Imperial measures – but measuring for what?

Posted on December 10, 2010 by Austin

In which we get a glimpse of the future. And it isn’t very comforting.

Somewhere else in the Blogoverse, I recently wrote that:

“In Universities up and down the UK, University managers are considering the implications of the Government’s funding cuts.”

And:

“…most Universities are planning for significant real-terms cuts in the budget, whatever happens on Thursday.”

As UK readers will know, one part of the picture is clearer today. The vote on University tuition fees – the “Thursday” referred to – has happened, and the Government  prevailed by a small, but clear, majority. The consequence is that Govt direct funding for University teaching is to be slashed by 80%; henceforth, UK students will have to pay most, or even all, of the cost of their tuition.

The axe will fall hardest in the arts, where the Govt is cutting away all tax-derived funding for teaching. But sciences will not be immune, either.

Now, Universities Minister David Willetts (especially) and Business Secretary Vince Cable have been making a lot of noise about how the increase in direct fees (i.e. paid by the students) will make the UK’s Universities  take teaching more seriously, and “improve teaching’s status”.

I have to say that I have yet to meet a single person who actually works in a University who believes this.

And I wouldn’t see research losing its grip on University priorities, and hence on academic career progression, any time soon. Indeed, my prediction is that as the amount of research cash that there is to be given out decreases – another consequence of the cuts – the Universities will be getting more, not less, obsessed with grant-getting.

Which in turn has consequences. One hears a lot of talk in the UK’s research-intensive Universities these days about the need to “disinvest” in “less than excellent research”. Another word one hears a lot is “concentration” – which is a euphemism for what you do by “disinvesting”.

Now, over the 25 years I have worked in UK Universities it has always been true that the individuals most likely to be shed in University voluntary redundancy campaigns – and I’ve lived through at least a half dozen – are academics in the 50+ age range with primarily teaching “portfolios”. These people do not boost the research profile, goes the argument, and you can always get someone cheaper to teach the class – or you can not replace them at all, and simply make everyone who is left take on a bit more teaching.

What is new in the ConDem world is that active, but relatively less profitable, areas of research are set for the same treatment. That is, people with active labs, and probably PhD students, and possibly even grants, are going to be in the cross-hairs too.

The last time this was true was when I first came into academia; the Thatcher years of the 80s, much invoked lately by pundits seeking parallels with the current austerity and funding cuts.

When this kind of thing comes along, the individual character of institutions and their bosses comes to the fore. Some are more aggressive about “getting ahead of the game”, others less. Some simply opt for a voluntary redundancy scheme and hope enough people sign up to cut the wage bill by an acceptable degree. Others, especially now, will see it as a chance for “radical restructuring” – or,  of course, in the new vocabulary, “concentration”.

Among all UK Universities, I would have picked Imperial College London as the one that has historically thought and behaved the most like a business. Early import of management practices borrowed from business, takeovers, attempts at major mergers (like the aborted one with UCL a few years ago) etc etc.. You can also see it, I think, in their choice of VCs/Principals and where they come from – ex-business honchos (like Richard Sykes, ex Glaxo) rather than ex-academics.

Of course, Imperial is one of the UK’s research powerhouses. It employs many excellent scientists – dare we mention our own Stephen Curry – who do first-rate research. I also imagine it provides its students with an excellent education. When we were discussing Imperial on a medical blog recently, one blogger whose kids had attended the college also stressed Imperial’s commitment to “enterprise and entrpreneurialism”. That rings true for me, and in some ways Imperial is more like a US University than any other UK institution. However, Imperial also has a reputation among UK academics for being a pretty hard-nosed employer, and generally seen as fonder than most UK Universities of restructurings and redundancies.

And now today I understand that a whole subsection of plant scientists are Imperial are set for the chop. There is an article about this from the Imperial College students’ paper here, and a letter from an Emeritus Professor – I’m guessing the former head of the threatened grouping – can be found here.

