How Much Does the Scientific Ecosystem Change over Time?

Posted on January 26, 2025 by Athene Donald

Desmond Bernal was an outstanding crystallographer. Not himself a Nobel Prize winner, he set the likes of Dorothy Hodgkin and Max Perutz on their own successful paths to that accolade. A Communist, he fell from grace during the 50’s and 60’s due to his unwavering commitment to the Russian regime and the (discredited) theories of the geneticist Trofim Lysenko. However, before and during the second world war he was one of the giants of British science, heavily involved with providing scientific advice to government during the war and appreciated as a polymath with a grasp of many subjects beyond his own field, and beyond science itself. He easily slipped from the analysis of X-ray patterns before the war into modelling bomb blasts and the statistics of the way they damaged life and property during the Blitz.

I have been rereading his biography (J.D.Bernal The Sage of Science by Andrew Brown) and that has pointed me to his massive and influential 1939 work The Social Function of Science. Inevitably, parts of this will have dated very badly, but there are an uncanny number of comments about the state of science in society then which still ring horribly true. People often talk about how the satirical 1908 description of Cambridge life from Francis Cornford (Microcosmographia: Being a Guide for the Young Academic Politician) echoes across the years, with its downbeat assessment of how business is done – or not – within the University and how to be influential, for instance. I think this ringing true equally applies to much of Bernal’s text, only now applicable across the country’s research ecosystem. It, however, was not at all satirical but deadly serious, intended as a call to action for society.

Most people practicing science in our universities would sympathise with the statement ‘Nor are the actual emoluments of the young research worker really adequate’ for instance. The 1930’s may not have had to endure the REF, but the publish or perish culture was clearly alive and well:

One more peculiarly damaging to science is the necessity incumbent upon all research workers to produce results and to see that they are published.…for it is on his published results by number and bulk as much as by excellence that his future depends…Another result is to burden scientific literature with masses of useless papers.

One should remember back then papers were not online. Wading through the Science Citation Index – a very substantial collection of tomes which was the necessary route for me and generations before (and after) to try to track down who had cited which paper/ whose papers had been cited – was hard work in a library, not something one could skim through at one’s desk, and useless papers just take up unnecessary space. Such papers are probably even more prevalent now, with predatory journals cluttering up reading matter with papers of dubious quality. How does one separate the wheat from the chaff as a young researcher, especially if you obey the DORA mantra and don’t look at citation indices?

Bernal was a friend of CP Snow’s, whose PhD thesis on The Structure of Single Molecules at one point passed through my hands when the Cambridge Colloid Group and its library were disbanded. Indeed Bernal ‘appeared’ as Constantine, a brilliant polymath scientist in Snow’s first novel The Search. It is therefore interesting to wonder what his influence was on Snow’s fury about the two cultures, exposed in the 1959 Rede Lecture of that name in Cambridge. Bernal writes, twenty years before, that ‘Among people of literary culture there is almost an affectation of knowing nothing about science.’ The worry is that may still persist, although my concern would be not that this impacts on literary culture so much as those who studied literature may then go on to control policy decisions involving science. Bernal worried about that too:

The lack of proper appreciation of science is not confined to the public at large; it is particularly powerful and dangerous in the fields of administration and politics.

It is not for nothing that Angela Maclean, as GCSA, has aspirations (seemingly met) of getting 50% of the civil servants entering through the Fast Stream route to come from a scientific discipline.

However, clearly Bernal has encountered some who have access to policy decisions when he makes the statement

Somebody who knows the Prime Minister suggests that something might be done for a particular branch of research, and in that typically English way scientific research carries on.

Whether it is somebody knowing the Prime Minister personally or some other Cabinet member, as they come and go, there may still be too much truth in that about what areas of research get moved up the funding agenda.

My motivation in turning to The Social Function of Science was to consider Bernal’s views on education. In the Brown biography these are given as (taken from another 1939 publication Science Teaching in General Education)

  1. To provide enough understanding of the place of science in society to enable the great majority that will not be actively engaged in scientific pursuits to collaborate intelligently with those who are, and to be able to cricise or appreciate the effect of science on society.
  2. To give a practical understanding of scientific method, sufficient to be applicable to the problems which the citizen has to face in his individual and social life.

