About me
I’m a former special adviser to the Prime Minister for Science and Technology (April 2020- September 2022), where I worked on projects like developing rapid testing and creating the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA). Our team published the first ever modelling of rapid testing in April 2020 (see here).
Before entering government I was a systems neuroscientist, where I did a range of projects including revealing conserved organisational principles of the central communication hub of the brain (thalamus). I won a number of awards including the UK Physiological Society Undergraduate Prize, having my undergraduate degree honoured with a round of applause from the heads of Oxford University, then the British Neuroscience Association’s graduate thesis of the year of award for my PhD thesis.
I worked at the Tony Blair Institute for global change 2023-2024, working on the New National Purpose reports which are a bipartisan effort to outline in practical terms how the state should be reimagined to place science and technology at the centre of human progress, and follow up actions from them.
Beginning May 2024, I am formally a student in a traditional rinzai zen school.
In my other time I read books, write this blog, play with my family’s dogs (twin fox red labradors called Newton and Nimbus, who are masters of mischief), and attend various retreats.
I’m also a Honorary Senior Research Fellow at University College London. Old blogs and scientific CV can be found at jw-phillips.com, LinkedIn here. My Twitter is @anemergenti My public email is jamesphillipspublic at gmail.com
My twitter tagline was until recently ‘Trying to prepare for artificial general intelligence’, and everything on this blog is posted with the caveat that that is a crucial thing to keep in mind.
This blog
This blog has three major themes which reflect my main current interests, with sign post the different categories as they may have different readerships.
‘S&T’ - The first category is Metascience/Science and Technology Policy
In 2018 I wrote a Telegraph op-ed with my brother, which laid out a number of points which became government policy 2019. I’m going to continue writing on these themes here. If you are interested in how the UK might pivot toward a science & tech focussed economy, hopefully it will be of use/spur a discussion. I’ll also be writing on Metascience. ARIA was just one of several substantial changes we felt needed to be made. I’ll be writing on them, including ARIA’s envisioned twin, Lovelace.
One of the key themes throughout this is there a lot of lessons in outlier events/organisations suggest how R&D might need to be re-organised quite substantially. My interest in this came from talking to a range of people in my twenties such as Sydney Brenner, Alan Kay, and Eric Betzig, who had been at some of the great 20th century labs and had strikingly similar advice on how research should be organised differently.
Dinner with Sydney Brenner, ‘Uncle Syd’, one of the great biologists, 2013.
Sydney Brenner, a pioneer of molecular biology 1950s-1970s, Cambridge LMB: “I strongly believe that the only way to encourage innovation is to give it to the young. The young have a great advantage in that they are ignorant. Because I think ignorance in science is very important. If you’re like me and you know too much you can’t try new things. I always work in fields of which I’m totally ignorant……Today [we] have developed a new culture in science based on the slavery of graduate students…….The most important thing today is for young people to take responsibility, to actually know how to formulate an idea and how to work on it. Not to buy into the so-called apprenticeship….I’ve never believed in these group meetings, which seems to be the bane of American life; the head of the lab trying to find out what’s going on in his lab.”
‘Body-Mind’ - The second is a research project on the Body-Mind, Qi, and the embodied meditation practices of Rinzai Zen Buddhism & related traditions.
I’ll name this ‘body-mind’ as it is the term generally used in the rinzai zen literature. I’ll say more on this later.
‘Neuro AI’ - I’ll also be writing on neuroscience/AI, which is where my first scientific research was done.