You will perhaps note with interest what he says about teaching, and things other than research in general.

I wonder if Messrs Willetts and Cable are following?

And finally, I am feeling a bit like Cassandra. In one of my comments to the parent-of-Imperial-students I wrote that:

“The answer may well be that Imperial is a very good place to be a high-flying academic, but not a very good one to be an average academic. But all Universities actually need (perhaps slightly better than) average academics too.”

And I also said something else:

“Of course, I suspect the UK Government would likely regard [Imperial] as a model”

So perhaps David and Vince will be paying attention after all.

For, judging by what I am hearing from my friends in the other UK Research-intensive Universities, I fear that what is happening at Imperial is very much the shape of things to come elsewhere.

————————————————–

I will update this blog as more information about what is happening at Imperial becomes available. It is notable that the articles I have seen so far contain no official statement from the college, though I understand they were asked for one. There has also been an open meeting for students and staff a couple of days ago to air their views about the impending “rationalisation”, though as yet I have seen no report of what the Imperial management said there.

Posted in Science policy, The Life Scientific | 15 Comments

Errm… let there be light?

Posted on December 7, 2010 by Austin

In which I postulate a philosophical question…

…to which the correct answer is, and will probably continue to be:

“Nah. More like a whole load of hot air”

Those of you who used to hang about on Nature Network, where this blog previously had its home, will know that there is some sort of a correlation (though I am not aware of a formal study…. anyone know one?)  between science geeks and sci-fi film buffs.

Hence the inauguration here with a bit of vintage sci-fi.

And the rather laboured allusion in the title is to whether scientists blogs to spread enlightenment, or simply to sound off a bit.

The answer, of course, is almost always a bit of both – though around here you can probably expect more of the latter.  Like  a lot of bloggers, I don’t really have a thematic plan (let alone a scheme for global domination) .  I tend to blog about what’s on my mind. Indeed, when  I was trying to think up a bio for the new blog, I was half tempted to call it

“A Trawl of Unfinished Ephemera”

Now, a big chunk of the point of moving here from NN, at least for me, was to try and reach a bit more general readership – partly by having a more open comments policy than NN did, but that’s one for another time. People who read the old NN blog will know what sort of content and tone to expect here. But since, like I said,  I’m hoping for new readers, and since I am not nearly as well-known a blogger as some of my fellow OTs – now now,  no scientology jokes, please – I thought I would give any newbies some idea what you can expect from Not Ranting.

So what’s it going to be?

Looking back over the year that the blog has been running on NN, I see that I could classify the posts into roughly the following categories:

Pseudoscience                    23%
History of science                18%
Science policy                     14%
News & events                    14%
The life scientific                 9%
Annoyances                        9%
Communicating science      5%
Research                             5%
Science fiction                     5%

So expect some pseudoscience (which leaks in from my other blogging), a good slice of history, some science policy, a bit of other miscellanea, and a general tone of low level grousing.

Enough of this navel-gazing. Tell us about the film!

Finally, lets get back to that excellent movie clip.

As a last aside, like many a scientist (and science blogger) of a certain age, I remember the lunar landing programme of the late 60s and 70s as being one of the key things that sort of defined for me what “science” was.  But, again like a lot of kids, I was also an avid viewer of space, and science, fiction – Lost in Space, Star Trek, Doctor Who, and so on. So the blame for my scientific career lies with the film makers. They are the guilty men.

Anyway, for those that didn’t recognise the source of the clip, it is from low-fi 70s sci-fi classic Dark Star, a favourite movie of my younger brother and me ever since we first saw it in our teenage years1. Dark Star has been a bit of our joint history, one of those films we share lines from as private jokes. And I started up my NN blog almost exactly a year ago with a short piece about the film, triggered by the news that screenwriter Dan O’Bannon (one half of the team that produced the film, along with director John Carpenter) had just died, aged only 63.

