WHEN people ask Philip Cohen how he squeezes in so many hobbies alongside being a university professor and the director of Dundee's Wellcome Trust Biocentre he has a simple answer: "No commuting". Researchers are attracted to Scotland by relatively low house prices, stunning scenery, a great education system and a thriving science economy. So for those frustrated by the frenetic pace of life in England's south-east, here is New Scientist's guide to Scotland's research hotspots.
Aberdeen
"As the most northerly city in the UK we're seen as a wee bit geographically challenged. But a lot of people, when they arrive - including myself - are very surprised to find such a vibrant, thriving, affluent city"
Andy Porter, Haptogen chief scientific officer and antibody engineer, University of Aberdeen
Built from locally quarried granite, Aberdeen has a reputation for toughness and grit. Thanks to its role since the 1970s as a base for oil and gas exploration and production in the North Sea, the UK's most northerly city is also one of the most prosperous.
The Granite City hosts two universities - Robert Gordon University and the University of Aberdeen - and is internationally renowned for research in energy and renewables. In August last year the Department of Trade and Industry and the Scottish Executive announced £6 million of funding for a pilot offshore wind farm in the Moray Firth. If the five-year pilot is successful, a 200-turbine wind farm will be built and should generate enough electricity to supply the entire city.
Perhaps surprisingly, the city boasts Europe's highest concentration of life scientists per head of population. For example, it is second only to Cambridge when it comes to antibody engineering, with four antibody engineering companies based here. One of these, Haptogen, is developing therapeutic antibodies that target the molecules bacteria use to communicate. Just before Christmas the University of Aberdeen spin-off signed a deal with a US biotech giant and a Korean pharmaceutical company (the details have yet to be announced) to take two of its products through clinical trials.
Another surprise is a small but growing electronics industry, including the start-up 4i2i, which in September last year won a contract with NASA worth £135,000. The company's video coding technology will allow astronauts to beam DVD-quality images back from space.
In 2001, four departments at the University of Aberdeen were awarded the second-highest rating - five - in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE): plant and soil science; biological sciences; community-based medicine; and pure mathematics.
Dundee
"There's mountaineering, hiking, kayaking, sailing. If you are an outdoors person like me this is a great place to be"
Spiro Rombotis, CEO Cyclacel
Electric street lighting, submarine telephone cables, hole-in-the-wall cash dispensers, keyhole surgery and marmalade all started life in Dundee. Continuing its tradition of discovery, the city is now the third biggest biotech cluster in the UK (after Cambridge and the region around Oxford) - up from seven companies to 40 in the past 10 years, 12 of them spin-offs from the University of Dundee. And unlike companies at other locations, not a single one has gone under during that time.
One of those spin-offs is Cyclacel, founded by Nobel laureate David Lane in 1997, which now has nine potential cancer drugs in the pipeline, three of them in clinical trials.
Biotech businesses are booming all over the city. In October, the Dundee branch of the US-owned company Upstate, which makes biotech reagents, expanded its premises in Dundee Technology Park. When the company came to the city in 1999 there was just one member of staff. There are now 77. Another Dundee company, Axis-Shield Diagnostics, is one of the top 20 biotechs in the world measured by sales.
The originator of many of these businesses, the University of Dundee, hosts two five-star departments - the highest RAE rating - in preclinical medicine and biological sciences, and four departments rated five, including civil engineering. Last year it opened the first forensic anthropology department in the UK.
The university's prestige in biology is largely due to the Wellcome Trust Biocentre, which opened in 1997 and performs basic medical research. The centre will effectively double in size in July when a new building housing the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research opens for business, specialising in diabetes and tropical diseases.
Edinburgh
"You can take the excellence of the science base as read, but the city is also a wonderful place culturally. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Royal Scottish National Orchestra are based here. We've got galleries and museums, the Edinburgh International Festival, a jazz festival, a film festival, a book festival, the military tattoo..."
John Archer, principal of Heriot-Watt University and chair of Scottish Enterprise Edinburgh
Edinburgh has every right to call itself the brainiest city in Europe - it has more graduates per head of population than any other European city. Its intellectual life and neoclassical Georgian architecture have earned it the nickname "the Athens of the north".
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