Those aspirations seem valid today as much as 80+ years ago. However, Bernal obviously felt back then that what actually happens in schools falls far short of this, and the words he wrote may currently be of relevance to the ongoing Curriculum and Assessment Review. Bernal writes somewhat sardonically

Actually for the convenience of teachers and the requirements of the examination system, it is necessary that the pupils not only do not learn scientific method but learn precisely the reverse, that is, to believe on the authority of their masters or text-books exactly what they are told and to reproduce it when asked, whether it seems nonsense to them or not…the only way of learning the method of science is the long and bitter way of personal experience….It is unfortunate that the easiest modes of testing knowledge and those which on the average will give the fairest results are precisely those that are the least valuable from the point of view of acquisition of scientific knowledge.

The phrase ‘teach to the test’ was clearly as appropriate then as now. Bernal, as an FRS, was no doubt very aware of the Royal Society’s motto ‘Nullius in Verba’, clearly at odds with the sentiment in that first sentence above.

Finally (in as far as I’ve just picked out a few sentences from the entire book) what about the stereotypes that schoolchildren may get exposed to? This is a topic on which I have previously said much, because I believe it is discouraging for many children when they cannot see examples of people like them. Bernal had thought about this ; his description here is also probably tending to the satirical when he writes

This does not usually take the form so often imagined, of the scientist as an other-worldly person who can only just manage to keep alive through the assistance of female relations.

I don’t believe that was a sexist comment in the modern meaning of the word. Bernal supported many female researchers, including Hodgkin as I’ve already mentioned. He was merely reflecting the inevitable norm of the day, of the male scientist with a stay-at-home wife (a domestic scene somewhat at odds with his own chaotic life, where he had many lovers including Hodgkin, and children by two of them. One of those I was at school with, perhaps reflected in my own interest in the man.)

Bernal is no longer revered in the way he was. He turned up in my undergraduate lectures as the man who tried to unravel the structure of liquids using plasticine spheres in a sack, to come up with the model of random close packing. I taught that too, when I lectured on Materials to undergraduate physicists. But his work on crystallography is so fundamental it is probably now invisible to many. As the biography – and his own writings – show, he was a man of many interesting parts.

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Unreactive Audiences and Pertinent Questions

Posted on January 19, 2025 by Athene Donald

Given that it is now a decade or more since I was particularly involved in research, if I am asked to give a seminar – usually to students, sometimes undergraduates, sometimes and more commonly PhD students and early career research researchers – I always make it plain that I won’t be giving a purely technical talk about my research. I was amused, before my last such talk, to be told by the undergraduate lead that they get fed up with speakers waxing lyrical about some minute area of physics that goes straight over the head of the majority of the audience. In prospect, they seemed excited I might talk a bit more about my policy and gender work.

However, when it came to it, I gave my talk to an audience that seemed totally unreactive. I am always encouraged when I spot someone nodding their head sagely, or smiling at some mildly ironic remark. To get some feedback from at least part of the audience is reassuring, even for people like myself who’ve given hundreds of similar talks. To talk to quite a full lecture theatre who give no sign of engagement can be unnerving, provoking the thought that there is no interest or one is talking over their heads in gobbledygook. At the end of my talk, when I asked for questions, there was a long time (well, it felt like a long time), before anyone tentatively raised their hand. Slowly, over the next fifteen minutes or so, the questions started to flow. Sensible, thoughtful questions but clearly from a nervous audience who weren’t used to putting their hands up in such a situation.

After the end of the talk, there was a plentiful supply of pizza, and a further opportunity for students to come and talk to me one-on-one. And, despite what had happened over the previous hour, come they did. It turned out that they had been paying close attention all along, and wanted to press me for advice but, given the majority of them were undergraduates they just weren’t as confident about speaking up in public as most of the audiences I encounter. I should have factored that in; a lesson for me to remember.

