When Sir Keith O’Nions was chief scientist at the Ministry of Defence, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, British Intelligence picked up what he describes as “a signal”.

Radiation sensors deployed at a British port had sounded an alert: gamma rays were coming from a container. Amid widespread fears about the prospect of a “dirty bomb”, the potential threat was chilling.

The suspicious cargo, however, was rather more prosaic than trafficked nuclear material. It was a large consignment of fruit juice.

“It turned out it was concentrate that had come from Eastern Europe, from an area where there was still a large amount of radioactive fallout from Chernobyl,” Sir Keith explained in an interview with The Times. “It wasn’t at a hazardous level in the fruit, but when concentrated into a juice the signal was strong enough to measure, though not harmful.”

The false alarm still weighs on the scientist, for his latest job is to head Britain’s first academic centre devoted to exploiting cutting-edge science to improve security at every level from terrorist surveillance to identity theft, e-mail “phishing” and protecting sensitive memory sticks. The Institute for Security, Science and Technology at Imperial College London will scour the research world - from physics’ quest for the “God particle” to biological insights into bacteria and viruses – for innovations that could make us safer.

The fruit juice incident is a perfect illustration of how basic science that was never intended to have security applications is already being used to that end, and of how far such systems could still be refined.

The sensors that picked up the radiation were originally developed by astronomers to track gamma-ray bursts – the most violent explosions in the Universe, so powerful that an event 3,000 light years away could destroy life on Earth. But, as the juice proved, even this highly sensitive tool is not quite fit for purpose. “What you really need is not to say, ‘Ah, I can find some gamma rays coming out of that container,’ but to say, ‘Actually, what sort of stuff is it?’,” Sir Keith said. “And if it’s something that’s very low and fruit juice, it’s all right.

“You need to distinguish between that and hospital waste that may be the forerunner of a dirty bomb. You can have very sensitive information, but you always need more sensitive information.”

That, he hopes, is where the new institute will come in. Imperial is the largest science and engineering university in Britain, academic home to thousands of experts whose work just might have security spin-offs, such as those from gamma-ray astronomy.

Sir Keith’s challenge is to join the dots, so that research that could have security applications isn’t missed. “The trick is actually spotting where that great piece of progress that has been made in nuclear physics may connect to sniffing a gas or an explosive, welding those two things together.

“In a normal academic world you’ve got nuclear physics over here and biology is over there. How do you create an environment where more than happenstance brings those people together, so they say, ‘My God, I’ve got something that could help with that’?”

He is particularly excited about potential gains from the world’s biggest scientific experiment – the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator at the European Cern lab near Geneva that will fire up next month.

The £2.6 billion atom-smasher’s main goal is to prove – or to disprove – the existence of the Higgs boson, the elusive “God particle” that is supposed to give matter its mass, but which has yet to be detected. But it could also provide clues to processing mountains of surveillance data that arefiendishly difficult to interpret.

“This is no more than an intelligent guess, but the thing about the Large Hadron Collider is that it pushes several things to new limits in technology,” Sir Keith said. “One is the detectors themselves; the sensitivity has moved to a new level. The other is the capacity to handle huge amounts of data.

“Effectively, they’re looking for the odd event that says, ‘Ah yes, we’ve got one of those,’ against a background of events that may be a billion or ten billion. It’s looking for the event that actually tells us that the Higgs boson exists, against a lot of information that’s not actually very useful.

“Now that’s great. They may find the Higgs boson and understand gravity, or they may not. Then you think well, what else can you think of in the world of security where finding the real event among billions of background events may be important? Well, it’s all a bit of a no-brainer.

“If you think of the amount of remote observation that’s made, of looking for rare events within that, you can start to see that it would not be surprising if some of these mathematical and computational techniques found their way into security, where you’ve got very large amounts of data and you’re looking for that rare event.”

Cern’s software might be adapted for crowd surveillance, in tools that analyse body language for clues to a criminal purpose. “One of the questions is what more can be done to make crowded places secure, whether it’s the Tube, the football, the Olympics. What you’d really like to know is the intent of every soul that is in the place. What you’re looking for is the odd person who is carrying something, who has some malign intent.”

The institute will also be looking at wider security issues, such as better protection of personal data and financial transactions. Sir Keith is well placed to run an interdisciplinary programme. As well as defence experience, he was until recently Director-General of Science and Innovation – the senior civil servant running the science budget. One of the main themes of his Whitehall tenure was an effort to persuade medical researchers to do more “translational” work, aimed at moving their discoveries more quickly from bench to bedside.

Sir Keith sees parallels between this and his latest challenge. “What we’re talking about is translating basic research, in the physical, biological, engineering and mathematical sciences, into solutions for the benefit of society and the population and its security,” he said. “So in that sense it’s similar. It’s quite useful to think of this as a translation exercise and nick the term from the medics.”

Sir Keith O’Nions

Age 63
Scientific training BSc, University of Nottingham; PhD in earth sciences, University of Alberta; Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Oslo
Academic career Lecturer in geochemistry, University of Oxford; Professor of Geology, Columbia University; Royal Society Research Professor, University of Cambridge; Head of Earth Sciences,
Government jobs Chief Scientific Adviser at Ministry of Defence, 2000-04; Director General of the Research Councils, and then Director General, Science and Innovation, which involved managing the £3.4 billion science budget
Other positions held Chairman of Trustees, Natural History Museum
Honours Fellow of the Royal Society, 1983; Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, 2005; Knighthood for services to earth sciences, 1999
Family Married, with three daughters

Times Recommends

• Don't despair: great players learn from defeat
• Pope clears way for Cardinal Newman sainthood
• Ecclestone: despots are underrated