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Skills, FE and Levelling Up

Posted on 17 November 2021 by Athene Donald

As we await various key Government papers – specifically the long-awaited response to the Augar Report and the Levelling Up White paper – the news is full of labour shortages. Whereas delivering some of Augar’s recommendations about funding for FE Colleges may not do much for the number of HGV drivers on the road, it may make a difference in the medium term to some of the smaller companies that sit somewhere on the low productivity tail. Much is frequently made of the contribution of high tech IT developments to the economy; the discussion of the future of ARM is not unimportant here. Nevertheless, the significance of employees in much lower tech companies who need to have the skills and confidence to use a spreadsheet to facilitate ‘just in time’ logistics, or to update costings if they have to raise pay for employees due to the loss of EU workers, is no small matter. This is where ensuring that FE Colleges are funded well enough to deliver that level of skill to a wider swathe of the population is so important. And, alongside that, that as the Lifelong Learning Loan Entitlement comes into play (unfortunately not till 2025), workers will have the financial means, if not security, necessary to return to education to gain the skills they need which either may not have been available to them when they were 16, or been obvious to them then that they would be useful.

The evidence that increased R+D intensity drives up economic prosperity and GDP seems broadly accepted now, as well as that that public sector funding crowds in private sector investment. Thus, the increase in money in the budget for research and innovation funding is a huge positive. Much of this money will provide a welcome fillip to the university sector, where there will be many people ready to take advantage of it. Backing up the researchers will be a team of technicians, whose input is often crucial in sustaining and delivering a project, particularly when they provide long-term stability and knowhow as research students and postdocs come and go. However, their own career progression is often forgotten, an issue the current TALENT Commission is examining in depth (a project I am pleased to be associated with), along with a survey of their experiences, with a report due to be published in the New Year.

But what about technical support in industry, broadly defined. By which I mean, industry not just in high tech areas, but other areas such as more basic manufacturing, logistics or public health-related, for instance? This is where upskilling the workforce comes into play as being a vital component. Here I would include IT skills as part of this technical support, not so much as a stand-alone component, but as a necessary contributor to overall skills. If you are entering data, let alone analysing it, these skills are vital.

A Royal Society report from earlier this year highlighted a worrying trend of this part of the workforce ageing and not being replaced by youngsters entering the pipeline. Choices children make at 14 or 16 probably play into this, and they are not necessarily getting access to good careers advice to help them make those choices. But, additionally, they may not find the courses they need to put their aspirations into action if the local FE College is unable to provide them. This comes right back to what is going to be delivered – not least in terms of funding – and to whom, when the Augar response is finally published.

The Skills for Jobs White Paper, published at the start of the year, suggests the Government is aware of the issues, with excellent overarching goals, of which three are particular pertinent to my arguments here:

  • Investing in higher-level technical qualifications that provide a valuable alternative to a university degree;
  • Making sure people can access training and learning flexibly throughout their lives and are well-informed about what is on offer through great careers support; and
  • Supporting excellent teaching in further education.

As the second of these bullet points shows, it is most certainly not just for school-leavers that thought must be given. The decline in opportunities for adults to upskill or reskill is an indictment of our society. The introduction of (initially) £9000 fees for university courses has had a massive impact on part-time adult learners at universities. The position over ELQs (Equivalent or Lower-level Qualifications), making it impossible to retrain if you already have a qualification at or above the level you are wanting to retrain at, has recently come back into sharp focus with recent comments by Chris Skidmore and Jo Johnson, both former HE Ministers, both calling for a rethink on this and associated entitlement to loans.

However, rhetoric and practice may be two very different things in this space and, despite the warm and encouraging noises, policy isn’t fixing the problems yet. The threat to defund BTECs, deferred but not removed, in favour of T Levels remains a concern when considering the education of those whose tastes may lie in less academic subjects. (BTECs have a good track record of facilitating entry to university for those who haven’t taken A Levels.) However good the concept of T Levels may be, it would seem that not enough thought has been put into how courses are going to provide the obligatory 45 days of placements in industry for each student. If this is the only route to qualifications post-16 other than A Levels, that’s a huge number of placements required and no guarantee of successfully finding them. By killing off BTECs, at speed, without resolving this issue, it is hard to see these vocational routes will succeed in their stated aims.

So we are in a position where there appears to be lots of good intent but without the wherewithal to achieve them. I would identify four issues in particular where words and action don’t completely align:

  1. Plans to offer loans to adults wanting to upskill, but who may have severe and utterly understandable reservations about taking on the requisite level of debt imposed by such loans;
  2. ‘Great career advice’ at every stage should be a no-brainer, but it is something that has not shown much sign of appearing and would need substantial additional funding;
  3. New vocational training routes, that require plenty of on-the-job training, but no guarantee the placements can be found;
  4. Nobody could object to the idea of ‘Excellent teaching in FE’, but without a response to Augar about funding this is unlikely to be able to materialise.

Levelling up touches all of this because, where the jobs are, where the people with the right skills are, and where the FE Colleges to deliver are may be non-intersecting sets and, without appropriate joining up of these key dots improved regional economies are unlikely to be transformed in the way that levelling up might be taken to mean by local populations. The stagnation of the UK’s productivity since the financial crash of 2008 is well-documented and undoubtedly has had a major impact on the reality of lives lived in ‘left behind’ regions. Investment in research and innovation is a crucial part of national recovery and regeneration, but money alone without people with the right skills is not sufficient. Current thinking about how lifelong learning will be delivered in ways that can actually make a difference still seems to be a bit foggy. One can only hope the Augar response and the Levelling Up White Paper finally part the clouds.

 

Posted in Augar Review, BTECs, careers, education, productivity, Science Funding, T Levels, technicians | Comments Off on Skills, FE and Levelling Up

Corner Office

Posted on 6 November 2021 by Steve Caplan

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As a child, one of the most humiliating punishments at (elementary) school was being banished “to the corner” for bad behavior. Something to be avoided at all costs. But as an adult, I have learned that there are advantages to being in “the corner.”

For nearly 18 years I have spent large portions of my working day toiling behind a screen (or two or three) in a “compact” (mind the euphemism) office. I had no complaints, being housed in a modern building that was completed in 2004, with a large, well-furnished lab, I was perfectly happy to retreat to my office-closet. I had my kettle, coffee and tea, emergency snack food, an oversized desk and a bookshelf, with little room for anything else. Given that I purchased a “convertible standing desk” (https://www.vari.com/standing-desk-converter-varidesk-tall-40/DC-TL40.html) a few years back, meetings with colleagues or visiting researchers (remember those?) were inevitably uncomfortable, and more than one visitor required the securing of a conference room for a meeting. Such meetings, including with my own students, were always complicated, with technical difficulties in looking at data, whether on my computer screen or on paper.

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As if to compensate for the tiny size of my 7thfloor office, I was blessed with huge floor to ceiling glass windows. Nice? Sort of…. The windows faced full west, and even with the blinds permanently closed, the glare often necessitated wearing sunglasses while working at the computer in the afternoons. If that wasn’t bad enough, my view west (in the rare instances when the blinds were open) included: several parking lots, an electrical power station, a smelting factory from WWII that just recently closed, and a large cemetery on the other side of a very run-down industrial road known as “Saddle Creek.” However, we scientists don’t like to complain, and if we have a lab and research resources ($), then who cares about such trivial matters?

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However, this summer I was offered the opportunity to move to a corner office at the other end of the hallway and I readily accepted. Unlike all the other offices, this one is different—it is much larger, with space for a nice desk for my co-investigator, as well as a round table for meetings with colleagues and students, and the ability to swivel my screen around to look at data from the table with students. No less significant than the extra room is the northern exposure—meaning that I get natural light all day from the many, large windows facing several angles, without having to close the blinds. Even better is the view, which looking north avoids the power plant, graveyard and factories (although there is a car wash), and I can even see two of Omaha’s iconic sites: the Joslyn Castle and St. Cecilia’s Cathedral.

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Whether the new corner office improves my productivity or leads to more exciting scientific advances, I am doubtful. But given that I spend so much time in the office, I am very appreciative of my new surroundings, and certainly no longer dread being banished to the corner. Although, I guess it does mean that I’m getting old…

Posted in Research, science | Comments Off on Corner Office

Week

Posted on 29 October 2021 by Henry Gee

What an ericacious exhausting sackbut amazing week.

It started last Saturday morning when I discovered that I was being followed by the Literary Editor of the Times.  Followed, in the sense of Twitter. At least, I don’t think the Literary Editor of the Times really was following me, you know, in person, with a raincoat and binoculars, notwithstanding inasmuch as which the Present Emergency and so on and so forth, though of course he might have been, but if he was, he’d very good at it, because I didn’t notice.

Perhaps, though, this was a signal. So alerted, Mrs Gee and I bought a copy of the Times on our regular weekend supermarket trip, just in case we were approached by a stranger who sat down next to us on a park bench and said something innocuous like ‘The tulips bloom early in Vienna this spring’. Actually, it’s only Mrs Gee who ventures into the supermarket. I sit in the car, in the car park. After all, someone has to do the stake-out.

Mrs Gee came out, with the usual groceries — atonal apples, amplified heat,  and so on — and a copy of the Times. When we got home we found that my latest book had attracted not just a book review, but the lead book review, noch, and a splendid one it was too. You can read it here.

The effect had a salutary effect on sales. The book had been published in the UK in September. Reviews were sparse but  generally good. There was a lovely one in the Literary Review, a magazine for which I have a particular fondness, though its appeal is, as you’d expect, limited to people like me who simply can’t get enough of books.  Following that, the Amazon UK ranking crept up to the low thousands. Although my publisher tells me that the algorithms Amazon uses are mysterious, this had to count for something.

The Times review gave sales a huge boost. Amazon rankings shot up well into the top 200 of all books – up with colouring books, celebrity autobiographies, books for children, and editions of novels by Sally Rooney in Hebrew. At one stage, I was told, the rank was above 120, though the highest I saw was 134.

In specific categories, such as ‘palaeontology’ and ‘dinosaurs’, it reached number one and stayed there for some days (see the picture). The hardcover edition was most popular, but the audiobook and kindle versions came up to approached got close.

And, quite unlike any other book I have ever written, it really was available in the canonical All Good Bookshops.

The Amazon rankings subsided over the following days, although very slowly, and as I write it’s still in the top 1000. By the end of the week normal service should be resumed and I shall return to the comforting obscurity to which I have long been accustomed.

People ask me about the paperback. (Well, one person did, take a bow, Mr. G. O. of Norfolk). There is what’s known as a ‘trade’ paperback, available from foreign markets that are less receptive to hardbacks. The UK ‘mass market’ paperback should be out in autumn 2022.

But, hey, things have hardly got started. Editions are already out in German and Dutch, and on 9 November it’ll be published in the US & Canada. …

In preparation I’ve been a guest on a lot of podcasts that’ll be broadcast nearer the time (I already have a podcast series of my own that you can hear now).

Posted in a very short history of life on earth, Literary Review, times, Writing & Reading | Comments Off on Week

Vaccines, Emotion and the Status of Women

Posted on 17 October 2021 by Athene Donald

I’ve been catching up with some reading this weekend: a year’s worth of (hard copy) THE issues, picked up now I’m finally able to get back into my department, and Vaxxers – sub-titled The Inside Story of the Oxford Astrazeneca vaccine and the Race against the Virus. These cover the same period, but from rather different viewpoints. Take the period April-June in the THE articles, so many focussing on Covid-related topics: the rapid adoption of online teaching, the ‘Zoomiverse’, the dawning appreciation of the potential damage to careers, particularly for early career researchers and those with caring responsibilities, plus the likelihood that a researcher’s productivity will plummet and the need to be kind to oneself and others when this happens.

With hindsight, perhaps we were too optimistic that this situation wouldn’t last long and that within a few weeks, which then stretched into months, all would return to normal. Of course, it hasn’t. To different degrees around the world, life is still strange, worrying and, for many, Covid-related health issues remain. Carers’ lives are still upended and the lasting impact on careers unclear (but unlikely to be positive). Although for a lot of us, by this point some meetings are now held in person, many are still not conducted remotely. What ‘normal’ will eventually look like is not yet clear.

But long before Covid hit the UK, the Oxford vaccine team were already moving into top gear, as soon as stories of a strange illness began to surface in Wuhan. Sarah Gilbert – the one who has a Barbie doll in her likeness – and Churchill College alumna Cath Green, had read the China tea leaves and realised it was time to direct their existing vaccine platform to target this specific virus to give themselves – and the world – a head start in developing tools to weaken (though not yet neutralise) the virus’ impact. While most of us were adapting to working from home, this pair and their teams were flat out in their labs, working out all the necessary steps to produce the vaccine in record time. As the recipient of two doses of the Astra Zeneca vaccine, I can only be immensely grateful for their dedication, intellectual prowess, a firm grip on logistics of an incredibly complex chain of steps plus their ultimate achievements.

Their book is a gripping account, not just of these steps in some detail, explained in simple terms for the non-experts in their field, but also the emotional roller coaster of their work, the sleepless nights and the nerve-wracking interactions with the media as well as funders (there was no guarantee of success; funders are risk-averse and not used to working at the speed this situation demanded, but the money did come through). This all had to be followed by the anxious wait to see if the vaccine succeeded in Phase 3 trials (which, as we now know, it did). Scientists rarely speak up about some of these issues that can lurk under the public face of their work or the written word of journal publications. Rarely do they have such an intense media spotlight shone on them, week after week, as this pair did. Nor are the stakes often quite so high. It will be interesting to see if the BioNTech scientists, with their alternative route for successful vaccine development, choose to write their own story to complement Vaxxers.

As two immensely successful female scientists, I am also interested in what they have to say about the subject of emotional content. Their family lives intrude to some extent (both Green and Gilbert are parents, the latter of triplets, although none of their children are toddlers constantly interrupting zoom calls or needing much help with home schooling), so the huge problems many mothers have had to face while working from home did not beset them. Nevertheless, making time for family in the midst of handling the massive task they faced was by no means trivial. But it is more the commentary on the simple fact that they are female that intrigues me, inserted in passing in their wider narrative. Most of what I learned came from Green referring to Gilbert (they each wrote their own chapters from their own perspectives, more or less alternately throughout the book) rather than a first-hand account by the latter. Maybe this was a deliberate strategy.

For instance, Green quotes Gilbert as saying ‘something like’

“This is 2020. Why are we discussing women scientists? I’m not a woman scientist, I’m a scientist and more than half my colleagues are women and we do the job.”

The frustration at being seen as a woman first and a scientist second is palpable. That feeling will resonate with many, myself included. I have written previously about how the media referred to Dorothy Hodgkin when she won the Nobel Prize (“Oxford housewife wins Nobel“, according to the Daily Mail of the day.) Similar sorts of out-of-date comments were, perhaps unsurprisingly and as quoted by Green, used in describing members of the team: serious redhead mother to triplets (describing Gilbert), not your stereotypical Oxford boffin (Green) and Irish mother of two for Teresa (Tess) Lambe, a third team member. As Green remarks wryly, one of the men on the team has ‘never been described as ‘male scientist Andy Pollard’ nor, presumably, has his parental status been laid bare in the media.

Nevertheless, the balancing act between being annoyed by the gender issue or motherhood constantly being raised and using the opportunity to excite and inspire future generations of young women by being a visible role model is a delicate one. Not many scientists get to feature in Vogue (nor is it likely to have been an aspiration to do so for many).  A decade ago an article in The Lancet stated that

‘It’s impossible to be 100% sure, but Molly Stevens is in all likelihood the only person ever to have graced the hallowed pages of both The Lancet and Vogue.’

Whether or not that was true in 2012, Sarah Gilbert has undoubtedly joined her in appearing in that rare pairing of journals. As Green writes in Vaxxers

‘One of the more surreal moments of this year was Sarah’s high fashion photoshoot in the basement of the Jenner Institute. Sarah had already been to a London studio for a shoot for Vogue’s ’25 Women Shaping 2020’ earlier in the year. She said she thought it would be fun [we don’t get told if it was!] and not something she was likely to be asked to do ever again. But not long after Vogue she was approached by Harper’s Bazaar…she describes their shoot…. as ‘all slightly ridiculous’.’

Nevertheless, as Green makes clear, her view is that this is important and not ridiculous. Again, this resonates with me. When I won the L’Oreal/UNESCO 2009 Laureate for Europe for Women in Science I endured numerous photoshoots and interviews. I never actually saw, I’m relieved to say, the huge blown-up photographs of me that were plastered both on the side of L’Oreal’s Hammersmith headquarters or in Charles de Gaulle Airport, though I have a copy of the issue of Le Monde which had a full page devoted to my photo. However disconcerting for the individual, these photos convey an important message for the casual passer-by. Women do do science. Everyone should feel confident encouraging their daughters and other young women of their acquaintance to pursue science if that is their passion. If girls don’t see the faces of women scientists in their textbooks (and they don’t, as a recent American Chemical Society report made clear), they need to see them elsewhere in their daily lives. However uncomfortable I felt then, as Molly Stevens may have felt appearing in the pages of Vogue and presumably Gilbert did this year in all the publicity, it isn’t a bad – let alone vain – thing to do. It is, unfortunately, still necessary.

2020 was a weird year, as both Vaxxers and all those back issues of the THE make clear. Women do science, they do it at the top of the game, and yet too many are held back by caring responsibilities, by attitudes and by unconscious bias still operating. 2021 is little better as a year, but the battles must continue to ensure both that excellent science gets done and that the opportunity to do so is open to all.

Posted in Cath Green, Communicating Science, families, Sarah Gilbert, vaccination, Vaxxers, Women in science | Comments Off on Vaccines, Emotion and the Status of Women

Infectious opinions

Posted on 14 October 2021 by drtregoning

It’s been a funny old 18 months as world events suddenly came crashing into my corner of science – the immune response to viral infections in the lung. One of the unexpected outcomes of the pandemic was that I wrote a book (Infectious: Pathogens and how we fight them). In the book I cover the history of infectious disease research and the enormous strides that have been made. One of the great joys of writing the book was learning about all the scientists who have helped us in our battle with infections. Thanks to these women and men, we had a COVID19 vaccine within 100 days of the virus first being sequenced, a truly remarkable feat. I think it is fair to say that the pandemic has seen the return of some level of respect for expertise.

That we are emerging from the other side of the pandemic is thanks to expertise of many sorts – the healthcare workers who treated patients throughout, the epidemiologists and behavioural scientists who plotted the tricky course of how nations should respond, the lab scientists who developed and ran the diagnostic tests and the immunologists who developed a vaccine at unprecedented speed.

Of course, not everyone has respected scientific expertise. There has been a congealing of conspiracy theories on social media during the pandemic. These rumours invariably hurt the people who believe them – the rates of infection were much higher in the no-mask/ anti-vax states of the US. The ongoing digestion of toxic guff and the polarisation of society are beyond this article, but if the virus deniers found catching COVID a surprise, just imagine how shocked they are going to be when they discover climate change is real and their house is 6 foot under water and on fire.

Shouting at other people electronically has not been reserved for the scientifically illiterate. Science-COVID twitter has (like Saturn) devoured its children. Which is a crying shame. In the spring of 2020, Twitter had been the go-to source for information about the spread and the evolution of a fast-moving pandemic, but in the summer 2021 it was a cesspool. You were just as likely to see scientists trolling each other as members of the public. Though maybe this shouldn’t be such a surprise – it harkens back to a bygone era that I had mistakenly assumed was long gone, when academics let their feelings for each other be known very publicly.

In researching my book Infectious, I discovered that infectious disease research has always had a shouty streak, with antipathy between key players. Anthrax research and the Franco-Prussian war fuelled enmity between two of the grand messieurs of infection science: Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, who both raced to develop polio vaccines, were not exactly on speaking terms. Salk’s inactivated vaccine won that race, much to the chagrin of Sabin who described him as a ‘mere kitchen chemist’. Ignatius Semmelweis, who in the 19th Century first demonstrated that washing your hands between touching dead bodies and delivering babies might be a good idea, also experienced intense acrimony but this was less from a single person more from the entire medical establishment.