Some of the discussions I did have were particularly heartening. The student who said they felt ‘seen’ was especially moving. Others were seeking advice I’m not sure I was in any position to give. One asked me how to decide what to do post-graduation if they had no idea what they wanted to do. I suggested they went to their careers service, but that had already been tried and it didn’t seem to have lead to any breakthrough in their thinking.   Beyond that, I suggested that they should try something that they felt might be of interest and, since jobs aren’t for life, it should be easy enough to move on if it was wrong. I often feel it’s important to remember there is no single right answer to questions like these, and many routes might turn out to be satisfying. If for every one of us there was a unique solution, we’d all be frozen doing nothing in case we didn’t find it. ‘Good enough’ is often good enough, and may lead to something that’s even better.

In the public questions, there was one question in particular that needs further thought for all of us. I had mentioned that sometimes people aren’t necessarily easy to deal with. This was paraphrased back to me, as ‘how do you learn to deal with jerks?’, although I’m pretty sure the word jerk had not passed my lips. (I have written about that characteristic several times in the past, such as here). The reality is in most sciences – as opposed to engineering – there is little time to practice team-work and thereby start working out personal strategies. Wherever you end up working, there will always be people who rub you up the wrong way, do things that irritate you (or indeed, not do things that need to be done, thereby also irritating you) or claim undeserved glory when they’ve not pulled their weight. There isn’t an easy way to handle them, and managers/leadership won’t always notice. Getting used to finding your own tactics for staying sane while pushing back on the behaviour that’s getting you down takes time. There are some people – as I was told firmly by a trainer on a course for ‘dealing with conflict’ – that you can never get on with. If you’ve been trying, the chances are that’s their problem and fault not yours. Nevertheless, finding some strategies is important.

I believe, as the world of work is changing, employers increasingly want team players, employees who can work well with others. Yet our education system is more likely to focus on facts that can be crammed in and then examined, than on anything to do with interactions with other people. This is true in schools, and it is true in most university science courses. Just as with promotion in later academic years, we reward the individual. Industry is not like this, and employers typically don’t want individuals like that on their workforce either. Soft skills – such as the ability to collaborate – matter to them as much as the technical, yet universities don’t help very much with developing those skills. We should think harder about the bigger picture, and not just cram facts that can be tested, but which can also easily be found online if needed for future use.

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We Haven’t Had Enough of Experts

Posted on January 3, 2025 by Athene Donald

When I talk to student groups, as I still do quite often, I talk as much as what else one can do with a science/Physics degree beyond the obvious, as about the research I used to do (quite a long time ago now). I like to encourage them to think about careers beyond the academic lab and roles for which their science education will provide an excellent base. Obviously, teaching is one where the need for more graduates entering the profession is crucial, particularly in Physics where the shortfall is massive: in 2023 only 17% of the target for trainee teachers in the subject was achieved, ‘up’ (if one can call it that) from 16% the year before. But I also like to highlight the policy arena, both politics itself and the civil service.

Angela McLean, as GCSA,  has stressed the desirability of having more scientists in the civil service, with a specific science and engineering fast stream, which is steadily growing. There were 113 participants in this scheme in 2023, compared with 18 in 2015. The more generalist fast stream entry now has a (Cabinet Office) target of 50% of their new entrants being scientists, a figure that was achieved, and even exceeded, in 2023. However, having achieved that, it is important that their scientific expertise, their numeracy and analytical thinking skills, are put to good use. Reading an account of how the Civil Service is deployed in Ian Dunt’s 2023 book (How Westminster Works….and Why it Doesn’t), may make one question whether that is, in practice, the case.

Dunt discusses the history of the civil service from its reform in the 1850’s, following the Northcote-Trevelyan Report. At that time, civil servants were expected to be generalists, coming typically from Oxbridge with an arts degree, but expected to be able to tackle anything. My grandfather – who read Classics in Cambridge before the first world war – would occasionally talk about the Indian Civil Service exams he sat after his degree. My memory is imperfect of the things he said to me during my teenage years, but these exams involved something like fourteen separate papers covering different topics over three days. I assume the questions were similar to those old types of name the principal rivers in Mesopotamia or list the kings of England in the thirteenth century, but I never pressed him on that. Not necessarily, however, knowledge particularly useful even to an Edwardian civil service – or India come to that. I don’t know if he ever intended to go to India (I often think of the questions I wish I’d asked him, but wasn’t interested in at the time, plus I had zero appreciation of the consequences of colonialism back then), but he ended up as a clerk in the House of Commons instead, where he formed a dim view of both Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. The war put an end to that position, as he headed off to France.

But enough of the personal detour, although recalling his account of the exams he sat may have mislead me about the more modern civil service. Dunt points out that many people over the last 50+ years have raged against the lack of specialist knowledge the civil service system utlises (and it is the structure he is railing against, not the individuals serving). He quotes an essay from 1959 by Thomas Balogh entitled The Apotheosis of a Dilettante and the 1968 inquiry led by Lord Fulton, who highlighted the issues around generalism and churn. Then, as now, people get moved on as the obvious way to gain promotion, so that knowledge gained in one sphere becomes irrelevant a couple of years (or less) later. For, according to Fulton, scientists and engineers – and yes, even in 1968 there were such people employed –

‘get neither the full responsibilities and corresponding authority, nor the opportunities they ought to have.’

I suspect Dunt doesn’t believe much has changed since then, and he rails against the widespread use of consultants instead of constructively using what experts they do have. He states:

‘On a very basic level, government departments have no idea what skills, knowledge or experience their staff have, because no one bothered to track it. Many departments do not collect basic workforce data…’

There are government departments where science sits squarely and centrally in its policy-making and their teams include many scientists. But, as I discovered some years back when I became chair of the Science Advisory Council for the Department of Culture Media and Sports in 2015, that particular department had precious few scientists on its staff, about one as I recall. (It didn’t even at that point have a CSA, only a deputy who was an economist.) That position changed subsequently when it assumed responsibility for digital, between 2017 and 2023 until DSIT took on that responsibility.

Talking of DSIT reminds me of a visit I made to its predecessor, BEIS, soon after the creation of UKRI. The primary focus of that visit was to stress the importance of UKRI making progress on interdisciplinary funding, for instance through the newly announced Strategic Priorities Fund, and I was talking to some of the staff assigned to UKRI from BEIS as it got going. I may have thought I was going to talk to those who knew what was going on, but ended up realising I was instead giving some new and junior staff a tutorial about how grant-funding committees worked. I was disappointed that the direction of knowledge transfer was from me to them, not vice versa, but I hope they found it useful. What I do recall was the insertion of various Latin epigrams into the conversation by one of the civil servants, and I left feeling that he, like my grandfather, had a Classics degree from Oxbridge, but that it didn’t mean he had a good grasp of how UKRI could or should operate. I had to hope I had inspired him to do more homework.

Now I work with another Department (the Department for Education) as chair of their newly formed Science Advisory Council. They have now, and for the first time I believe, a CSA (Russell Viner, a paediatrician) and a small science team, actually populated by scientists, one which probably could usefully be larger. I am excited to be working with them, and excited by the signs of genuine cross-departmental working under the new government’s missions. I am also encouraged by the willingness of those in Whitehall and elsewhere to talk to me about their work and potentially mine. I hope Dunt is wrong in his pessimistic analysis of the way Westminster works, or doesn’t; and that the vital place of STEM within Whitehall is fully recognized in our increasingly technologically-led society. We live in a world in which innovation and growth are crucially important for our economy and consequent societal wellbeing but which can only be delivered with a well-functioning education and skills system. All of which requires an appropriate spread of scientists and engineers across government departments.

 

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Praise and Possibility

Posted on December 15, 2024 by Athene Donald

Anyone who watched the final of BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing will have heard words like ‘resilient’, ‘belief’ and ‘self-confidence’ thrown in the direction of the four finalists by the judges, with all contestants having been on a ‘journey’. It got a bit boring, all this waxing lyrical, but perhaps being told that this or that finalist had demonstrated to the general public that ‘anything is possible’ is just a tad over the top. Yes, the overall winner was blind comedian Chris McCausland, and what he had achieved was indeed truly remarkable, not least because he had started out with little self-belief. Furthermore, his professional partner Dianne Buswell, must have had extraordinary skill and patience to work out and carry through the tricky art of teaching someone the look and execution oof a dance when they cannot see what they are doing, or even meant to be doing.

However, this is an academic blog and there is a point to that opening paragraph beyond revealing Strictly is a secret pleasure of mine, that does bring a smile to my face. I worry that being told ‘anything is possible’, with the best of intentions, is a bit of a lie. If you are doing an experiment in a lab with inadequate equipment, then you aren’t very likely to make a major breakthrough. If you are setting out on a PhD, however determined you may be and however dedicated to research, the sad truth is academic careers are a pyramid and just because you believe in yourself does not mean your journey will end up with you winning a Nobel Prize, or even a permanent position as a professor. Sadly, there are more people setting out than become tenured and although it is ‘possible’ it is by no means certain and keeping trying is not an infallible route to success. In reality, many things can intervene, ranging from bad luck (e.g. results being scooped) to bad supervisors. More on the latter to follow.

However, a so-called growth mindset is undoubtedly going to be helpful, the belief that being good at a subject is not simply about innate talent, but also about a work ethic and putting in the hours to build on the strengths you do have. Not giving up the first time something goes wrong, but keeping going until it is clear that, for whatever reason, success is not going to meet your endeavours. So, words of encouragement to keep a student going through the inevitable tough days, reinforcing resilience and self-confidence are definitely helpful, but that does not mean that an academic career beckons, even if the award of a PhD does.

One of the things that angers me most about some of my academic colleagues is that they may say, sometimes in totally blunt ways, if you don’t end up like the boss you are a failure. In other words, that any career other than academia is beneath their notice. Which is rubbish. We need scientifically-trained people in many parts of the economy, from journalism to Whitehall, from heavy industry to the classroom. Just because a PhD student leaves academia does not make them a failure. On the contrary, they may be using their skillset in wonderful and productive ways, which cannot be said about all academics.

Very often something professors don’t say to their teams is that they are doing a good job. A student may be struggling for all kinds of reasons, personal or professional, but if they are sticking at something, that in itself is a positive and should be celebrated. Such kind words may help someone progress and develop more confidence. A recent article in the FT spelled this out in a very different context (of course, a more financial setting and language), articulating that praise may help to offset lower pay, encouraging someone to stay in a job rather than move on elsewhere dissatisfied with their lot.  As the article said

Once you earn enough to meet what you deem to be basic needs, you are more inclined to value non-remunerative aspects of work, such as praise and appreciation.

The same may apply in academic science. Praise shouldn’t cost anything to the supervisor, but can be received as something of real value by the recipient and help them to go on to better things. But, that doesn’t mean that if every supervisor praised every student they would all stay in academia. Of course not, it doesn’t work like that.

Nevertheless, I think academic supervisors should pay more heed to encouragement and devote less time to trying to convince a student that quitting the lab for some other profession equates with failure. Goodness knows, we need more physics teachers in our classrooms, more scientifically-qualified civil servants and more journalists who can readily explain exponential growth, to take a specific example. The scientific training acquired during a PhD is a wonderful basis for many careers that don’t have science in the job title. Each student who takes their skills into a different sphere is helping to improve our nation’s scientific literacy, the benefits of which may be uncertain, but are certainly important.

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Living in Silos

Posted on December 8, 2024 by Athene Donald

When I first started writing this blog in 2010, I imagined I was going to write about the science that interested me, the latest papers in my field that caught my eye, and specifically highlight the excitement and challenge of working across boundaries in interdisciplinary areas. I was troubled by the difficulties scientists who worked, as I did back then, in areas that crossed research council boundaries faced in obtaining funding. Specifically, I worked at the interface between physics and biology and saw, despite the good intentions of those working at EPSRC and BBSRC (there was no UKRI back then), who regularly assured me that every grant would find a home, that what was meant by a ‘home’ was a panel that would evaluate an application. And this was not, and would not be now, the same thing as finding a panel that was able to judge it fairly because of the breadth of their expertise. I saw a grant I had written for EPSRC be rejected by them and sent to a BBSRC panel for which it was totally unsuitable, something I knew full well as I was the chair of that particular panel. Of course it failed, as I wrote about previously.

In time, my vocal raising of this issue wherever I could, did not lead to any more success in grant funding, but it did lead to me chairing the REF2021 Interdisciplinary Advisory Panel where I hope we were able to do a little to change the monoculture of panels involved in decision-making during the process. In particular, we stressed that excellent research could be done which did not need to be cutting edge in all or indeed any of the component parts: the excellence could lie in the overall integration. I hope some similar approach will inform the current REF round, in which I will play no part.

It is a long time since I last wrote a grant proposal, successful or not. During the last decade I served on the European Research Council’s Scientific Council (across the Brexit referendum) and discovered that a single overarching research council does not solve the problem of grants that transcend any particular boundary imposed between panels. UKRI faces exactly the same issues only now with two tiers: gaps between research councils and gaps between panels within a single research council. In an attempt to solve this problem, there is now an explicit interdisciplinary research strand, the cross research council responsive mode pilot scheme which has recently closed its second round. Although I was involved in training panel members for the interdisciplinary college for this call, I have no information on how well the first round progressed or was received. I would be interested to hear from any readers who know more.

But the disjunction that occurs when people work in silos can be found in many places far beyond academic research. Now much of my work is in the policy arena, rather than research science, I have been rereading Roger Pielke’s classic text The Honest Broker. I was struck by the following text inserted into a section on the failure of the so-called linear model, in which it is naively assumed that basic/pure research leads to applied research leads to product in the market. Apparently a reviewer of an early draft of the book said there was no need for a discussion of this because ‘the STS (science and technology studies) audience know all this already’. I remember I got a similar comment regarding my own draft manuscript in which I presented data about gender and science from the social science literature and was told this was all well-known to social scientists (although I cannot immediately lay my hands on the exact quote). The idea that an author might be writing for those who already know the stuff seems to me to be a strange way to approach a book draft where, surely, the whole point is to reach those who don’t know the stuff. But reviewers can be narrow-minded – as anyone who has ever received a referee’s report will know only too well – and not appreciate that an important point of working across disciplines is to bring solid facts to new audiences and to new problems. In my case, I wanted practicing scientists to learn about what the social scientists could tell them about gender issues in the classroom and whether specific interventions might work. I was not aiming my book at the social scientists who knew their own literature already.

However, the reality is, any organisation – be it a university, a UKRI, a business or a government – has to structure itself into some sort of units, and there will always be joins with friction or gaps between them. A recent HEPI blog by Gavin Miller took exception to the whole of the concept of silos as being inappropriate, claiming ‘The term ‘silo’ invokes a mystifying metaphor – that of the university as a living, intelligent organism’ (I’m not sure most readers would claim a university as intelligent, although they are often organic). But nevertheless, whether an organisation is considered to be living or not, there can be no doubt that junctions between units can be problematic and the need for keeping them as frictionless as possible is vital.

In a different guise, but arguably a far more important space, the new Government has recognized this in identifying its five cross-departmental missions, instead of relying on individual departments to solve the myriad problems of the day (subject, of course, to Treasury approval). There is no doubt that science will have a major role to play in just about all these identified areas, but how easy it will be for different teams to share enough of a common language (often a problem in interdisciplinary university research, where local jargon and acronyms can rule the day), or shared goals of both a short and long term nature, will remain to be seen. In the not-too-distant past, universities benefitted from having a minister (notably David Willetts and Jo Johnson at different times) who had a foot in both BEIS, now of course defunct, and the Department for Education. Sometimes a minister who sat in Cabinet. Now that formal linkage is gone, but if the ‘opportunity for all’ and ‘growth’ missions are to succeed the linkages will be more important than ever across different groupings of departments (issues far beyond universities themselves). Breaking down silos, departments, disciplines, whatever language you want to use, does really matter.

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