A Time to Remember

by Alexander Todd

  During the past few years there has been much concern over the ill-treatment and indeed persecution of individual scientists in a number of countries by governments differing in their political stance. Many of us have been approached from time to time with the request that we sign a declaration or letter of protest about individual cases; such approaches have emanated both from private individuals and from organised bodies and the degree of documentation provided has varied. As President of the Royal Society I have myself- as no doubt has my predecessor in office - been approached with the request that the Society should associate itself publicly with such protests. But I have not acceded to these requests; for this reason I feel I ought to make my position in such matters clear.

  Of the cases brought to my attention recently the commonest are those in which it is alleged that a Soviet scientist has been subjected to various forms of persecution including in some cases incarceration in a prison or psychiatric hospital for no reason other than that he, or some member of his family, has requested permission to emigrate. As presented, such cases represent the grossest violation of the Declaration of Human Rights embodied in the Charter of the United Nations to which all of its member countries have subscribed. The violation is, however, made neither better nor worse by the fact that the victim is a scientist rather than some other member of the community. Such infringement of human rights should be a matter for public condemnation and action by the United Nations. Alas, that organisation has not been very active in this respect; nor can one feel optimistic about it when one recalls the deplorable action taken by one of its organs, Unesco, over participation in international scientific meetings.

  It is entirely right and proper that individuals should express their indignation about such cases by declarations or in any way they wish, but it is hard to see in what way the Royal Society can occupy a special position in the matter of human rights in general. I have already mentioned in these remarks the Society's three-centuries old insistence on freedom of scientific enquiry and discussion from direction or restriction on political, religious or racial grounds. This has again been made abundantly clear as recently as four years ago by its adherence to the Declaration on this subject issued by the International Council of Scientific Unions and by its cooperation with that body in efforts to uphold it in all its member countries. Moreover, in appropriate cases the Society has drawn and will continue to draw the attention of the Soviet Academy of Sciences or the corresponding body in any other country concerned, as well as our own Government, to the facts and to the need for action with, I believe, good effect. It is my firm belief that the Society as such can achieve much more in this way than it can by subscribing to or issuing public declarations. For it must be recognised that a scientist, as such, is in the same position as any other citizen of his country, subject to the same laws and having the same obligations to the society in which he lives. His profession does not entitle him to special privileges which are denied to his fellow citizens; nor should it deny to him those privileges which are the right of every man.

  APPENDIX III. Extract from Anniversary Address 30 November 1977

  Reprinted from Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B. 200, x-xiv (1978)

  A year ago in my first Anniversary Address to the Society I discussed the problems of freedom in science both with respect to choice of subject and the right of individual scientists to freedom of movement and discussion with colleagues. Today I should like to examine in a little more depth some specific problems which beset science and scientific research in our country although science is not the only facet of our society so beset nor are the problems confined to one country. For this is above all a disappointing period in our country's history. The coming on stream of oil from the North Sea basin does not conceal the fact that the 'white-hot technological revolution' we were promised never came to pass and the 'pound in our pocket' is far from being what it used to be. In much of industry - but fortunately not in all of it - there has been so little profit for so long that some manufacturers are allowing their plants to run down and are even skimping on the research and development which must surely be essential to any regeneration of British industry. In the country at large there is a widespread feeling that the legitimate expectations of the early 1960s have somehow been frustrated. We all know that we are less prosperous than we ought to have been and it is cold comfort to observe that some other countries are equally beset by inflation and ailing economies. This is a time of unsatisfied aspirations of the young for opportunity and one too of growing egalitarianism coupled too often with a lowering of educational standards. Those of us who work in education and especially in higher education cannot but sense the irony in the contrast between government's enthusiastic launching of the Robbins expansion in 1963 and the stagnation of the present. Some there are who fear that our universities may be irreparably damaged as a result of present crises. I do not myself share that view for I believe our university system is at once too robust and too flexible to succumb. But what seems to me to be beyond dispute is that they, like many other institutions, will emerge transformed from the series of crises through which they are passing; whether for better or for worse remains to be seen.

