Willetts pumps £5m into Edinburgh's Easter Bush SCIENCE minister David Willetts yesterday unveiled £30 million of funding to help businesses tap into inventions created by agriculture researchers. As part of the UK government's agri-technology strategy, Westminster is pumping £5m into Edinburgh University's Easter Bush campus in Midlothian to help create an incubator centre for start-up businesses. The funding comes on top of £20m from the university and the Scottish Government. The rest of the Willets" £30m funding from the Biology & Biological Sciences Research Council (BBRSC) is being shared among research centres in Hertfordshire, Norwich and Wales. Willetts said: "Britain has the potential to be world-leading in agricultural science and technology, yet our productivity growth has dropped significantly in the past 30 years. These leading-edge campuses will help reverse that trend by getting our researchers and businesses working together to commercialise their ideas. David Hume, director of the Roslin Institute, based on the Easter Bush campus, added: "The BBSRC's £5m commitment to the new bio-incubator building comes alongside £20m commitments from the university and Scottish Government and will allow us to continue our goal of securing the university's status as the leading animal and veterinary bio-science campus in Europe and worldwide." Roslin's bio-incubator will be the latest in a string of such centres, which include the Edinburgh BioQuarter and BioCity Scotland at Newhouse.