Alexander Todd - A Time to Remember

The invention of the steam engine was perhaps the most important feature of the early phase of the industrial revolution, for it put into the hands of man cheap mechanical power on a scale previously undreamed of. Not only did it revolutionise industry, but on land and sea it enormously increased the speed and scale of communications. New industries grew up, new materials of all types were imported into western Europe and from it a stream of machinery and manufactured goods flowed out to other parts of the world. Not only did the European Powers spread their influence over primitive areas such as America and much of Africa, but their aggressive new technology found the old and rather different civilizations of the Orient totally unprepared, and thus an easy prey to commercial and military aggression. The rapidity with which all these things occurred put an almost intolerable strain on existing societies, and unrest associated with the rise of an industrial proletariat was widespread by the middle of the nineteenth century. This, however, was but the beginning, for something new and vitally important to the development of technology happened round about the mid-century - something so important that I feel it could properly be said to have ushered in the Second Industrial Revolution, which has continued until today and whose far-reaching consequences we have not yet, perhaps, fully appreciated.

What we usually call the Industrial Revolution - I would prefer to call it the First Industrial Revolution - had little to do with science. It involved technological advances due to the exploitation of chance discovery or invention, and in this respect was no different from anything that had gone before. Men like Boulton and Watt were essentially inventor-entrepreneurs rather than scientists. Natural science had, it is true, been advancing steadily since the so-called scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, but although its theoretical basis and its corpus of knowledge were growing fast it was, prior to the mid-nineteenth century, mainly a pursuit of the amateur, and its impact on everyday life was small. But around the middle of the last century men of science began to apply the scientific method and the results of scientific research to the solution of industrial problems. Perhaps it is because I am a chemist that I am particularly struck by what happened in chemistry. In this country, for example, the young William Henry Perkin in the year 1856 produced a purple dye - mauveine - in the course of some over-ambitious attempts to synthesise the drug quinine. Perkin was not simply a scientist; he was also by nature an entrepreneur. Before this time the dyeing of fabrics had always been carried out with dyes like indigo, madder, etc., extracted from natural sources, but Perkin realised not only the commercial possibilities of mauveine, which he proceeded to exploit in a small factory at Hounslow, but he and others began deliberately to apply their chemical skills to the fashioning of more synthetic dyes of different colours. Thus were founded the great organic chemical industries of today, for it was from the dyestuff industry that the synthetic drug industry developed, as well as a host of others giving us entirely new materials - plastics, detergents, explosives, fibres and so on. This, indeed, was the birth of what we now know as technology - the application of science and the results of scientific research to the solution of practical problems: industrial, military, agricultural, medical and organisational. It is the new technology which has revolutionised our lives in this century and which has advanced at an ever-increasing speed, fed by, and itself feeding, a similarly advancing science.

I need not endeavour here to enumerate the sensational advances which have been made in almost every aspect of material existence, especially during the past fifty or sixty years, culminating in the staggering feat of man's landing on the Moon and his sending of further probes to other planets in the solar system. It is perhaps pertinent to remark here, however, that the part played by computer technology in space exploration, and the rapidly widening application of computers in industrial, administrative and medical work, may foreshadow yet a third industrial revolution with consequences as far-reaching as those of the second. The impact of these advances has been universal, but it has varied in scale and form in different parts of the world and has tended to increase rather than decrease the material gap between the rich developed countries and the poorer underdeveloped areas. In the growth of this gap the enormous rise in world population, which was an inevitable consequence of the Industrial Revolution and the development of medical science, has played, and continues to play, a major part. It is not now my purpose to discuss the problem of population control; suffice to say that it is a problem of the greatest urgency and one which man must solve if his aspirations to a better life in a world at peace are not to be stifled by sheer growth in his numbers.

Everywhere it is evident that economic strength, and with it national stability, are dependent on technological progress, and it is difficult to think of any area of national affairs in which science and technology are not involved directly or indirectly. Under such circumstances it is hard to believe that correct policy decisions can be reached in a democracy whose members are ignorant of science; and yet that is, even today, very much the position in this country. Educational patterns and social attitudes are closely related and both are slow to change for the reason I have already mentioned - the need which man feels to seek stability during his lifetime. So it is that while science and technology have been bringing about vast changes in our material existence at an ever-increasing pace we have failed to match them with appropriate social and educational changes. I believe the root of our present problems is in fact educational, that much of the frustration evident among young people is a symptom of our failure to adapt ourselves to rapid technological change and that we would do well to give educational change a high place among our priorities. Failure to do so could be disastrous, since the powers we now possess to alter drastically our environment are so great that, improperly or foolishly used, they could menace our own survival.

Advancing technology has brought with it great material benefits which have been widely spread throughout the entire population, so that the general standard of living has everywhere been raised and leisure increased. As a consequence there has been a gradual elimination of class barriers and a continuous movement in the direction of equality among members of our society. This has expressed itself in many ways, and not least in the demand for universal education which would give all children equal opportunity to develop their talents to the full. Response to this demand came first at the level of primary education, then moved on into secondary education, coupled with a rising school-leaving age, and now, with the added pressure of population growth, the demand is being made for universal tertiary education. There is really nothing surprising about the current push for tertiary education; it was quite predictable. But the general prolongation of the period of education to the age of twenty or twenty-one which it implies is, in my view, likely to present society with acute problems unless we can offer each individual the type of education appropriate to his or her future role in society. For the majority the education must have a vocational content such that they can proceed at the end of it to suitably lucrative employment without a further period of training akin to the old-fashioned apprenticeship.