And finally, my favourite – Félix d’Hérelle, a French-Canadian microbiologist who lived the kind of colourful life no longer seen in career academics. Amongst other things, d’Hérelle lost all his money in a failed chocolate factory, worked in Guatemala, Mexico, France, India, the USA and Egypt (not trivial before international flight), had a brief run-in with the secret police in Soviet Russia when his mentor fell in love with the same woman as Beria (the notorious head of the Stalin’s secret police) and was put under house arrest by the Wehrmacht in the Second World War. Scientifically his main contribution is as an discoverer of the bacteriophage (in parallel with Fred Twort), but he antagonised Jules Bordet, a Nobel Prize winner, to such an extent that d’Hérelle ended up threatening Bordet with a scientific duel. Though it is not clear what a scientific duel entails – pipettes at dawn possibly?

So, Covid-19 disputes are nothing is new really. Some people argue that competition can drive progress. I am not convinced.

Where do we go from here? As someone observed recently, science Twitter could definitely do with a reboot. Whilst debate is healthy; entrenched opinions based on sketchy data are not. I certainly preferred it when scientists passively-aggressively slated each other off in reviewer’s comments rather than this all-out warfare. The simplest answer is to step away from social media and talk to people in the real world, most of whom are simply happy that the pandemic is by and large over. Or maybe retreat into a good book? Ideally one taking a long view of our progress in Infectious disease research.

John Tregoning is reader in respiratory infections at Imperial College London and author of the upcoming book INFECTIOUS published by OneWorld.

Posted in art, COVID-19, education, Guest posts, Hobbies, Infectious, vaccine, virus | Comments Off on Infectious opinions

The Problems of Measurement

Posted on 12 October 2021 by Athene Donald

How should we measure what is a good outcome from a university education? As David Willetts puts it in his latest report published through the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) ‘The Treasury cast their beady eye over the evidence and worry universities are not delivering the earnings boost which they used to’, demonstrating one sort of answer to the question. Another recent publication, this time from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), considers social mobility and the lure of London using earnings as the framing of a good outcome for the individual. Is it all about money? Should it be all about the money? It seems to me a very narrow figure of merit for either society or the graduate.  Furthermore, I believe the IFS analysis is oversimplifying the interesting data they have analysed.

The IFS study explores the mobility of those with and without degrees, considered by socio-economic status and ethnic origin, but it is framed as mobility – and this is geographical mobility that is being analysed, not social mobility – as necessarily desirable, as if anyone who doesn’t move has ‘failed’, although that is not their explicit phrasing. I worry about this framing, relevant though it may be to the levelling-up agenda. For instance,

“Places with high average earnings attract graduates through migration. Graduates who grew up in places with low average earnings are more likely to move away.”

They note that non-graduates are less likely to move to London and other large cities than graduates.  Inevitably, these patterns of behaviour also lead to their final conclusion that ‘patterns of mobility exacerbate regional inequality in skills’, so that there is a ‘brain drain from the North and coastal areas’. By framing what is a good outcome of a university education in terms of money, the implicit messaging being given to graduates is ‘it’s all about the cash’. This is a travesty of what a university education should be about. The idea of public good, as opposed to personal gain, cannot be seen in that framing, but becomes relevant when trying to determine what might be done for the areas (Grimsby and Wisbech are pulled out as examples) where the current loss of graduates is marked, and social deprivation is highly visible.

Let us take the specific example of a Muslim woman who wants to stay close to her family and teach in a primary school: she will neither be a high earner nor have demonstrated an appetite for mobility, but she will be of huge benefit to her community, and an excellent role model for younger women. Such a woman should be highly valued, not put down as a statistic of someone who didn’t aspire to geographical mobility. (I wonder how the likely increasing trend to working from home, possibly home being located far distant from the location of the employer, will skew future analyses.) Interestingly, the IFS findings show that Asian women who do move earn less than those who stay put (in contrast to every other group), and that young adults of Indian and Pakistani heritage are significantly less likely to have moved by age 27 than their white peers of otherwise similar backgrounds.

Income can be measured.  Value to a local community is much harder to quantify, but it is still value. It is obvious that high paying jobs are often in metropolitan areas which will therefore act as an attractor to many, and if income is used as the only figure of merit, then the metropolitan areas look ‘good’. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy that the well-heeled parts of the country are the ones to which graduates may aspire to move, which will definitely exacerbate inequality.

How should we measure what is a good outcome from a university education? As David Willetts puts it in his latest report published through the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) ‘The Treasury cast their beady eye over the evidence and worry universities are not delivering the earnings boost which they used to’, demonstrating one sort of answer to the question. Another recent publication, this time from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), considers social mobility and the lure of London using earnings as the framing of a good outcome for the individual. Is it all about money? Should it be all about the money? It seems to me a very narrow figure of merit for either society or the graduate.  Furthermore, I believe the IFS analysis is oversimplifying the interesting data they have analysed.

The IFS study explores the mobility of those with and without degrees, considered by socio-economic status and ethnic origin, but it is framed as mobility – and this is geographical mobility that is being analysed, not social mobility – as necessarily desirable, as if anyone who doesn’t move has ‘failed’, although that is not their explicit phrasing. I worry about this framing, relevant though it may be to the levelling-up agenda. For instance, “Places with high average earnings attract graduates through migration. Graduates who grew up in places with low average earnings are more likely to move away.” They note that non-graduates are less likely to move to London and other large cities than graduates.  Inevitably, these patterns of behaviour also lead to their final conclusion that ‘patterns of mobility exacerbate regional inequality in skills’, so that there is a ‘brain drain from the North and coastal areas’. By framing what is a good outcome of a university education in terms of money, the implicit messaging being given to graduates is ‘it’s all about the cash’. This is a travesty of what a university education should be about. The idea of public good, as opposed to personal gain, cannot be seen in that framing, but becomes relevant when trying to determine what might be done for the areas (Grimsby and Wisbech are pulled out as examples) where the current loss of graduates is marked, and social deprivation is highly visible.

Let us take the specific example of a Muslim woman who wants to stay close to her family and teach in a primary school: she will neither be a high earner nor have demonstrated an appetite for mobility, but she will be of huge benefit to her community, and an excellent role model for younger women. Such a woman should be highly valued, not put down as a statistic of someone who didn’t aspire to geographical mobility. (I wonder how the likely increasing trend to working from home, possibly home being located far distant from the location of the employer, will skew future analyses.) Interestingly, the IFS findings show that Asian women who do move earn less than those who stay put (in contrast to every other group), and that young adults of Indian and Pakistani heritage are significantly less likely to have moved by age 27 than their white peers of otherwise similar backgrounds.

Income can be measured.  Value to a local community is much harder to quantify, but it is still value. It is obvious that high paying jobs are often in metropolitan areas which will therefore act as an attractor to many, and if income is used as the only figure of merit, then the metropolitan areas look ‘good’. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy that the well-heeled parts of the country are the ones to which graduates may aspire to move, which will definitely exacerbate inequality. However, here as in so many instances, metrics should be used with care.

