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The Ledger has been inadvertantly investigating the life science sector in recent days - specifically, an innovative, entrepreneurial niche outfit known as novovirus. It sounds like a research start-up company, but its exponential growth-rate is dizzying in all the wrong ways.

Had this detour not taken place, I would have been in Edinburgh on Friday, listening to Alistair Darling, as he dropped at least one significant hint about his forthcoming, pre-election Budget.

So, I've read his speech instead. And while all the pre-Budget attention is focussed on cuts, squeezes and tax hikes, the big and unsurprising hint is that he'd prefer to talk lots about growth.

There will be more about his plans for Infrastructure UK, a body to help build or fund the next generation of power, energy and transport connections. There will be more to be said about high-speed rail connections, but don't expect that to involve any commitment of money for the foreseeable.

What caught my eye was his talk of technology. He's facing flak aplenty for slashing England's university budget, and the consequences from that will flow into the Scottish Government's budget.

(With university principals now public in talking about the need for new funding streams, even the president of the National Union of Students is saying he's up for that.)

Universities punch

Alistair Darling wants to make a feature of technology as an opportunity and challenge for the UK economy.

"I am struck by how much research is coming out of UK universities, but with 18 universities in the world's top 100, we should be seeing even more spin-off companies."

It's a familiar refrain. But note how few UK companies are in the top 100 for registering patents. Only Unilever made it, at number 98.

The mismatch between Britain's technology brains and its commercial application has never been clearer - except, of course, in Scotland, where universities punch well above their weight, and private research and development spend punches well below it.

It falls, most often, to small companies to make the running, in the hope either of growing and being bought or, some hope, of growing to global scale.

Dollops of funding

The UK Government's response is to get tech entrepreneur Hermann Hauser to analyse what others are up to, and to see what can be learned. That should inform some of the Budget decisions.

According to one press interview, Hauser's heading towards much more focus on only those technology areas where the UK already has a lead, and institutes which would plant large dollops of funding with sufficient time for the scientists to produce results. The German model he seems to have in mind involves the private sector providing a third of the funding.

The key then is to make those results count in spin-offs and spin-outs to the wider British economy. And as we know in Scotland, that's an established area of dismal failure.

Let's hope Mr Hauser's global vision, from Germany's Fraunhofer institutes to the research hubs for Taiwan and Korea, takes note of the failure of the Scottish intermediate technology institutes to provide such centres of expertise and activity - at least their failure so far to link innovation to significant commercialisation.

Angels investors

I've been hearing about one Scottish tech start-up in its very early stages, but with hopes of going global. It tells you a lot that Glasgow-based drugs-testing company Sistemic has only six employees so far, but it already has an office in Boston.

I was hearing about this from its chairman Jim Reid, an "angel investor" in life science start-ups, having made a wedge of cash from his share of the sale of Aberdeen-based Haptogen to Wyeth in 2007. At this month's Scottish Life Sciences Awards, he got the award for outstanding contribution to growth of the sector.

Reid's chairman of Sistemic, through his investment company, ChimaeraBio. (And here's a plea: would life science companies please come up with more memorable, useable brand names, rather than barely pronounceable website addresses?)

Sistemic - beaten to the trophy for best new start-up by Edinburgh's BigDNA - hopes to fill some of the gaps in drug-testing capacity being left by Big Pharma's big lay-off announcements in recent weeks. Its offer is to run computer tests at early development stages, along with "re-purposing" - an ugly word meaning the finding of new uses for old drugs, which are at their most useful when 20 year patents are about to run out.

Mr Reid's beef with the university sector in Scotland is the speed at which it releases its intellectual property. And while he says the Scottish angel investment community is as good as it gets, he says the biggest gap in developing the sector is the support for companies to find the next tranches of funding for growth.

So just when Scottish financial community is trying to re-calibrate its attitude to risk, here's a challenge to get stuck into life sciences, one of the riskiest investments of all.

You can hear Jim Reid interviewed on The Business, broadcast on ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Scotland on Sunday 14 February and available as a podcast or on ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer.