Australasian Biotechnology (backfiles) AusBiotech ISSN: 1036-7128 Vol. 11, Num. 1, 2001, pp. 4

Australasian Biotechnology, Vol. 11 No. 1, 2001, pp. 4

FROM THE EDITOR

Martin Playne, Senior Editor

Biotechnology certainly has climbed the political agenda in the last two years. The finance and investment pages of Australia’s major newspapers carry, nearly every day, a biotech story. Commonly sharemarket prices of a stock rise 10% in response even to the announcement of the patenting of a new gene.

January’s innovation statement by our Prime Minister was welcomed by many academics and commentators as giving a much-needed boost to university funding, although not doing too much to rectify the severely depleted infrastructure of most universities. Industry was much less enthusiastic, and saw much less direct benefit to companies in the new measures. While welcoming the 175% taxation R&D concession initiative, the fine print certainly made sure it was not worth too much to most companies. To me, a sad feature was that companies who already spent high percentages of their revenue on R&D did not gain much from the new measures. No reward for the already-converted?

Its obvious that the R&D community welcomes the sort of boost it has received, but it is questionable whether the government has done enough to boost company R&D spending in Australia, nor really understands the need for company R&D. Still, as Peter Riddles has said in his opening President’s letter in this issue, the biotech industry should welcome the government measures, and work with government to make the measures as effective as possible.

A step in the right direction, but the government still fails to realise the perilous state of university funding, and the magnitude of the “kick-start” needed to develop and maintain company R&D at realistic levels.

Many of our readers are in an excellent position to fuel the debate on R&D funding and to speak with authority and experience. I invite you to contribute your views and experiences for the next issue of this journal. Please send me your contributions by 21 March.

 

Special Features for the Year 2001 In our last issue, we listed a schedule of planned features for the year ahead. We have not been able to present the special features on biotechnology in the wine industry and grain industry as promised. Consequently, we will be altering our approach to special features. We will now be presenting a special feature on fermentation and bioprocessing in the April and subsequent issues. This will include considerations of all aspects of product development, and regulatory issues surrounding a product produced by fermentation or bioconversion. Michael Zachariou , of CSIRO Molecular Science,will be editing this feature jointly with Martin Playne. We hope to include listings of suppliers in the area of fermentation, bioprocessing, and downstream processing, including filtration, chromatography, solvent extraction, centrifugation and precipitation. If you are a supplier, please be sure to send your product and contact details to me by 21 March. We will be endeavouring to contact all known suppliers, but we want these supplier listings to be as comprehensive as possible. The material should be sent to the ABA office (see title page). We would also be pleased to hear from you if you are interested in taking out advertising space. The other features planned for issues this year are: the Wine Industry, the Grains Industry, the Energy Industry and DNA fingerprinting and detection. We welcome contributions either as Letters to the Editor(300w), Issues pages (800w), Papers (3000w) from readers. We particularly would like contributions on ABA restructuring (from Members), and on the GM food debate. If you are a professional in the biotechnology or related industries, it is important that you contribute and have your say. M Playne, Senior Editor

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