Willetts highlights the dangers of using, as a proposed criterion for the OfS (Office for Students), graduate outcomes a mere fifteen months after graduation as a means to determine university performance, a time when many (if not most) graduates are still finding their feet in their careers. Fifteen months is far too soon, as he makes clear, and it still relies on using earnings as the figure of merit, this time to score university courses. As so many commentators have pointed out, such a metric will necessarily imply that many courses are inherently seen as low-value; not necessarily the STEM careers I typically consider on this blog, but courses in music and the arts, for instance, and those wishing to become nurses, work in the charity sector (a popular choice for Cambridge graduates I understand) or who aspire to be that primary school teacher I mentioned above.

Willetts is a great believer in universities of all complexions and wishes to see less distinction made between academic and vocational pathways, as well as less between those institutions providing either. He has, it would seem, little time for his alma mater of Oxford, or indeed mine of Cambridge, accusing them of snobbishness, in large part because they don’t teach non-academic courses (while, a little confusingly, simultaneously pointing out that engineering and law are vocational, courses very much taught here). He highlights the potential benefits to the local economy if new universities were to open up in towns from Wigan to Peterborough. Such benefits would pertain at least as much to workers in low-paid jobs as to the graduates themselves. However, the IFS study would imply such graduates would, possibly should, then migrate to the bright lights of London or Manchester, removing the possible gains to the community.

What about Oldham? I highlight this town, sitting within Greater Manchester, because it is in the process of carrying out an economic review, led by Alun Francis, the head of the local Further Education college, Oldham College. (Willetts sees FE Colleges as a great undervalued resource in the education landscape.) What can a run-down old mill town do to improve its economic performance, pushing up median wages from their current miserably low level, and to keep those young people who get qualifications at level 4 and above in the area to boost the economy? As long as the public discourse is framed in ‘geographical mobility is necessarily good’ – to paraphrase the IFS study – or graduate earnings are the only measure of the value of further and higher education, as the Department for Education appears to want OfS to think about the matter, we will not get anything approaching levelling up, because those who can, will migrate to the city lights, and those who advise them will encourage them to do so.

How should we measure what is a good outcome from a university education? As David Willetts puts it in his latest report published through the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) ‘The Treasury cast their beady eye over the evidence and worry universities are not delivering the earnings boost which they used to’, demonstrating one sort of answer to the question. Another recent publication, this time from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), considers social mobility and the lure of London using earnings as the framing of a good outcome for the individual. Is it all about money? Should it be all about the money? It seems to me a very narrow figure of merit for either society or the graduate.  Furthermore, I believe the IFS analysis is oversimplifying the interesting data they have analysed.

The IFS study explores the mobility of those with and without degrees, considered by socio-economic status and ethnic origin, but it is framed as mobility – and this is geographical mobility that is being analysed, not social mobility – as necessarily desirable, as if anyone who doesn’t move has ‘failed’, although that is not their explicit phrasing. I worry about this framing, relevant though it may be to the levelling-up agenda. For instance, “Places with high average earnings attract graduates through migration. Graduates who grew up in places with low average earnings are more likely to move away.” They note that non-graduates are less likely to move to London and other large cities than graduates.  Inevitably, these patterns of behaviour also lead to their final conclusion that ‘patterns of mobility exacerbate regional inequality in skills’, so that there is a ‘brain drain from the North and coastal areas’. By framing what is a good outcome of a university education in terms of money, the implicit messaging being given to graduates is ‘it’s all about the cash’. This is a travesty of what a university education should be about. The idea of public good, as opposed to personal gain, cannot be seen in that framing, but becomes relevant when trying to determine what might be done for the areas (Grimsby and Wisbech are pulled out as examples) where the current loss of graduates is marked, and social deprivation is highly visible.

Let us take the specific example of a Muslim woman who wants to stay close to her family and teach in a primary school: she will neither be a high earner nor have demonstrated an appetite for mobility, but she will be of huge benefit to her community, and an excellent role model for younger women. Such a woman should be highly valued, not put down as a statistic of someone who didn’t aspire to geographical mobility. (I wonder how the likely increasing trend to working from home, possibly home being located far distant from the location of the employer, will skew future analyses.) Interestingly, the IFS findings show that Asian women who do move earn less than those who stay put (in contrast to every other group), and that young adults of Indian and Pakistani heritage are significantly less likely to have moved by age 27 than their white peers of otherwise similar backgrounds.

Income can be measured.  Value to a local community is much harder to quantify, but it is still value. It is obvious that high paying jobs are often in metropolitan areas which will therefore act as an attractor to many, and if income is used as the only figure of merit, then the metropolitan areas look ‘good’. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy that the well-heeled parts of the country are the ones to which graduates may aspire to move, which will definitely exacerbate inequality. However, here as in so many instances, metrics should be used with care.

However, here as in so many instances, metrics should be used with care. Willetts highlights the dangers of using, as a proposed criterion for the OfS (Office for Students), graduate outcomes a mere fifteen months after graduation as a means to determine university performance, a time when many (if not most) graduates are still finding their feet in their careers. Fifteen months is far too soon, as he makes clear, and it still relies on using earnings as the figure of merit, this time to score university courses. As so many commentators have pointed out, such a metric will necessarily imply that many courses are inherently seen as low-value; not necessarily the in the STEM arena, as I typically consider on this blog, but courses in music and the arts, for instance, and those wishing to become nurses, work in the charity sector (a popular choice for Cambridge graduates I understand) or who aspire to be that primary school teacher I mentioned above.

Willetts is a great believer in universities of all complexions and wishes to see less distinction made between academic and vocational pathways, as well as less between those institutions providing either. He has, it would seem, little time for his alma mater of Oxford, or indeed mine of Cambridge, accusing them of snobbishness, in large part because they don’t teach non-academic courses (while, a little confusingly, simultaneously pointing out that engineering and law are vocational, courses very much taught here). He highlights the potential benefits to the local economy if new universities were to open up in towns from Wigan to Peterborough. Such benefits would pertain at least as much to workers in low-paid jobs as to the graduates themselves. However, the IFS study would imply such graduates would, possibly should, then migrate to the bright lights of London or Manchester, removing the possible gains to the community.

What about Oldham? I highlight this town, sitting within Greater Manchester, because it is in the process of carrying out an economic review, led by Alun Francis, the head of the local Further Education college, Oldham College. (Willetts sees FE Colleges as a great undervalued resource in the education landscape.) What can a run-down old mill town do to improve its economic performance, pushing up median wages from their current miserably low level, and to keep those young people who get qualifications at level 4 and above in the area to boost the economy? As long as the public discourse is framed in ‘geographical mobility is necessarily good’ – to paraphrase the IFS study – or graduate earnings are the only measure of the value of further and higher education, as the Department for Education appears to want OfS to think about the matter, we will not get anything approaching levelling up, because those who can, will migrate to the city lights, and those who advise them will encourage them to do so.

