Alexander Todd - A Time to Remember

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.

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 economically and without fuss the enormous task of expansion that they were set by the nation less than fifteen years ago.