Scientists at the John Innes plant research centre in Norwich, UK have uncovered a gene that could form the basis of new crop varieties able to cope with changes in world climate brought about by global warming.

Researchers at the University of Bonn in Germany have succeeded in finding a potentially low-cost source of a potent antiviral compound known to prevent replication of the HIV virus in vitro.

On 26 January, in London, Science|Business organised a roundtable of executives in the biotech industry to discuss the state of the market. The consensus: investor appetite for biotech companies is on the rise.

Europe preaches the knowledge society, but its aversion to risk and reluctance to change has got to go, warns Esko Aho, former prime minister of Finland.

There is much more work to do to convince public opinion that bioscience is a force for good, says UK BioIndustry Association chairman Simon Best.

Ireland's fastest-growing companies hired even more aggressively than other top job-creating European companies during 2001-2004, according to a survey conducted by Entrepreneurs for Growth, a membership-based organisation representing 2,000 European firms.

"There is a large gap between the rhetoric of a political system that preaches the Knowledge Society and the reality of budgetary and other priorities that have shown little shift in preparing to engage with it." Esko Aho, former Prime Minister of Finland, in Creating an Innovative Europe, January 2006.

The founding dean of INSEAD's Singapore campus is moving to the UK to head up the Judge Business School at Cambridge.

TU Delft ditched the usual model of outlicensing or seeking venture capital backing when it was looking to commercialise a novel wastewater treatment technology.