By some accounts, 1998 was a year when everything changed in Irish bioscience. With the country's economy soaring, a group of experts told the government that massive investments in research infrastructure were urgently needed to avoid throwing away the success of the 'Celtic Tiger' years.
Those years, from 1996 to 2000, had been marked by soaring incomes and low unemployment. The experts, representing industry, government, and universities, had been gathered by the Irish Council for Science Technology and Innovation to identify how the country could capitalize on those gains in terms of its science and technology policy.
Crucially, this 'Foresight Exercise' then gained the backing of Irish industry. "We rolled the dice," says Cormac Kilty, who founded a biotech firm called Biotrin in 1992, "and we could afford to roll the dice because of the Celtic Tiger. I have always said, a rich country should be able to invest in ...