There are two major difficulties in our way. The first is the failure to recognise that natural science is just as much a branch of culture as literature, music and the arts and that it is not in any sense a subject for the specialist only. In school curricula it should be part of the education given to every child and should be treated on all fours with the standard compulsory subjects like English, history and the rest. Unless this is done we will never have a scientifically conscious democracy. The second is that we must make available a diversity of types of tertiary education and must avoid over-emphasising (as we now do) the virtues of the traditional type of university education, especially when it is applied in a context for which it was not intended. Both of these problems are serious, but neither is insoluble. The necessary broadening of school education is gradually taking place, and the speed with which it is happening will increase as we get rid of current prejudices in the field of tertiary education. Over the last century or so we have built up in England a pyramidal system of education in which we started children in the primary schools at about five years of age and instituted from the age of twelve onwards a system of selection based on academic ability, under which those rejected at each successive selection step were channelled off into various technical forms of education or training. Each successfully completed step in this selection process was accompanied by increasing specialisation until, finally, at the top of the school pyramid there was left a small highly selected group which then went on to university. University education was, of course, highly specialised, but was designed, in each speciality, to offer to an intellectual elite the maximum opportunity to develop their intellectual and creative powers. Now, it is true that we did not operate the system very well, and that, in the past, social privilege may at times have been given more weight than academic ability; but at least that is the system which we built up, and I myself believe that, for the past forty years, during which secondary education has greatly expanded, it has been operating more and more on the basis of academic ability alone. During the past ten years or so we have seen a vast increase in the number of applications for university entry - so much so that we have roughly doubled the number of universities in order to meet the demand for places. Now we are told that we can expect a further doubling in numbers, so that by 1980 we are likely to have 450 000 students in our universities. Such an increase, if it is to be absorbed, would almost certainly entail the creation of more new universities, although a good deal of the pressure could be relieved by increasing the size of the present universities, some of which are so small as to be barely viable, to around 10000 students each. But is this increase in the number and size of universities of the traditional type really desirable? I do not believe that the traditional type of English university education is appropriate for such a large proportion of each age-group; it was designed to deal with a small minority of our young people which was believed to be creative and to have powers of leadership. That such a group or elite exists must be clear to anyone who has been concerned with higher education, and it should, and indeed must, be given every opportunity to develop its power to the full. But that group is not going to amount to 450 000 in 1980; what a large proportion of that 450 000 ought to pursue is some other form of higher education with a different and greater vocational bias. Already the expansion of numbers in our universities has reached a point where the inappropriateness of the system to many of the entrants is evident. This is why we hear so much about bringing the universities closer to industry not only at the graduate level but also by giving a more industrial orientation to undergraduate courses in science, technology and (through management studies) the social sciences. We must remember that in this technological society we need a relatively small number of creative scientists and technologists to generate new ideas and a vastly greater number of technicians whose task it is to apply these to practical use. It is nonsense to suggest that both these types should have the same training, but I sometimes wonder if we pay sufficient heed to this problem. Somehow or other we seem increasingly to equate higher education with traditional university education and to regard the obtaining of a B. A. or B.Sc. as the goal to which all must strive. This 'degree fixation' has its roots in our own educational history but it has been powerfully reinforced by the argument that in the United States of America, one of the great 'super-Powers' of this century, the educational system is such that far more people take college (i.e. university) degrees than in this country. It is always difficult to make direct comparisons between countries with different cultural and social backgrounds, and there are some features of the American educational scene that are often overlooked in this country. One which I think is relevant to our problems is that although America has created a large number of university-type institutions giving Bachelor degrees of a rather general character and of a standard academically somewhat lower than the English Bachelor degree, with the increasing numbers flowing into higher education a marked hierarchy has developed within the system. Nowadays it is evident that a small number of universities are emerging as superior institutions working at a higher level than the others and with a large graduate element. It sometimes seems to me that those who advocate the adoption of a generalised American-type system of higher education do not realise that already America is moving away from that kind of system towards one which is more like the one we have built up slowly in this country. There is much talk of a new system of British universities in which there would be a two-year general degree followed by a further two-year specialised degree for a selected group and finally a very restricted two-year doctorate group. If something on these lines is adopted, as I believe it may well be, then we will have to come to some kind of hierarchical system in our universities - and perhaps it would be better to plan for a range of different types now rather than wait until change is forced upon us by circumstances. But whatever system is finally adopted I hope we will bear in mind that we need far more technicians than scientists and technologists. If we train too many of the latter then many of them will have to follow the career of technicians for which their training was not designed and which they will tend to regard as 'inferior' to that which they expected; the result will be a frustrated 'white-collar' class, with all the dangers to society that such a class implies.