The running gag of Dark Star is the one about – what if space travel turned out to be really, really REALLY boring? With people stuck together for years, thoroughly fed up with one another’s company, eating monotonous food and doing monotonous things on a malfunctioning spaceship?

Any resemblance to working in life in general, of course, is purely deliberate.

For those too young to have ever caught Dark Star, perhaps its most obvious descendant, at least on British TV, is the comedy series Red Dwarf (official website here) which seems to me to owe much of its “Waiting for Godot in space” premise to Dark Star. Of course, Red Dwarf has other obvious antecedants in 70s sci-fi, including Alien and another “space will drive you crazy” cult classic, the proto eco-movie Silent Running.

Perhaps the best known single sequence from Dark Star is the end of the film, featuring the philosophical and talkative bomb (see  above). However, you may get more of a flavour of the film overall from this short sequence.

If you’ve never seen Dark Star, it is well worth digging out on DVD or video (do they still have those?) to see what 70s film-makers could do with a quirky vision, next to no money, improvised-on-a-shoestring special effects (by O’Bannon) and an absurdist deadpan sense of humour. At least if the film-makers were talents like Carpenter and O’Bannon.

—————————————————————–

[1] Sadly, I really am that old. It crept up on me.

Posted in Procrastination, Science-fiction | 4 Comments

If you can’t march, write

Posted on October 8, 2010 by Austin

I’m afraid I am not going to make it to the “Science is Vital” march on Saturday, so as a penance I have done two things today – spammed all my work colleagues (again) with an email exhorting them to sign up and to pass it on, and written to my MP.


The letter to my MP, who as a LibDem is a member of the governing coalition, is below. I’ve tried to mix the Science is Vital boilerplate with some stuff specific to my University, with the idea that this might concentrate the MP’s mind.


[Of course, he probably won’t read it, given its Austin-verbose length. But he might]
———————————————————————————–

Dear John

I am one of your constituents. I am also a lecturer in Physiology at Manchester University. I would like to ask you to help us to preserve Britain’s science. Please could I ask you to :

– sign EDM 767 – Science is Vital
– sign the Science is Vital petition
– attend a lobby in Parliament on 12 October (15.30, Committee Room 10).

The evidence is abundant, and clear, that investing in scientific research brings a range of economic and social benefits. It is also clear that severe cuts at the very moment that our competitor nations are investing more could jeopardize the future of UK science. While I understand that the country’s economy is in a weak state, it seems clear to me – and to most commentators – that cuts to science and to Universities will actually harm the economy.

Heavy cuts in research will waste the investment already made in facilities and people. For instance, Manchester University has put a major investment into new bioscience research laboratories over the last 10 years. Parts of these buildings now lie empty, because staff have left and not been replaced, or because anticipated recruitments have not occurred as a direct consequence of the current financial uncertainty.

Cuts will hurt research. They will not eliminate waste. In my own field of bioscience research, competition for funding is fierce, and only one in six research proposals gets funded. All of the proposals funded, and a large numbers of the ones that are not, are rated internationally excellent.

The non-funded applications represent a vast burden in terms of the time spent preparing them. Cuts will only exacerbate this. In addition, academics are astonishingly thrifty with research funds, stretching them to help with the experiments of less well funded workers, like PhD students. There is no slack in the system that I can see. “Doing more with less” is not an option – because in the UK we already do more with less in science than in any other country, as all the available statistics clearly show.

A particular fear of mine is that the effects of cuts will be long-term; they will damage our ability to compete in science – and hence damage our wider economy that depends on science – for the next ten to twenty years.

Let me give you some Manchester-specific examples of why I think this is so, if we experience cuts on the sort of scale that has been widely trailed.

1. We will no longer be able to attract the best scientists here from outside the UK.

The recent award of the Nobel Physics Prize to Manchester University’s Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov brings this into sharp focus for me. Manchester was able to recruit these two outstanding physicists because of, as Royal Society President Martin Rees put it,  “the promise of adequate funding and a supportive environment in a first-rate university. “.

