. And essentially that's what we did for the 50th. Found a group of people who would make the commitment to make things happen. And then I worked with the company in Manila that we contracted to produce the shows. It's like a lot of things. I had an idea, a sort of a concept in my mind as to what I thought the day the event should be. And I wrote up a position paper, sort of a concept paper, and presented it to them. And my philosophy was, well, if money was no object, what would we do? So that was essentially the concept that I gave to the production company. And they said, well, to do that, it'll cost you X dollars. And I said, whoops, whoops, we can't afford that. But we were able then to discurs and realign things and cost it out a little bit till everybody felt comfortable with what we were trying to do. If we'd gone the other way and said, well, let's have an idea and then try to grow it, we would have stopped very much sooner. We wouldn't have spent as much. But I don't think we would have had quite the entertainment. That we ended up having. I mean, yeah, I was involved for 18 months. I knew what was going to happen, who was going to be involved. But it blew my socks off when I saw what we were having in Manila and what was eventually produced here in Los Baños. I mean, I was certainly talking about it for a year or two to come. And I feel quite proud to have been involved in that whole process. And as with a lot of things, it was a hell of a lot of fun. It really was a lot of fun. When we had the show on the 13th of December and I sat there through the whole thing, perhaps didn't enjoy it quite as much as many other people. Because I was slightly on edge as to whether things were going to go right and what was going to happen and were other people enjoying themselves. But now that I've seen the video, they did a great job of putting the video together and you see the performers from a distance, you're in there with the performers, but then you see the audience and they were loving it. And to me that's the best message back. People enjoyed themselves. It's just written on their faces. And that's what we... Most of the show, I hadn't a clue what was going on because it was all in Tagalog. But that didn't matter because the humour and the rest of it translated. Our Filipino staff obviously were really stuck in with it. The expat staff probably were scratching their heads at times and also wondering why certain acts were involved. But on the other hand, the whole thing came together and I think we had really quite a memorable event.