  In this, the Silver Jubilee Year of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, it is appropriate that we should consider our successes and failures during the past twenty-five years and seek to profit from them in planning the way ahead. And our record in science and learning is an enviable one. We have indeed accomplished much in these twenty-five years and British intellectual life remains vigorous as ever; our scientific research is still flushed with success and full of promise. During this period no less than thirty Fellows of the Society have won Nobel Prizes and outstanding contributions have been made and continue to be made in many and diverse fields of science - in radioastronomy, astrophysics, chemistry, neurophysiology, plant genetics and molecular biology, to mention only a few. But in the present period of economic gloom the cry goes up - what has all this exciting work done for the country's economic problems? All kinds of people and, perhaps most ominously, many politicians ask why a country in such economic straits as ours should support academic research like this. Hasn't the time come when the universities should be harnessed to the regeneration of the British economy and the research in them devoted to the needs of manufacturing industry - to making better transistors or motor cars or even sewing machines?

  Such criticisms are based on a profound misunderstanding of what universities are for and on a failure to appreciate what they have done for us since the last war. It is too easily forgotten that between the 1940s and the Robbins Report in 1963, government, industry and, indeed, the country at large was crying out for more and more trained scientists and engineers. In the chorus of complaint about their irrelevance to the country's economic needs it is too often overlooked that the universities have discharged their responsibility superbly in this respect. In less than a quarter of a century the numbers graduating in science and technology from British universities have multiplied by three and the numbers graduating with higher qualifications in technical subjects have increased still faster. And although many of these young men and women have been trained in institutions where people worry about such things as 'black holes' or bacterial genetics - for uncommitted research is a necessary adjunct to training - a very large proportion of them has found its way into the productive sectors of our economy. Indeed, for the first time in our industrial history, industry has enough technically trained people to satisfy its needs. Moreover we have now lived through the period when the burgeoning universities and polytechnics were two of the principal consumers of their own products -trained and talented young people. Unfortunately, as I shall discuss later, there is now a serious danger that the universities may be unable to recruit and retain the stream of young teachers and research workers on whom, in the longer term, their health and survival must depend. Those who claim that the universities have become 'irrelevant' forget that the universities have accomplished ec
onomically and without fuss the enormous task of expansion that they were set by the nation less than fifteen years ago.

  Sometimes one hears complaints that there is something wrong about the education of scientists and technologists in our universities because many companies find that new graduates do not slip easily into their new roles in industry. But it does not follow from this that there is anything radically wrong with our university courses; the acclimatisation of new recruits has always been a problem in industry and many devices have been tried to meet it. The reasons for the dissatisfaction that undoubtedly exists are at once more subtle and more complex. It remains true that the creative scientists and technologists of the future must be recruited from among those who have a broad grasp of what technology is about so that they can meet not just the present needs of industry but also those which industry has not yet foreseen. These are the people the universities seek to provide and it must be remembered that adherence to traditional ways and resistance to change for essentially social reasons are by no means uncommon in some sections of industry. It may well be that those graduates who are not going to proceed to a course of research before taking up employment would benefit from attendance at some kind of vocational M.Sc. course which would give them an introduction to particular features of industrial life. It could also be argued that in our rush to expand university education we have sucked into this stream of tertiary education a substantial number of those who might have been more appropriately trained through the more vocational education which it is the function of polytechnics to provide. But although minor changes should, and no doubt will, be made, I do not think there is anything fundamentally wrong with our university training in science and technology for those who are to play a leading role in industry and especially for those who are to provide the drive behind research and development.

  This brings me back to the question of university research. This is a matter of major importance to the country's future, for research in universities has a double function. On the one hand, it has a training function which is vital to the development of creative scientists and technologists and which, although exercised primarily at the postgraduate level, also permeates the undergraduate years through its effect on the teaching and on the liveliness of the teaching staff. On the other hand, it has the function of advancing the frontiers of knowledge and the provision thereby of new facts and concepts upon which future technology must depend. If it is to fulfil this double function adequately academic research must be essentially uncommitted. This is not to say that it should have no objective - all research must be committed to that extent; but it should not be dominated by short-term practical or economic objectives. It is for this reason that proposals for joint industry/university Ph.D. courses or that universities should orient their research to meet specific industrial needs are, in my view, misguided. Industry is the proper place for industrial research; this, I hasten to add, is not to belittle in any way the contributions made incidentally by many university departments to industrial research and development. Similarly if government considers there is need for oriented research to support defence or meet the needs of nationalised industries it should make full use of its own research establishments for the purpose. There is often talk of a gap between certain industries and the university departments of science and technology related to them. But to the extent that it exists it is a gap of understanding which can be put right by closer personal contacts. It will not be closed by endeavouring to make university research departments do the job of industry or vice versa.

  In Britain, unlike some other countries, most of our pure or uncommitted research is carried out within our universities or in units (as, for example, those of the Medical Research Council) closely associated with them physically and drawing on the same pool of young postgraduate students. And this is indeed one of the great sources of strength in our system. For in my view - and there is much evidence to support it - if research is to be of the highest quality over a long period it must meet one or other of two requirements. Either it must have definite (and preferably changing) economic objectives as, for example, in industry or in a mission-oriented government laboratory in which case it can operate with a mainly permanent staff or, if the objectives are not economic, high standards can only be maintained if there is a constant throughput of fresh young minds - a situation which obtains only in universities. I believe that it is largely because it has recognised this that Britain has maintained a consistently high standard and has such an outstanding record in scientific research; the system we have of concentrating most of our uncommitted research in universities is in fact one of our greatest assets.

  That is why I and many of my colleagues are deeply concerned about the reduced level of support for university research which is apparent at the present time. It is, of course, clear that we must all tighten our belts and that there can be no question of continuing the fantastic growth in research funding which characterised the 1960s. The universities clearly must live with whatever level of research funding government is able to afford. But to do so we should be selective and concentrate on those centres where the greatest potential for progress lies. This is not an argument for or against so-called 'big science'; it is simply a recognition that when funds are not unlimited choices must be made and that these choices should not be made on the basis of 'big' or 'little' but on the quality and promise of the people in particular fields of science and on the likely pattern of demand for scientific manpower. At the present time university research faces two major problems. The first is the growing obsolescence of equipment in some sciences owing in part to spreading what money we have available for research too thinly over too many places, not all of which are of the standard we would wish them to be. The second, and perhaps in the longer run the more important, is this. As I mentioned earlier there was a period in the 1960s when the creation of new universities and the expansion of the old was proceeding so rapidly that they were consuming a large proportion of their own products to provide them with adequate staff. A very large number of permanent university posts were thus created and filled by young men and women of effectively the same age group all of them with many years of service ahead of them before retirement. On top of this the acute financial stringency experienced by the universities in recent years coupled with an easing of the pressure on entries has caused many universities to restrict severely the filling of posts rendered vacant by retirement. Such action, understandable enough from the university administrator's standpoint, has, of course, almost completely blocked the way ahead for many of the bright young men and women now coming forward who would normally have been absorbed into the university system at this stage in their careers and would thereby have helped to maintain its momentum. This state of affairs has in varying degree affected most faculties in our universities but its effects are especially dangerous in science. For these bright young scientists, although small in number, are the seed corn for the future of our industries. Without them, the research they promote, and the training they impart to their students, the necessary new knowledge will not be made available to regenerate and maintain British industry which will come to depend more and more on foreign know-how. And the danger is real: other countries see in our error their opportunity and in the absence of a real prospect of developing and exercising their talents here who can blame our young scientists if they take them elsewhere?

  To identify a problem and to diagnose its origin is relatively easy but its solution or, better put, the amelioration of its effects is at once more difficult and more important. The major provider of money for university research is Government through the University Grants Committee and the Research Councils. These bodies are necessarily subject to a measure of political constraint although the experimental introduction of an advanced fellowship scheme by the Science Research Council shows that the existence of the problem has been recognised by at least one of them. The sums at the disposal of the Royal Society are very much smaller
but even so I believe there is an opportunity for it to make a significant contribution. The Society has in its gift some eighteen research professorships and a substantial number of research fellowships of various types. We are hoping to use these professorships and fellowships as they become available to provide support for outstanding younger scientists and to build around them small groups of advanced workers so as to provide nuclei to initiate the scientific discoveries of the future and to retain and develop the best of our young people on whose work our technological future will ultimately depend. There are of course many problems to be faced and not least that of ensuring continuity. For the Royal Society cannot enter into a permanent commitment to maintain a group or unit. After a period of years - perhaps five or seven - a group supported in this way would either have fulfilled its aim and be ripe for dissolution or it should be taken over by and incorporated in the university where it is located. Those of us who have had experience of the takeover problem as between charitable foundations and the universities are well aware of past difficulties but I do not believe they are insurmountable. Only time will show if the efforts we are making will be successful; but I believe the attempt should be made and that it is in the best tradition of the Royal Society. In these days of rampant egalitarianism our concern for an elite in science may be regarded by some as outmoded. But it is not. In science the best is infinitely more important than the second best; that is the belief of the Society and a country which ignores or forgets it does so at its peril.

  APPENDIX IV. Extract from Anniversary Address 30 November 1978

  Reprinted from Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A. 365, xii-xvii (1979)