If funding is cut, this kind of thing will no longer be possible – and the first jobs to go will likely be those for younger scientists. This is because, when money is tight, Universities tend to concentrate on making small numbers of star Professorial appointments. But cutting junior appointments would mean that there is less chance of recruiting people like Professor Novoselov, who was barely 30 when he came to Manchester.

Even if special posts can be set up for “Star Professors”, these scientists are less likely to want to come to a country where the research funding prospects are bleak. Dame Nancy Rothwell, the President of Manchester University, gave two specific examples in her September 6th letter to Lord Krebs’ House of Lords Science & Technology Committee:

“Two individuals went most of the way through the appointment process for chairs (in one case all the way), but then withdrew because the financial packages were unsatisfactory. In one case, the main problem was funding of laboratory space and funding of unique transgenic rodent colonies. A better offer made and accepted in Switzerland. In the second case there were two issues: the personal remuneration was not equivalent in buying power to that currently received (particular issues were travel and housing) and the package did not incorporate sufficient dedicated laboratory and clinical space. “

2. Top-class non-British scientists currently working here will leave

Science is international, with movement of people across the globe. Looking round my own Faculty of Life Sciences, we have been able to appoint top-class tenure-track (academic) staff in the last five years from many nations, including the USA, Canada, Germany, France, Spain, Japan, and Denmark. However, these people will soon be in a position where funding prospects for research in their countries of origin will be considerably better than in the UK. I predict that a significant number of these people will be tempted back to their countries of origin, and their skills lost to the UK, if severe cuts are imposed.

3. We will lose much of our own young talent to other countries with better science funding.

Professor Noveselov recently pointed out that “The impact [of cuts] is going to be that good scientists will go abroad, especially the young people.” Scientists of my age (late 40s) are aware of numerous contemporaries who left for other countries during the last period of prolonged austerity for British research in the 80s and never returned. In some cases (see 1. above) they wanted to return but have never been able to, since the UK cannot match the facilities and remuneration they enjoy overseas. Cuts will make this situation worse.

4. We will starve local high-tech industry of the talent pool it needs, both as workers and as collaborators

To give an example in my own field of biomedicine, I note that a significant part of the skilled (doctoral level and beyond) scientific workforce at AstraZeneca (AZ) Alderley Park was trained at Manchester University. Over my two decades at Manchester I have known literally dozens of PhD level scientists who have moved on from the University to work for AZ. These scientists have been trained using public money through the provision of PhD studentships and posts on competitively-awarded research grants. AZ have benefited from having this regular supply of locally-based highly skilled scientists anxious to work for them. However, this supply in the future is clearly likely to be reduced, while the supply of trained people in our competitor countries is likely to increase. Pharmaceutical disinvestment from UK-based R&D is highly likely if the UK science base is crippled with cuts. We have already seen companies like GlaxoSmithKline relocating research from the UK to China. It would be a tragedy for the North West of England if AZ were to choose to re-locate their research base away from Alderley Park.

In summary; cuts to science will do long-term damage to the science base, will waste investment already made in facilities and people, will damage the economy, and will be extremely difficult to repair even when things improve. To quote a line doing the rounds, cutting science to save the economy is rather like trying to lose weight by cutting off your own leg. The maintained or increased investment in science, technology and education in essentially all our competitor countries suggests they have grasped this.

The Science is Vital coalition, along with the Campaign for Science and Engineering, are calling upon the Government to set out a supportive strategy, including public investment goals above or at least in step with economic growth. Without such investment and commitment the UK risks its international reputation, its market share of high-tech manufacturing and services, the ability to respond to urgent and long-term national scientific challenges, and the economic recovery. It also risks decimating one of the sectors – science and education – in which we are truly are world-class. As I hope I have convinced you, this will be damaging both locally, and nationally.

