Alexander Todd - A Time to Remember

As I approached the end of my five-year tenure of office as President of the Royal Society on 1 December 1980 I gave quite a lot of thought to the content of my final Anniversary Address. I decided to make it a vehicle for the expression of my views on the Society as it was when I became President and on the matters which, apart from my chemistry, had occupied me over many years, namely the relations between science and government in general, and the position in these matters which the Royal Society should occupy; I believe the best way to summarise here my views on these matters is to refer the reader to Appendix VI, in which I reproduce the relevant portion of my final Anniversary Address.

I thoroughly enjoyed my Presidency of the Royal Society, and it is my hope that I may have made some positive contribution in that position. It certainly provided me with an opportunity to influence, in some degree, action on many issues in public affairs in which I had been interested and involved over a period of some thirty years. The period between 1975 and 1980, however, is too close for me to give any considered judgement. When I look back further over my entire career, of which only a selective account has been given in these memoirs, it seems to me that I have been consistently fortunate in my family, my scientific work, and in my other interests. Chance, rather than design, has exercised a major influence -but that, I suppose, must be true for most of us.

Presidential Address delivered to the Durham Meeting of the British Association on 2 September 1970. (Advancement of Science 1970, 27, 70)

The impact of science on society has been discussed frequently and at great length by many people in recent years - so much so, indeed, that it would be difficult to put forward views on any single aspect of the subject which had not at one time or another been aired by someone else. Yet as a rule discussion has been fragmented; one speaker will talk about scientific manpower, another about science in developing countries, a third on how scientific advice should be made available to government, and so on. But the problems facing society today are so overwhelming that they demand our most urgent attention; in such circumstances the evidence we have regarding them warrants repeated discussion from all angles. In this Address I should like to take a rather broad view and to present certain thoughts and reflections which suggest, to me at least, actions which should be taken if we are to extricate ourselves from the social morass into which we, at times, appear to be sinking.

The first thing we must recognise is that science, although it has expanded enormously and with increasing speed during the past couple of centuries, has had of itself little or no direct effect on society. Nor could it have, since it is a cultural pursuit akin, indeed, to music and the arts; it seeks only to enlarge our understanding of the world in which we live and the universe of which our world forms a tiny part, using the experimental method which is its essential characteristic. What does affect society directly is technology. Not only does it do so now, but it always has done. From the moment when primitive man first used and fashioned tools and weapons, i.e. made his first technological innovations, his progress - and, indeed, his fantastically rapid rate of evolution - has been determined by technology, which is simply the application of discovery or invention to practical ends. The evolution of an animal species is, and must be, a very slow process when the species has effectively no control over its environment. This is where man differs from all other species -through technology he can consciously affect or control his environment, and down the ages he has been doing so to an increasing degree. There can surely be little doubt when one contrasts the development of, say, man and the chimpanzee from a common primate stock around five million years ago that the fantastic progress of one but not the other, especially as regards brain size, is hardly explicable save on the basis of a selection based at least partly on technological skills used in the control of the environment for man's benefit. I believe that man's evolution has been closely bound up with technological progress, and will no doubt continue to be so - for we must remember that, however much we may have interfered with the processes of natural evolution on the Earth, or however many species we have exterminated in the process, evolution is still going on and man as we know him today does not represent its end-point. At least, it will not unless man in his folly so misuses his mastery of technology as to destroy himself and the habitability of the Earth for any form of life as we know it. And the trouble is that man, by a series of enormous technological advances made in very recent times, has acquired almost unlimited power, at a time when his social progress gives no guarantee that this power will be wisely used. The nub of our problem today is fantastically rapid technological advance coupled with relatively slow social progress. When we look back to the very beginnings of recorded history it is clear that our early forebears had already gone in for some potentially risky technological innovation. After all, to embark on changing one's environment by developing agriculture, or even by the domestication of animals, was really a pretty risky thing to do in the light of knowledge then available. No doubt man's early progress was punctuated by local failures and disasters, for there is an element of risk in every advance. Successes, however, clearly outweighed failures and as man's technology advanced so too did his social organisation, from the family to the village or tribe, and then on through city state to nation and federation of nations, each step forward being associated with new or improved technology in some sphere of human activity. Consider, for example, the way in which great empires have risen and fallen under the impact of improvements in military or administrative technology. During all this time - and I am speaking of the past five or six thousand years - each new technological advance brought in its train social changes, but the peace of advance, although it gradually increased, remained on the whole slow until the period extending over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century which is commonly described as the period of the Industrial Revolution in the Western world. For this slowness, compared with the fantastic speed with which we have seen technology advance since then, there were no doubt many reasons, but I would single out the following three as being of prime importance:

(1) mechanical power was inadequate as long as man had to depend very largely on muscle power, whether of himself or animals;

(2) communications were inadequate, so that the spread of any innovation was very slow;

(3) technological advances depended entirely on the exploitation of chance discovery or invention.

The pace of social change due to technological advances during the historical period prior to the industrial revolution - although it was irregular and subject to wide local variations - was, of course, vastly greater than that of evolution which has, over millennia, wrought enormous changes in all animal species. But it was, in general, tolerable because it rarely involved revolutionary social or occupational changes within the span of one lifetime. Man, like all other animals, is essentially conservative; he seeks, above all, for stability within his own lifetime. So it was that he slowly built up a social system which was supported upon and legitimised by the traditions of family, religion and of State, all of which combined with a somewhat selective presentation of history to maintain a feeling of continuity and security for the individual members of society. Education rested largely on the tradition of apprenticeship; the child learned from his father or other master a craft or trade, and on completion of this training in early manhood he was provided with a set of skills sufficient to carry him through the whole of his working life. The age-old pattern of society - which, incidentally, entailed, for many, hardships which we would now regard as intolerable - was already showing ominous signs of cracking in the eighteenth century in Europe, mainly because increased communication by sea had both revealed new lands and brought Europeans more into contact with other civilisations which had evolved along slightly different lines from their own. But it was the Industrial Revolution which really triggered the process of dissolution by undermining, in rather less than a century and in succession, all three of the reasons I have already mentioned for containing the rate of material change in our society.