Willetts highlights the dangers of using, as a proposed criterion for the OfS (Office for Students), graduate outcomes a mere fifteen months after graduation as a means to determine university performance, a time when many (if not most) graduates are still finding their feet in their careers. Fifteen months is far too soon, as he makes clear, and it still relies on using earnings as the figure of merit, this time to score university courses. As so many commentators have pointed out, such a metric will necessarily imply that many courses are inherently seen as low-value; not necessarily the STEM careers I typically consider on this blog, but courses in music and the arts, for instance, and those wishing to become nurses, work in the charity sector (a popular choice for Cambridge graduates I understand) or who aspire to be that primary school teacher I mentioned above.

Willetts is a great believer in universities of all complexions and wishes to see less distinction made between academic and vocational pathways, as well as less between those institutions providing either. He has, it would seem, little time for his alma mater of Oxford, or indeed mine of Cambridge, accusing them of snobbishness, in large part because they don’t teach non-academic courses (while, a little confusingly, simultaneously pointing out that engineering and law are vocational, courses very much taught here). He highlights the potential benefits to the local economy if new universities were to open up in towns from Wigan to Peterborough. Such benefits would pertain at least as much to workers in low-paid jobs as to the graduates themselves. However, the IFS study would imply such graduates would, possibly should, then migrate to the bright lights of London or Manchester, removing the possible gains to the community.

What about Oldham? I highlight this town, sitting within Greater Manchester, because it is in the process of carrying out an economic review, led by Alun Francis, the head of the local Further Education college, Oldham College. (Willetts sees FE Colleges as a great undervalued resource in the education landscape.) What can a run-down old mill town do to improve its economic performance, pushing up median wages from their current miserably low level, and to keep those young people who get qualifications at level 4 and above in the area to boost the economy? As long as the public discourse is framed in ‘geographical mobility is necessarily good’ – to paraphrase the IFS study – or graduate earnings are the only measure of the value of further and higher education, as the Department for Education appears to want OfS to think about the matter, we will not get anything approaching levelling up, because those who can, will migrate to the city lights, and those who advise them will encourage them to do so.

 

Posted in careers, education, Further Education, inequality, mobility, skills | Comments Off on The Problems of Measurement

Office

Posted on 3 October 2021 by Henry Gee

Small spaces at home, hitherto neglected nooks and crannies, have begun to assume a far greater importance in our lives than they once did. These are those closets, spare bedrooms, cupboards under the stairs, corners of bedrooms, edges of dining tables or breakfast bars and so on where many people now do their work, when once they would commute to somewhere perhaps more suitably equipped.

I’m lucky in that even before the Present Unpleasantness I have worked at home for most of the time. When the Gees first moved to Cromer, in 2006, I really did work in a cupboard under the stairs, though back then I commuted more. In 2011 we remodeled the house, adding a kitchen diner at the back, so I moved into (most of) the old galley kitchen. And that’s been my office/ studio/ man cave/ dojo/ fun palace/ library ever since. This is what it looked like a couple of weeks ago.

I did most of the working (and music-making) at the far end. Although it’s a long narrow room, it seems much longer because I used a wide-angle lens to get it all in. In actual fact the total floor area is less than six square metres.

After working hard all summer at the Submerged Log Company, as well as finishing my latest book — and recording the audiobook version thereof — I felt that it was high time for a refurb. I spend quite a lot of time in the home office, whether for the day job; writing on my own account; writing and recording music; or just relaxing; and after ten years of occupation it had begun to look a bit scruffy. There were some ugly stains on the ceiling (a result of minor flooding from the bathroom above), and I realized that behind the bookshelves there was still some raw plaster and even a few holes from when the room had once been a kitchen. Even the wire that had powered the cooker still protruded from the wall. So I decided to take some time off to gut the place.

It took four days — FOUR DAYS — to remove the hundreds of books, sound equipment, sundry gewgaws, bibelots, unicycles, girrafes, and other stuff. Luckily we have a capacious garden summerhouse.

It took another three days to prep the place for repainting. I pulled up the scuzzy floor tiles. I filled up all the holes. I vacuumed. I threw out trash. I vacuumed again. I sugar-soaped the walls. I did more vacuuming. The dust, my dears, the DUST.

The time came at last to apply, you know, actual paint.

 

 

 

 

 

And here it is after the first coat of Homebase Pure Brilliant White. One thing I discovered while doing this job is that, like Michelangelo, I don’t like painting ceilings very much. A friend suggested I send the bill to the Pope. So His Holiness might soon be getting a receipt for a large tub of the aforementioned Homebase Pure Brilliant White. and a paint roller.

After two coats — and two days — Offspring 2, who has far greater attention to detail than I, came in to touch up the bits I’d missed.

 

 

 

 

 

Then the time came to install a large shelf with legs, which has pretensions to being a desk.

The next task was to attach fourteen vertical runners to the walls, for the shelves. This meant drilling a lot of holes, with a power drill. Another thing I discovered while doing this job was that I am not fond of power tools, especially in a confined space. The NOISE. You might ask why I didn’t use the same holes as before. Well, that would have been too easy. Besides, I wanted some of the shelves in different places.

This took two days. Or, rather, four hours, spread over two days. I could only take so much of the noise (and the vibration), and I wanted to spare the neighbours. After that I could put up the shelves.  Quietly.

 

 

 

 

 

After a lot more vacuuming it was time to install new carpet tiles. Last time I did this I glued them down with special tile adhesive, and after some time in this confined space I felt that I was being cheered enthusiastically on by Harvey the Giant Pink Octopus and his All-Star Orchestra featuring the Crustacean Choristers, with, towards the end, Agama Gekko and the Iguana Brass. This time the tiles were thicker and backed with bitumen, so could simply be laid flat on the ex-council lino, without adhesive of any kind, not even hallucinogenic, although I still had to cut a few to fit. This only took an evening, but took longer than it might have done because the dog felt she had to come and ‘help’. This meant that short bursts with a sharp knife and straight-edge were interspersed with longer intervals of rolling around on the floor admiring whichever soft toy was the dog’s favorite that day.

 

 

 

 

 

Only then could I install the computers and associated electrical equipment – much easier to do before the books come back.

In the meantime, comments had been made on Social Media about the scruffiness of my chair. Well, I have had that chair for at least a quarter of a century. I have written many books while seated in that chair, notwithstanding inasmuch as which processed many thousands of submerged logs. That chair was good enough for me. But Mrs Gee very kindly re-covered the chair with the fabric from some very colorful but worn-out trousers she once wore, giving the chair a fetching and funky new appearance.

