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The long career of Patrick Cunningham, chief scientific adviser to the Irish government, neatly parallels the transformation of Ireland itself, from the predominantly agricultural country of his youth to one that is now staking its economic future on the pursuit of scientific knowledge.

Cunningham's job involves advising the Irish government on all matters scientific, as well as monitoring and evaluating the implementation of its ambitious strategy for science and technology, which aims to increase dramatically both the quantity and the quality of Irish research from 2006 through 2013. He is also chairing Dublin's bid to become Europe's 'City of Science' in 2012.

Cunningham took on the role of chief scientific adviser at the beginning of 2007, after a distinguished 45-year research career that began in Ireland's national institute for agricultural research, An Foras Taluntais. For most of his 25 years at that institute, he had a parallel career as an academic, and he retains a personal chair in genetics in Trinity College Dublin, which he has held since 1974. Along the way, he also had stints as a visiting professor at the Economic Development Institute at the World Bank in Washington, DC, and as Director of Animal Production and Health at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome.

He also wears an entrepreneurial hat, as cofounder and chair of IdentiGEN, a Dublin-based firm that built a DNA-based traceability system for the meat industry using Cunningham's academic research into bovine genetics.

Cunningham is one of only a half-dozen or so Irish scientists with a genuine international reputation, says former student David McConnell, now head of the School of Genetics and Microbiology at Trinity College Dublin. "Paddy is known all over the world in the field of agricultural science, especially animal science," he says. Cunningham's qualifications for the job extend beyond his scientific capabilities. "He also has enormous political skills. He's a very subtle man," McConnell says.

Growing up in rural County Waterford, where Cunningham's father worked as a veterinarian, agriculture was a natural interest. "We were always dabbling in farming," he recalls. Undergraduate studies in agricultural science at University College Dublin followed. "There was a sense that agriculture was Ireland's only resource at the time," he says.

Cunningham, who doesn't dwell on his achievements, neglects to mention that a career as a classics scholar was another possibility. McConnell notes that he was ranked first in Ireland in the Leaving Certificate examination in Latin and second in Greek. He originally entered university on a classics scholarship. "He also had a very fine analytical and mathematical mind. He just has huge intelligence," McConnell says.

Cunningham obtained a Master's degree in animal nutrition in 1957 and then headed to Cornell University, where he completed a PhD in animal genetics under Charles Roy Henderson in 1962. "By good fortune, I found myself in probably the leading place in the world," he says. Around that time, Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize for their work on unraveling the molecular structure of DNA. Cunningham's motivations were of a more practical bent. Although "it was nice to know what the chemistry at the back of it was," his work was focused on developing new statistical methods for beef cattle breeding. This involved crunching vast quantities of field data through the first generation of academic computer systems, which had just started to appear on university campuses.

Cunningham had four job offers on his return to Ireland. He preferred the lowest-paid option, at the recently established An Foras Taluntais, where he put his Cornell training to work in improving the genetic quality of the Irish cattle herd. During this time, he and a colleague, Sandy McClintock, developed a probability model for combining genetic and economic information, dubbed the discounted gene-flow method, which is still widely used in genetic improvement programs in a diverse range of species.

In 1989, Cunningham's group at Trinity College Dublin started investigating the molecular genetics of the world's major cattle breeds and built a 'molecular clock' based on analyses of mitochondrial DNA, microsatellite markers, and Y chromosomal markers. This work, which continues under the leadership of Dan Bradley, has revised our understanding of the domestication of cattle. Cunningham and colleagues also began a genetic analysis of thoroughbred racehorses during the 1960s, an effort that also continues to this day.

A particular highlight of his time at the Food and Agriculture Organization was the successful eradication of the New World screwworm (Cochliomya hominivorax) in Libya in 1991. The pest, which had been endemic in Mexico, causes open wounds in domestic and wild animals. It can be fatal for them and for humans. At the time of the Libyan crisis, Mexico was completing a 16-year, $750 million eradication program, which involved saturating affected areas with sterile male worms. Cunningham headed up a 400-person effort, which drew heavily on the Mexican experience. In one year, they achieved a reduction in the number of infections from 12,000 to just six in Libya and contained a problem that could have had devastating consequences for Africa's human population, as well as its domestic livestock and its wildlife.

In his current role, Cunningham is looking at a completely different set of metrics. Ireland is slowly climbing the league table of European research performers. From occupying the lower reaches around a decade ago, it is now a midlevel player. By 2013, it aims to be in the top tier, alongside Sweden, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Israel. "These are countries that have driven their economies by investing in knowledge, broadly speaking, not just in science and technology," says Cunningham. "It's a very rational and defensible policy, and we're not there yet."