Alexander Todd - A Time to Remember

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.

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

Nowadays one often hears statements to the effect that civilisation is at a turning point and these statements are not infrequently coupled with a very gloomy outlook on the future of society or even with a denial that it has a future at all. Certainly it is true that there is much to discourage us the present scene. The subject was touched upon by the President of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States in his Presidential Report for 1977; he summarised the situation in the following words:

Consider the current scene: the largest, deadliest arms race in history, in a world that almost nourishes international tensions and conflict; self-defeating population growth in those nations least able to afford it; hunger and malnutrition on a vast scale; the countdown as domestic and foreign supplies of liquid and gaseous fossil fuels decline; uncertainty concerning the future of nuclear energy; pressure from the industrially less developed nations for a 'new economic order', generating ever harsher political strains; dependence of the industrial economy of the nation upon access to diverse mineral resources outside our boundaries, resources upon which we can no longer count simply because they are there; the economic consequences to this nation of the increasing industrial productivity of others; the new social problems attendant upon an aging population; the changing economic circumstances of various regions of our country; over-capacity of the nation's educational plant imposing constraints upon the career aspirations of young scholars; unsatisfied aspirations for opportunity, equity, and justice of various segments of our society; growing egalitarianism coupled, too frequently, with a lowering of educational standards; the twin spectres of unemployment and inflation; continuing decay of most of our cities; an inadequate but ever more expensive health care system; escalating costs of all services. Withal, we are sufficiently affluent to demand protection of the environment, both for aesthetic reasons and for protection of the public health, and to place ever greater emphasis on the safety of the materials, products and processes with which we traffic, introducing economic costs of considerable but uncertain magnitude.

These words were, of course, addressed to an American audience; but they could be addressed equally to a British one or to one from most other industrialised nations. And they certainly give food for thought. Change is inherent in progress (however one defines that term!) and so at all times people feel that there is something special about the particular period in which they live. Yet this is not necessarily so since our perspective of the present is distorting and the future is continuously being determined by us and by what we make of the present. Major transitions are rare although they do occur from time to time; one such was associated with the industrial revolution which began about two centuries ago and which has largely shaped the world we know today. That transition was, I believe, mainly due to one of the inventions that triggered the industrial revolution - that of the steam engine - which gave us access to plentiful and flexible mechanical power. All our tremendous scientific and technological achievements since then rest essentially on the stimulus given to society by that one invention. The social systems built up during previous centuries were unable to cope with the new circumstances of the industrial revolution and so there were many upheavals - some of them violent - from the French Revolution onwards during the period of flux before society, in the late nineteenth century, came to some kind of terms with the new world. But that accommodation could not last in the face of ever-accelerating technological advance and we are again in sore straits.

There are, it seems to me, so many similarities between the situation today and that of the early phases of the industrial revolution that, while acknowledging the difficulty of reaching an objective assessment of present events, I feel that we may indeed be living at another major period of transition. Again we have new inventions, all based, this time, on science, whose effects seem certain to be revolutionary and to impose severe strains - already becoming visible - on our society. Among the most vital of these new things are the harnessing of nuclear energy, the invention of the computer the explosive development of micro-electronics, and the remarkable advances in molecular biology. All these have been proceeding so rapidly that during the past twenty years we have been brought face to face with a new world and are forced to look anew at ourselves and to adapt if we are to play any significant role in it. This is especially true of Britain which, although it was one of the first and most successful countries in seizing the opportunities presented by the earlier industrial revolution and in adapting its society to it, has not been outstandingly successful in this new one. There is probably no single or simple explanation for our economic decline relative to some other countries but I believe its origins are to be found in the latter part of the nineteenth century and lie in the twin effects of our early industrial success and the great development of the British Empire. I suspect that the vast inflow of wealth from the empire had a feather-bedding effect on our economy so that we were able to turn a blind eye to our growing industrial obsolescence and our declining productivity during the burgeoning era of science-based technology. And despite all changing circumstances we have gone on diminishing in our wealth-producing capacity and matters have been made worse by our failure to adjust our social and political systems to a rapidly changing world. It could well be argued, too, that a similar feather-bedding occurred in some other countries as a consequence of colonialism and the exploitation of the agricultural and mineral resources of the underdeveloped countries. Now that these underdeveloped countries - partly through population pressure - want a bigger share of the cake the shortcomings of more than one western economy are being revealed. The oil crisis of 1973 came as a rude shock to the industrialised countries and seemed at first likely to make them face their problems realistically. In Britain the discovery and exploitation of massive oil resources in the North Sea and adjacent waters gave us a great opportunity — a kind of breathing space in which we could change our ways and build for a new future. I still hope we will seize this opportunity, although I sometimes fear that we may repeat our past disastrous behaviour and squander the proceeds of North Sea oil in propping up rather than reforming our antiquated economy so that before the end of this century we will be back in the mire again. There are disturbing signs that this may happen - deliberate overmanning and protection of jobs by subsidising lame duck industries rather than by the development of new industries and new jobs, low investment coupled with low profitability, and growth in public expenditure which seems to take little or no account of financial realities. In varying degree, of course, these or similar signs are visible in most industrialised nations and they have caused some people at least to argue that our civilisation is grinding to a halt and others to predict impending doom through exhaustion of the world's resources and inability to meet our energy needs. Personally, I cannot accept either of these gloomy predictions based as they are on what their proponents consider to be current trends. I have little faith in futurology, and forecasts of the future carried out by computer or crystal ball are about equally reliable. Of course the doomwatchers will be right if we do nothing and everything remains as it is now - but that is not, nor ever has been, the way the world goes.