Angry scientists
Bernard Dixon
Britain's research laboratories are said to be simmering with discontent just now over the Government's continued failure to appoint a Chief Scientific Adviser. It is now nearly two years since Sir Alan Cottrell, Lord Zuckerman's successor in this post, retired to become Master of Jesus College, Cambridge. Since then, apart from evasive answers by the Prime Minister when the subject has been raised, nothing has happened. Sir Alan himself has publicly lamented the absence of a top scientist in Whitehall. And Sir Alan Hodgkin drew attention to the perplexing hiatus, when he gave his farewell address as president of the Royal Society last November. Coming from distinguished scientists who are in no way prone to public politicising, the anxieties aired by these two are significant reflections of the apprehension felt by the scientific community as a whole about its apparent lack of a strong voice at the highest level in government.
The merits and demerits of appointing a single government scientific adviser can be debated endlessly. There are, for example, legitimate doubts whether one person, however brainy, can aspire to deliver highgrade advice across the entire spectrum of modern science. It is, in fact, not so much the absence of this function that fuels scientists' current disquiet as their increasing belief that their interests are no longer conspicuously represented in Whitehall. Whatever the real nature of the job, the presence of a Chief Scientific Adviser to the government has enormous value as a tangible symbol of the administration's regard for science.
And right now is a peculiarly bad time for science and scientists not to have such a presence on high. To see why, we need to go back four summers to another period when Britain's boffins were fretting. In mid-1971, scientists working for the various research councils were waiting anxiously for what was to be the Dainton report—the result of a study by a working group under Sir Frederick Dainton on the future of the
research council system. Up until that time, the Medical Research Council, Science Research Council and the rest had operated on what was known as the 'Haldane principle', first enunciated by another committee of inquiry over fifty years earlier. Broadly speaking, this had led to a pleasing independence for the research councils, which were able to decide on their own programmes without external constraints from politicians or civil servants. Once money was voted their way, the boffins got on with their work without let or hindrance. It was this valued freedom which led, for example, to the Medical Research Council investing in the then outlandish new field of molecular biology in the 1950s. The result was a clutch of Nobel prizes for Britain and an unparalleled reputation in this important research area. What did not follow was any immediate pay-off in the sort of discoveries leading to the prevention or treatment of disease.
The Dainton report was published in November 1971—and was then almost immediately forgotten. The reason for its eclipse was its appearance, within green 'consultative' covers, alongside another report, written by Lord Rothschild, then head of the Central Policy Review Staff. It was the Rothschild report—on the management of government-financed research and development—that proved to be the bombshell. Its central recommendations threatened the sacred Haldane principle and introduced an altogether new element of accountability into the work done in government research institutions and through the research councils. An incredible fifty or so letters appeared in the correspondence columns of the Times in the weeks following publication of the report. Most came from angry scientists who were convinced that the acceptance of Rothschild's ideas would gravely threaten the continuance of any scientific work whose practical value was not immediately apparent.
For what the good Lord had suggested was the customer-contractor principle: 'The customer says what he wants; the contractor does it (if he can); and the customer pays'. This would mean government departments approaching research councils with potential projects, and the cash to pay for them. Quite a change from the previous system, in which the Department of Education and Science had simply handed out money to the research councils without strings attached.
When the government came to act on the report, it announced partial acceptance of this principle. So today, government departments (for example, the DHSS in the case of the Medical Research Council), control a proportion of the funding for projects pursued towards a defined practical aim--such as the development of a new antibiotic or nuclear reactor. Another constraint is that some contracts now placed for research in the universities are of a transferable type, such that the scientists involved may be required to change direction and work along different lines should someone in Whitehall decide.
This, then, is the uneasy background against which one must interpret such further bombshells as the science cuts announced in the recent White Paper on Public Expenditure. Research workers were already feeling—rightly or wrongly—that fundamental ('curiosity-oriented' is the American term) science was in increasing danger from the demand for visible payoffs.
Now the scientific community is having to face the likelihood that, in one major field at least, Britain may not be able to support a viable programme at all.
According to the White Paper, the Government intends `to reduce expenditure in the areas of "big science" (high energy physics, astronomy and space science) supported by the Science Research Council, in order to sustain other sciences (including applied science) supported by that council, and to enable the Agricultural, Medical, Natural Environment and Social Science Research Councils to continue to develop programmes based on social need as well as scientific opportunity'.
The implications of this for just one field —that of high energy physics, which is concerned with exploring the fundamental structure of matter—are devastating. S0 named because of the tremendous power required to accelerate particles for use as vanishingly tiny missiles to probe the makeup of atoms, this type of science is very expensive. Financial cuts now mean that one of the machines used in Britain for such research, at Daresbury near Manchester, will cease operation at the end of next year. Another accelerator, at the Rutherford Laboratory in Berkshire, is also in jeopardy. The money left will do little more than buy our subscription to CERN, the European high energy physics laboratory located at Geneva.
Let us be clear about this. Inflation and the cabinet dog-fight over priorities and savings have forced the country virtually to abandon any domestic research in one of the most fundamental branches of science, a field which in a sense provides the underpinning for the disciplines of chemistry, physics, and biology. Radio astronomy too is going to be hard pressed to survive in the few years ahead. The cuts have not been a result of Rothschild-style reorganisation. But taken together with Rothschild, they mean that science in Britain is being compelled to concentrate largely on projects that are inexpensive and of practical utility, at the expense of more costly and more esoteric science, hoWever great its theoretical, conceptual and indeed cultural importance: That, rather than the mere lack of highgrade scientific expertise, explains why many scientists are so unhappy about the continued exclusion of one of their mandarins from the top echelons of government. Their concern is understandable.
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