I have signed the petition at

http://scienceisvital.org.uk/sign-the-petition

I urge you to do the same.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Austin Elliott

Posted in Science policy, Uncategorized | 8 Comments

DNA – letters, stories, and narratives 60 years on

Posted on October 3, 2010 by Austin

One of the great “behind the scenes” histories / stories / arguments / legends of 20th century science is back in the news again this week, with the publication in Nature of an article about the re-discovery of a large quantity of Francis Crick’s correspondence, including letters he exchanged with Maurice Wilkins during the period of the solving of the structure of DNA in 1951-53. Crick’s letters had long been thought lost, but turned up in the papers of Sydney Brenner, with whom Crick shared an office for many years in Cambridge.

The Guardian’s Ian Sample also covered the story, in a piece headlined, a touch melodramatically in my view:

Letters shed light on bitter rivalries behind discovery of DNA double helix

This is, of course, a reference to two things: firstly the personality clashes between Rosalind Franklin and Wilkins, Crick and Jim Watson, which have been hashed over many times in print; and secondly, the professional rivalry between King’s (where Franklin and Wilkins worked) and the Cavendish Lab in Cambridge (Watson and Crick).

The Nature article, by Alexander Gann & Jan Witkowski, is titled simply:

The lost correspondence of Francis Crick

– with the perceptive subheading “Strained relationships and vivid personalities leap off the pages”.

“Strained relationships” is certainly accurate, from every account of the events that has come down to us. However, the events have now been almost overwhelmed by the later “interpretations”.
In particular, every time the story of the discovery of DNA is referred to in print beyond the scientific literature, it is almost guaranteed that two arguments will make an appearance in comments or commentaries. One, and by far the most common, can be stated crudely as “Rosalind Franklin was done out of the credit” – usually with the corollary “…because she was a woman”. The other, a bit less common, is that Erwin Chargaff was done out of the credit. Sometimes this one is also coupled with the implication that Chargaff, an Austrian Jew by birth, was excluded for being an “outsider”.

These two viewpoints, but especially the one relating to Franklin, have become so entrenched in some quarters that even some scientists seem to think they are the definitive truth. For instance, I saw one scientist opine on Twitter that the newly-rediscovered letters were “more damning than ever on Franklin’s exclusion”. And one or two of the comments under the Guardian article were so silly that I felt moved to write, and post, the following comment:
————————————————————————————————–

“My father shared a lab for a couple of years with Rosalind Franklin’s assistant Raymond Gosling, and knew many of the protagonists in the story, some fairly well. From what I have read, and what he has told me, these letters don’t seem to reveal anything we didn’t already know – though of course it is interesting to see the contemporaneous thoughts of those involved, rather than their reminiscences filtered through years of hindsight.

Most people would agree that both Franklin and Chargaff did not quite get the credit they deserved, certainly in the early accounts of the discovery. But the views of Franklin as a wronged heroine and victim of the boys’ club, or of Chargaff as systematically disregarded because of his race and/or nationality, seem to me to owe far more to the “political” narratives projected onto the story by later authors, many with obvious agendas.

I have never met any scientist with direct memories of the era, of heard of one, who did NOT think that Crick, Watson and Wilkins were fully deserving winners of the DNA structure Nobel. Omitting Franklin, had she been alive at the time of the award, would have been an injustice, though (hypothetically) likely a direct consequence of the Nobel “no more than three winners” policy. However, that is not what actually happened. The problem of whether to include Franklin was sadly resolved by her tragically early death; however, her key role in the discovery, and her place in the scientific pantheon, is secure.”

—————————————————————————————————
The dispute over credit for the discovery of the structure of DNA re-appears in the national press periodically. Prior to the discovery of Crick’s letters, the last time was probably on his death in 2004 (closely followed by the death of Maurice Wilkins).

Which reminds me that in writing the comment at the Guardian, I was, in a way, following a family tradition.

When news of Crick’s death broke in early August 2004, the Times Higher Education published a series of comments from eminent scientists, and from those who had know Crick. You can read them here.

Among them was the following comment from then chief executive of the Institute of Physics, Julia King:

“I was disappointed that, in much of the coverage of Francis Crick’s death, the references were to Crick and Watson’s great discovery – there was no mention of Rosalind Franklin.”

This moved my father to pen the following letter,  which appeared in the THE on 20th August 2004:
—————————————————————————

“The response of Julia King to the death of Francis Crick is more than a little churlish (“Not many scientists can claim immortality”, August 6).

If King looks up the Watson-Crick paper in Nature (1953), she will find that it is followed in the journal by two papers from the workers at King’s College London, the first by Maurice Wilkins, Alec Stokes and Herbert Wilson and the second by Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling.

These papers show the X-ray diffraction pictures on which the Cambridge DNA structure was based, and this debt was acknowledged by Watson and Crick in their paper.

I joined the King’s College laboratory a year later as a graduate student.

Gossip made it clear that had there been easier interactions among the King’s workers, a correct structure might have been first derived in London, but all agreed that, as things turned out, the honour was due to Cambridge. These seem to be the facts, whatever mythology may have developed.

The responses of Hugh Huxley and Nigel Unwin better describe the Francis Crick whom I admired and respected. Your headline sums it up: indeed, he is immortal.”
———————————————————————————-
I am pretty sure that we will see this all re-hashed again, with the same competing “narratives”, every time the DNA discovery story re-appears in the news. Such, I guess, is the fate of historical events which come to mean different things to different people.
In the meantime, though, and to get back to the re-discovered letters: while Francis Crick was, and is, a scientific immortal, he was also a human being. And that is the person his letters bring to life for us. Do go and read them, if you haven’t already.

Posted in History, The Life Scientific | 12 Comments

The grass may be green somewhere, but the blue skies here look pretty dark

Posted on September 8, 2010 by Austin

The science Interwebz here in the UK have been abuzz today with reaction to Vince Cable’s statements on this morning’s Radio 4 Today programme (listen here). Cable’s remarks were a trail to a speech he is delivering today, his first major one on science since the election, at Queen Mary College London. (For non-UK readers: Cable, a Liberal Democrat, is the Business Secretary in the centre-right Conservative Lib-Dem coalition government and is thus the Cabinet Minister with overall responsibility for UK public funding of science).

General reaction has not been positive. Here is a quote from one astute analysis of the speech, from Cardiff astrophysicist Peter Coles, aka the blogger “Telescoper”

“Of course there are the obligatory platitudes about the quality of the UK’s scientific research, a lot of flannel about the importance of “blue skies” thinking, before [Cable] settles on the utilitarian line favoured by the Treasury mandarins who no doubt wrote his speech for him. Greater concentration of research funding into areas that are “theoretically outstanding” (judged how?) or “commercially useful” (when?). In fact one wonders what the point of this speech was, as it said very little that was specific except that the government is going to cut science. We knew that already.”

The line of Cable’s speech Coles is referring to, and which has received a lot of attention, is:

”..there is no justification for taxpayers’ money [supporting] research which is neither commercially useful nor theoretically outstanding.”

You will note that the word “curiosity” does not appear there. I wonder if politicians would grasp that curiosity tends to be a rather more meaningful word (at least to most scientists) than either “theoretically outstanding” – after all, we already have an entire grant system directed at funding the most “outstanding” projects – or that tired managerial favourite “excellent”

Roger Highfield, writing in the New Scientist, makes the telling point that Cable has said little different to what UK science ministers have been saying for the last three decades. But the political discomfort with the “un-directedness” of scientific discovery goes back far further than that. A famous quote which is often used to sum up this kind of “But what is it for?” mind-set is:

“I don’t care what makes the grass green”

This line dates back to the 1950s and is generally attributed to American industrialist Charles E Wilson (1890-1961) – aka “Engine Charlie” – during his stint (1953-7) as Secretary of State for Defence in the Eisenhower administration, prior to which he had been the long-time CEO of General Motors. Wilson was, as you might infer from the above remark, known for his lack of enthusiasm for “blue sky research”.

