News about the Uk Foresight Programme
Issue 9 - July 2005
Foresight Publishes Brain Science Report
Brain Science, Addiction and Drugs
New treatments for disorders like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Disease, improved treatments for addiction and the development of cognition enhancers, a variety of products that improve mental functioning, could be less than 20 years away according to the latest Foresight project report, 'Drugs Futures 2025?', published on July 13.
The Brain Science, Addiction and Drugs project identified a number of advances for the future of science and society. These developments may have wide reaching implications for society and highlight key opportunities and challenges for the 21st century. The report suggests the greatest changes society will witness in the near future will be in our understanding of the brain, how it functions and performs, its capacity and limitations and how it affects our behaviour.
For more detail, and access to all the project's publications click here.
The Next Foresight Project - Obesity
We are pleased to announce that the next Foresight project will be dealing with the major societal challenge of obesity. We will be seeking to develop visions of the future that will have a positive impact on policy. For more information, and to express an interest in working with us please see the Foresight Obesity project web pages.
Project News
Your Views On Foresight
Help us take stock of the curent Foresight process, and provide more systematic evidence of the Foresight projects' impact so far, as well as views on cost-effectiveness and the techniques used.
Sir David King Launches The Fan Club
The FAN Club is a new forum where those who have an interest in horizon scanning and futures analysis can meet to exchange new ideas, innovative thinking and good practice. It held its first meeting on 13 June. The Club forms part of the ongoing activities of the Office of Science and Technology's Horizon Scanning Centre (HSC). For more information on the club, and the HSC itself please see the first edition of the FAN Club newsletter here.
Perpetual Motion For Intelligent Infrastructure Systems
Intelligent Infrastructure Systems (IIS)
An update on the IIS project has been published in the June newsletter, which is available here.
The project has hosted a series of workshops, involving a wide range of experts from different disciplines, to develop and test four scenarios which illustrate different visions of the future (one of which is named perpetual motion). We have also hosted three case study workshops which looked at the scenarios from a regional, retail and local government perspective. A series of systems maps is being developed which will compliment understanding of the scenarios by illustrating the deep structure which underpins them. For more information on the project, please click here.
Detection and Identification of Infectious Diseases
We have started our options appraisal work and held a workshop in April to consider the initial findings of the work on future risks, and the emerging results our specialist reviews. The workshop helped identify a small number of future 'user challenges' for deeper analysis. A report on the meeting, along with other information on the project is available here.
An important part of the options appraisal work will focus on the needs of sub-Saharan Africa. We are organising a major pan-African workshop in Entebbe, Uganda between 1 and 3 August 2005 to take this work forward.
The programme will also provide an opportunity to debate where the surveillance and control of infectious disease could usefully progress across Africa, and what needs to happen to realise that vision.
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