Hello, welcome to Business Daily. I'm Gareth Mitchell, and for the whole week, we're looking at science and business.

We'll find out what research areas are causing a buzz in the business world, and we'll get a sense of where the money is.

Also, we'll discuss how being able to communicate science gives firms the competitive edge.

Midweek, we'll look at quantum computing and separate

hype from reality. But first, appropriately given this week's theme, I'm starting in a lab.

I'm at the Francis Crick Institute in London. It's at one of the UK's leading bioscience

research institutes.

I'll be honest, it's not like the kind of lab that you may remember from your school days.

We don't have bunce and burners or lots of flasks full of strange coloured liquids bubbling away.

There's nothing like that.

But there is a whole load of high-end scientific equipment standing on benches.

Also, there's one piece of kit here that's so big it's got its own part of the room.

There are scientific fridges for samples.

There are plenty of pipettes.

That's going on here as well.

It's quite a place.

Now, in charge of it all is project manager of the advanced sequencing facility, Dr. Maria Rodriguez, who's keeping

me company in this edition. Maria, first of all, what goes on here at the Crick? So we are at the forefront

of biomedical research in the UK. We work from yeast to humans, ancient genomes. We have people working on COVID, everything, basically.

And to give a sense of scale, I have no idea how big the places or how many people work here.

But I can tell you, as somebody who lives in London, it's a building that dominates the St.

Pancras area up towards the north of the centre of London. So

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