 

 

 

 

And now, the books. The refurbishment was an excellent opportunity to have a cull. I really don’t like getting rid of books, but as I am fast coming up to rapidly approaching my seventh decade, I made one of two executive decisions – that if I have read a book and am unlikely to read it again, then I should donate it to a charity shop so someone else can have a go. This picture shows a huge pile of crates filled with books destined for our favourite secondhand bookstore, which is at Blickling Hall, a local National Trust property. Almost all of these books are from the Office, though Mrs Gee and I have been thinning out drifts of books that have accumulated elsewhere chez Gee. Working at a publishing company, as I do, I tend to accrete books without knowing it. I also had a large pile of generic thrillers, acquired in two episodes. The first was when a elderly neighbour was in hospital for some weeks trying to shake off pneumonia. He was a voracious reader, and before each visit I’d trawl charity shops for airport-lounge-style thrillers and whodunits. Sadly his pneumonia won in the end, and after his death, his widow returned the books. The second episode was when I broke an ankle in August 2018 and was confined to bed for a couple of months, and neighbours and friends kindly gave me lots of entertaining reading. Much of it now read – the rest, I’m unlikely to – so off they go.

 

 

 

 

The remaining books re-shelved, the last task was to reinstall Flabbey Road, my home studio. Which I did. The second executive decision I made was that my days of live playing are over. I really don’t much like wiring things up, taking all the wires out again, schlepping huge boxes around in the middle of the night, wiring them up again, playing for a few bored punters wildly enthusiastic crowds, and doing it all in reverse when I could be comfily at home watching Strictly with the family. Besides, lockdown has taught me that I can record whole albums at home, as well as audiobooks.

 

 

Here is what it looks like from the other end.

And that’s it. It took the full fourteen days, or even a fortnight. And it was exhausting. Some days all I could do of an evening was flake out in front of the TV while I felt the blood pounding in my arms and legs. All that moving of books and equipment, all that stretching and bending, toting barges, lifting bales, while wielding a paint roller/ vacuum cleaner/ carpet knife/ etcetera.

But I’m very glad it’s done. I must say I couldn’t have done it without the support of the family, who had to tolerate the mess and dust and fumes and general chaos. Should be good for at least another ten years. Next stop – tidy the toolshed.

 

 

 

 

Posted in Domesticrox, Home Office, working from home | Comments Off on Office

University Traditions

Posted on 20 September 2021 by Athene Donald

This is the time of year when students are in the process of returning to their many campuses (or going for the first time as Freshers). Cambridge University term starts later than many, and as a result few students are yet back. Consequently, the University has been cramming in, in the diary but not in numbers attending, ceremonies in the Senate House to confer degrees and to celebrate those who took their degrees in absentia last summer. The occasions are not what they would once have been – no proud parents or friends in the Senate House, no clasping of the hands while the degree is conferred – but I hope they still feel like a special occasion. (I wrote about the form of my University’s ceremonies, as indeed other graduation events in which I’ve participated in different guises, in a relatively early post on this blog).

The pandemic has changed everything, across University occasions and well beyond the Senate House. A few people still seem intent on shaking hands in social situations – and I’ve been giving them a metaphorical cold shoulder – but I wonder whether the Cambridge tradition of clasping hands in the Senate House will ever return, although I certainly hope the presence of families will. There are so many aspects of life, traditional customs which may seem totally inappropriate in the future. The Continental way of hugging – be that with two or three pecks on the cheek, I was always confused which to expect from whom – which increasingly seemed to be replacing the cool British handshake, even between academics, seems as unsuitable in these pandemic days as that handshake. I don’t think the bumping of elbows is very likely to catch on, more appropriate though it may currently seem.

I am very conscious of the approaching start of the Cambridge term, with its formal sequence of events, ceremonial and pedagogical, but also looking back, almost with horror, as I realise the 50th anniversary of my own matriculation is fast approaching. While Churchill finesses what new procedure we will follow – not all freshers coming into the Master’s Lodge one after the other and shaking my hand and then my husband’s, while a couple of sentences are exchanged at close range – I try to remember what my own matriculation was like. No formal dinner, it would seem. I’ve found the letter I wrote to my mother all those years ago, and it is not very enthusiastic:

‘I may say the matriculation ceremony was a farce (I didn’t even wear a gown for it – tatty old jeans instead!). It consisted of filing into the praelector’s office and signing our name in two places – one swearing to obey the rules, regulations, ordinances [which I couldn’t spell, getting confused with ordnances] etc, and the other the college register. No pomp and ceremony and not even a glass of port.’

Was I disappointed or relieved? I’m not sure. There is no doubt that too much ceremony can overwhelm freshers who aren’t used to that sort of formality and are convinced they will get things wrong. The matriculation dinner so many colleges – including ours – do have, may simply feel like an opportunity to demonstrate their ignorance by using the wrong knife or putting water in the wine glass. I always feel sorry for those who are placed next to me, in case that makes their anxiousness soar yet higher, although I’ve had some amazing conversations with students who have done phenomenally enterprising things before they left school, or simply thought deeply about the issues that matter to them and which they are keen to discuss.

Nevertheless, myself as a fresher had little positive to say in this same letter about ‘the Mistress’s reception’ (I was at Girton College, then for women only, and which has always had a Mistress).

‘Tonight was the mistress’s reception which was another farce. A sweet looking old woman, who gave the impression of being unused to making speeches and it didn’t really look as if she was going to try to make personal contact with everyone – so we made off.’

Oh dear. Is that how people regard me, sweet and unused to giving speeches? Checking Wikipedia, I see that the said Mistress was rather younger than I am currently so ‘old’ feels, to my present self, very harsh. It is undoubtedly wholesome for me to look back at what a young student may feel about the strange events that greet them when they first arrive in this venerable University. I should remember this! I still have to write this year’s speech for the Fresher’s dinner, but I’ve been getting plenty of practice at giving speeches to other cohorts of students and alumni, so I hope I don’t resemble that ‘old’ Mistress of mine.

It is intriguing to note that, in my next letter home, I refer to being exceedingly exhausted:

‘I have just returned from playing squash for an hour at Churchill. Made a real fool of myself but at least I know better what it entails.’

As far as I recall, that was the only time I set foot in Churchill during the six years I was in Cambridge completing my first and second degrees. I was pleased to note that my opponent from that day came up to me at an alumni event a few years back, remarking (with pride, perhaps?) that he had been the one to introduce me to Churchill. We had not, to my memory, spoken from that squash day to the alumni event; he clearly had not been impressed by my squash-playing skills either. My defence is that it was my first time.

We may all be hoping for an academic year that is closer to the ‘normal’ we used to know. However, I think we also understand that all kinds of differences will assail us, ranging from what incoming students will know, how confident they are and how they settle into a life that is still going to be punctuated by mask-wearing, one-way systems in buildings and – on top of the pandemic fall out – limited food choices in our catering facilities as much as in the supermarkets. It will be a long time before we know what the new normal looks like, and what habits and customs will never return.