I came across Wilson’s name in an article that we have just published in Physiology News, and which I would highly recommend. The article is by Professor Tim Biscoe, former head of the Physiology Department at UCL and later Vice-Provost of UCL and Deputy Vice Chancellor of the University of Hong Kong. Tim’s article is a fascinating history of the idea of basic research. Here I want to highlight a bit of his piece which bears on the perennial question of whether one can actually identify research which will have “impact” later – either economic, or in terms of its influence on the research field (which might have something to do with “theoretically outstanding”).

Now. most scientists think you can’t predict this kind of thing.

While most politicians, and their civil servants, seem to believe you can – at least when they are trying to decide where to cut.

Tim Biscoe tells us it is “Not a new problem”. He goes on:

“A thorough discussion of the problem was given more than 30 years ago by JH [Julius] Comroe and RD [Robert] Dripps in their The Top Ten Clinical Advances in Cardiovascular-Pulmonary Medicine and Surgery [1]. Another important source is JH Comroe, 1977 [2]. Comroe and Dripps were responding to a US Defence Department Report, Project Hindsight, published in 1966-69.”

[A quick bit of background: Project Hindsight was a comparison of then recently developed (i.e. in the 60s) US weapon systems with systems of similar function in use 10-20 years earlier. The analysis suggested that improvements to the systems were primarily the result of engineering and technological advances made by the defence contractors (companies) and not the results of academic research. However, Hindsight had of course deliberately concentrated on systems which shared a “common scientific and technological base” with the older systems. A summary can be found here] .

Back to Tim Biscoe:

—————————————————————————————————

“Comroe and Dripps wrote:

“The nation’s medical research policy should be based on more than an analysis of weapons development by the Department of Defence and on informal ‘let me give you an example’ anecdotal arguments by concerned scientists, though examples are necessary”.

They defined research as basic “when the investigator, in addition to observing and measuring, attempts to determine the mechanisms responsible for the observed effects”. They discussed clinical orientation; where the research was done and by whom; the role of contract-supported or committee-directed research; lags between initial discovery and application; and more. Their methodology was to ask 90 physicians and surgeons to select their top ten clinical advances. [Comroe & Dripps] screened more than 6000 articles relating to those advances, picked more than 3400 for tabulation in the report, and of these selected 663 key articles with the help of consultants.

Of the 663 articles, 41.6% sought knowledge for the sake of knowledge unrelated to a subsequent clinical advance, and 61.5% described basic research dealing with mechanisms rather than products. Of the key research, 67.4% was done in colleges and universities.”

—————————————————————————————————————

Comroe was a pulmonary physiologist and Dripps an anaesthetist, hence their choice of cardiovascular-pulmonary medicine/surgery as the area for their investigation. A useful introduction to, and overview of, Comroe & Dripps’ work can be found in an article they wrote for Science in 1976, “Scientific Basis for the Support of Biomedical Science”, which can be read here.

The following paragraph, near the start of the Science article, rang some bells with me:

“Our interest in this project began in 1966 when President Lyndon Johnson said, “Presidents… need to show more interest in what the specific results of research are – in their lifetime, and in their administration. A great deal of basic research has been done . . but I think the time has come to zero in on the targets-by trying to get our knowledge fully applied. . . We must make sure that no lifesaving discovery is locked up in the laboratory” [Italics ours].”

Now, imagine you were to substitute the word “money-making” for “lifesaving”. And then look at Vince Cable’s speech, which recapitulates what British governments of any political stripe have been saying for the last three decades.

