Alexander Todd - A Time to Remember

And so I come back to the over-rapid expansion of our universities in the 1960s and to the disastrous age-distribution in our university staffs which has resulted from the way in which it was carried out. The unfortunate circumstance that we have since then entered upon a period of acute economic recession has entailed severe restraint on the money available for teaching and research and led to resources being spread too thinly over too many centres. I have indicated in the course of my Address where I believe our problems lie and have only posed some of the questions which could be asked about research in our universities and the ways in which it is promoted. But in the last analysis it is difficult to see any real progress being made unless we can do something about our ageing university staffs and the lack of openings for our brightest young academic scientists.

Unfortunately there is no quick or easy answer. From their own resources universities themselves can probably do little and the breakdown of the quinquennial government-grant system makes forward planning well-nigh impossible for them. I believe that the efforts being made by the Society to support future leaders in research and the Science Research Council's scheme of advanced fellowships are valuable but in the aggregate they can provide only a small contribution to the solution of a very large problem. A reduction in the university retiring age to sixty without any reduction in pension would undoubtedly speed up return to a normal age-distribution, but whether in present circumstances government would be willing or indeed able to face the very large expenditure which would be necessary is doubtful. Encouragement of voluntary retirement at fifty-five with generous financial compensation has also been suggested but would probably not be welcomed by more than a few individuals, and even if it were generally acceptable it would be altogether too costly. Nevertheless I believe the problem must be tackled and that some of the unpalatable things I have said in this Address may help to point the way. For example, if we accept that there should be a kind of hierarchy in universities and that some of them will be much more devoted to vocational teaching and less to research than others, then only in a proportion of our universities need the situation be treated as urgent. These urgent cases could well have a retiring age of sixty (with full pension) introduced even if only temporarily so that a more normal flow of young academics could be reintroduced in them. This would certainly cost money but a great deal less than any blanket procedure applied to the academic system as a whole. I have not attempted a detailed calculation but I believe the overall cost would be tolerable. But it would involve the introduction of much more diversity into our university system than we now have, and this alone would make it worth while.

To do anything like this with our dual support system in its present form would be difficult and it is not surprising that under present circumstances many academics are beginning to ask whether the present system can continue. The more successful universities are probably right in thinking that they would secure a greater share of the resources available if they were able to compete within a more flexible framework and suggestions for change will certainly increase if the prediction of a decline in student numbers in the 1980s proves well founded. Perhaps it is not too soon to be thinking of the best form such a change should take.

Reprinted from Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A. 211, 6-13 (1980)

In four previous Anniversary Addresses I have touched on a variety of problems of current interest and importance which, although matters of public concern, were in some of their facets of peculiar moment to scientists. Today in delivering my fifth and final Address to the Society as its President it is perhaps natural that I should look back not simply on my period of office but also on the thirty-eight years that have passed since I was elected to the Fellowship and reflect on some of the changes which have occurred and on our situation today. For changes have certainly taken place in the Society as in the world outside it! At the time of my election in 1942 there were 460 Fellows and 48 Foreign Members; the number of Sectional Committees was 8, of National Committees 9 and the total staff numbered 15. Today we have 900 Fellows and 85 Foreign Members with 12 Sectional Committees, 27 National Committees and our staff numbers approximately 100. In the same period the number of Fellows elected annually has risen from 20 to 40. This enormous growth is of course a reflexion of the increasing fragmentation of science and the large increase which has occurred in the number and importance of scientists and technologists in this and other industrialised countries since the last war. With the recent increase in annual admissions to 40 it is clear that for good or ill the size of the Fellowship will be considerably larger than it now is before anything like a steady state is reached. One obvious result of all this has been that the Society has become more impersonal, and Fellows living in areas remote from London have felt increasingly isolated from its activities. In efforts to mitigate this Council has introduced the Royal Society News and is now considering the possibility of holding Discussion Meetings outside London. But other changes, some of them relating to the Society's concern with national policy, have occurred and it is perhaps instructive to look back at their origin.

When I was elected to the Fellowship in 1942 we were in the midst of a world war, and many of the activities in which the body of Fellows normally participated were either in abeyance or severely restricted. I had, as it happened, some basis for comparison because as a young research chemist in the thirties I had become much more aware of the Royal Society and its activities than most of my contemporaries through my father-in-law Sir Henry Dale. Sir Henry, who had been Biological Secretary from 1925 to 1935 and was to be President from 1940 to 1945, was, like many of his friends and colleagues on the biological side - men like Sherrington, Adrian, Hopkins, Mellanby, Barcroft and others - devoted to the ideals and traditions of the Society. To me in those days the Royal Society seemed like a rather exclusive gentlemen's club where occasional rather ill-attended meetings were held at which short scientific papers were read and after which the Fellows dined together at the Royal Society Club. In other words, it still had much of its original character after nearly three centuries of existence in London. In 1939 its main source of income was from private sources and the Parliamentary Grant-in-aid was £15 500. (For the current year the Grant-in-aid is £3.72 million and far outweighs our private income.) The Society had a few statutory involvements with government but these were not onerous and did not interfere with its essential independence. Even in those days it was recognised as the country's national academy of science, and as such acted as adhering body to the various international scientific unions which were in the early stages of their development in the decade or so before the last war. Its concern with public policy was limited until the exigencies of war thrust responsibility upon it.

The role which science should play in determining national policy has been the subject of almost continuous debate during the past thirty-five years and it is, in my view, relevant to any discussion of the position of the Royal Society today. The term 'science policy' which is widely used nowadays is, of course, a misnomer, but it is used umbrella-fashion to cover a variety of things which really fall under three headings - policy for science, scientifically based policy, and public policy determined in the light of available scientific information. Let me first try to exemplify them.