Posted in admission to degrees, education, Freshers, Girton College, matriculation, Senate House | Comments Off on University Traditions

Spayed

Posted on 16 September 2021 by Henry Gee

It’s been a funny old day. It started in a celebratory mood as my book finally got to be published in the UK. And also, in Dutch, in Holland. I have been basking in congratulatory messages, which has been lovely, and if you want to know what the fuss is all about, you may visit the book’s very own website, which is here.

But the day was also deviant in its routine as I had to get my faithful dog Lulu to the vet to be spayed.  This is an appointment of long standing, and calculated from the end of her last being in season. She is now back from having been spayed, surprisingly perky withal, and modelling a very smart babygro. But I’ll be nursing her this evening.

And it also happens to be Yom Kippur, a day in which publishing books and nursing spayed dogs should really be very far from one’s mind. Real life, eh?

Posted in Domesticrox | Comments Off on Spayed

‘Pure’ versus ‘Applied’ Science

Posted on 12 September 2021 by Athene Donald

When I started this blog, more than ten years ago, I imagined I would write about physics, and specifically about physics at the interface with biology. Perhaps, I thought, I would write about exciting papers I’d read; indeed, I asked a couple of other researchers in my field to join with me in doing this, to be met with little enthusiasm. In practice, things have turned out very differently. The science itself has not featured greatly here; I’ve largely written about the doing of it – who does it, how it should be done (and equally important, how it should not be done), and how it is funded; the political landscape for science; and the diversity angle. Interdisciplinary work – of the sort I was doing at the time – has certainly featured, particularly in the early days. So have its challenges, not least around funding, but not much about the science itself. I don’t regret that. I’ve had fun with writing this blog. I’m sure it has helped my writing skills (never too late) and I’ve enjoyed the interactions I’ve had, initially through posted comments although now much more usually over Twitter. But today I want to revert to something closer to my original concept, although still without detailed science.

I am prompted to write this by reading an editorial in the newsletter of the Institute of Physics’ Biological Physics Group written by my Cavendish Laboratory colleague, Pietro Cicuta, who is stepping down as Chair. I was instrumental in setting up this group nearly fifteen years ago, and I was its Chair for the first few years. As far as I can tell, this editorial is available to all, and not just IOP members, so I encourage you to read Pietro’s thoughtful views. He says

‘Today, many of us capably handle living systems within our physics departments, or in genuine cross-disciplinary environments, making entirely new research possible, for example integrating new tools and designing experiments that are as systematic as many other areas of condensed matter physics.’

In the early 2000’s, physics departments did not expect to have cell culture facilities, for instance, nor to teach material that might be called ‘biological physics’, although the field has various equivalent names (e.g. biophysics). Things have undoubtedly moved on; many departments are now well equipped with facilities for working with live organisms and with teaching relevant material.

However, I absolutely share Pietro’s concern

‘that despite the excitement of our field, the new teaching courses we developed, the fundamental progress that it is possible to achieve even with relatively small teams, the relevance to real challenges that matter to the public…. despite all this, we are still seen as one of the various sectors of “applied physics”. We have not impacted the “physics culture” very much: particle physics, astrophysics or cold atoms are not considered as physics applied to particles, stars or cold atoms… they somehow are still “the physics”.

Readers who are not physicists might wish to consider what the topics are that they immediately think physics covers, and it probably wouldn’t involve malaria (I wrote about Pietro’s work in this area in the Guardian, back in 2014 when that paper was committed to science blogs), or Covid (more on that shortly), or tumour evolution (to cite the work of another Cavendish colleague Sarah Bohndiek). On the contrary, their thoughts are more likely to turn to black holes and the Higgs’ Boson, or perhaps how to manipulate single atoms at ultracold temperatures. As Pietro says, the rest is, somewhat derogatorily, described as ‘applied’. Dirty stuff, that might be useful….not seen nevertheless as differently exciting and full of wonder.

Back in 2010, when this blog was still largely on the topic of biological physics, I asked ‘Where’s the Wow Factor?’ for this very reason: mainstream physicists think there can be no beauty or amazement in areas away from the sorts of topics I list above. Pietro’s editorial indicates how little things have changed in the last decade. Yet, physicists working in this area can contribute very substantially to our wellbeing, potentially to ‘healthy ageing’, as through work on cancer. If physics is being applied to cancer, why does that not attract a sense of amazement? It baffles me why our culture, and this includes the media in the way they report stories, see so-called applied physics as less worthy of interest than black holes. It isn’t that everyone believes ‘applied’ is bad in all disciplines, because they have made so much – rightly so – about the work of Sarah Gilbert’s team on vaccine development. ‘Pure’ (as that must be the opposite of applied, I suppose) work may have underpinned the development, but its current wow factor sits in enabling it to be applied to our real world, in moving us gratefully on from total lockdowns.

I mentioned physicists’ contribution to Covid. Here I will cite theoretical physicist Mike Cates (educated in the Cavendish, but now Lucasian Professor – the Chair formerly held by Stephen Hawking – in Cambridge’s Department of Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics) who, early on in the pandemic, kickstarted an initiative known as RAMP (Rapid Assistance in Modelling the Pandemic) under the auspices of the Royal Society. This brought together, essentially via crowd-sourcing, over 1800 scientists who felt they had something to offer. Mike’s latest co-authored paper from this programme Efficient Bayesian inference of fully stochastic epidemiological models with applications to COVID-19 takes tools from other areas of physics to apply to this current problem, relying also on the late Dave Mackay’s (another professor at the Cavendish) work on inference. Why is all this work not seen as mainstream?

It seems to me right and proper that fields should evolve. We should remember that James Clerk Maxwell was fascinated by light and colour, but also how our eyes worked to perceive that colour (see, for instance, Basil Mahon’s biography The man who changed everything). In 1855 he presented a paper Experiments on Colour, as perceived by the Eye, with remarks on Colour-blindness to the Royal Society, and five years later he followed up with On the Theory of Colour Vision  to that same august institution. People back then were much more open-minded about what ‘physics’ might be. Certainly his work in this area, along with all his other notable achievements, did not stop him becoming the first Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge – when the Cavendish Laboratory was first opened – in 1871.

Somehow, in the intervening century and a half, scientific culture has become much more narrow-minded, putting us into boxes unless we fight hard. This is the problem for researchers attempting to break down disciplinary boundaries. The interface between physics and biology is one which has become much more blurred; for those of us working at that interface the work is fascinating, intriguing and infinitely worthwhile, and comes in many different flavours. But some of our colleagues seem stuck in a time-warp and, inevitably, that message may rub off on those they teach. I look forward to the world of physics in this country (other countries do rather better as far as I can tell) losing its hang-ups about pure versus applied, what is ‘proper’ physics, and what is not. I hope many members of the Institute of Physics read Pietro’s editorial and consider their positions.

 

 

Posted in Biological Physics, education, Interdisciplinary Science, James Clerk Maxwell, Mike Cates, Pietro Cicuta, Research | Comments Off on ‘Pure’ versus ‘Applied’ Science