Plus ca change,  it seems, plus c’est la meme chose.
Or, alternatively, and in perhaps the kind of vernacular LBJ might have favoured:

If the idea that you could tell in advance just what science was going to be important later was a bunch of bulllshit then, then it’s just as much of a bunch of bullshit now.

————————————————————————————————————————————

PS Another analysis of the history of the debate on blue skies research can be found here.

[1] Comroe JH & Dripps RD, The Top Ten Clinical Advances in Cardiovascular-Pulmonary Medicine and Surgery, 1977, DHEW Publication No. (NIH) 78-1521, vols 1 and 2.

[2] Comroe JH (1977). Retrospectroscope, Insights into Medical Discovery, Von Gehr Press, CA; [a compilation of a series of articles that first appeared in the American Review of Respiratory Disease between 1975-77]

Posted in Grumbling, History, Science policy | 8 Comments

Do some science, you !*!!

Posted on August 30, 2010 by Austin

Back a few days now from several weeks of holiday beyond the reach of broadband – yes, such places do still exist, even in Northern Europe – and am re-adjusting slowly. I feel rather de-inspired blogwise, though. It may be that this reflects being out of practise. I remember Henry Gee saying in a comments thread a while back that the only way to try to be a writer of any kind was to write regularly, preferably every day. His comments echoed those of many other writers writing about writing, Now, I haven’t written a word during my several weeks of holiday… Anyway, to try and ease back into the swing of things, here is a quickie.

Management in British science, particularly in academia, is traditionally pretty genteel. Over the quarter century odd I have been in the business, though, there has been a perceptible “hardening up” of managerial ways. This is widely seen in academia as a consequence of the endless targets that the Government has been setting UK Universities these last two decades and more, and the consequent generation of targets for individual scientists to fulfil, mostly in terms of grants and papers. A useful recent summary of this, for those not in the UK and/or not at “Principal Investigator” level, can be found on Dorothy Bishop’s blog.

Of course, it could be worse. Out in industry, I recall one of my friends telling me about his (UK) PharmaCo sending the management consultants and senior brass in to each research team to “weed out” the less committed as part of one of their periodic downsizing“resizing” exercises. In this particular round, each member of the scientific team was asked to come in and sit for a couple of hours in front of a several-strong team of PharmaCo management suits and external consultants. The research team members had both to justify their own role, and to “vision” their “personal five year plan”. The joke doing the rounds, according to my friend, was that this almost invariably resulted in the loss of the best bench scientist (or scientists) from each team. The general view in the labs, he told me, was that this happened because such folk were often the least good at bullshit managerial-type vision-talk – or perhaps they just decided they couldn’t be bothered.

But still, it could be worse…     …I guess.

If you wonder how much worse, you could take a look at this inspired sketch from British comedians Arnstrong and Miller, called

“Glengarry Glen Science”

[*WARNING!* This clip contains, erm, “industrial” or “Anglo-Saxon” language. Though not literally Anglo-Saxon, if you catch my drift. Anyway, do not click if easily offended by the F-word]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqZaLCB9KtI

It couldn’t really happen… could it?

I’ve certainly never been sworn at, or threatened, by a manager or superior. Well, apart from being told that I might lose my lab space. Or be moved to a much grottier building.

However – I should say that the UK-based scientist who sent me this (now working in a biotech start-up, but a veteran of many years in both Universities and Big Pharma) added the following comment:

“I think Armstrong and Miller must have met some of the great professors in [names Faculty in a major UK University] and [name of major UK research charity]… Several persons spring to mind.”

So perhaps it is not as far-fetched as you might think.

So… any comments? Anyone on the bad end of any serious Glengarry-ing they feel able to talk about? And do we think things have got generally more “in your face”?

PS If you don’t know the original model for the sketch, it is David Mamet’s classic play about Chicago real estate salesmen, Glengarry Glen Ross – see here for a clip from the film version.

Posted in Humour, Procrastination, The Life Scientific | 10 Comments