"Wasteful" Research in Pure and Applied Science
This is a modal window.
The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported.
Formal Metadata
| Title |
| |
| Title of Series | ||
| Number of Parts | 340 | |
| Author | ||
| License | CC Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivatives 4.0 International: You are free to use, copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in unchanged form for any legal and non-commercial purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
| Identifiers | 10.5446/52565 (DOI) | |
| Publisher | ||
| Release Date | ||
| Language |
Content Metadata
| Subject Area | ||
| Genre | ||
| Abstract |
|
Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings111 / 340
3
5
15
16
18
22
23
27
32
33
34
35
47
54
58
67
69
70
72
73
78
79
83
84
85
86
87
90
92
95
100
102
103
104
105
106
114
115
116
118
119
120
122
126
128
129
130
131
133
137
142
143
145
147
148
149
153
155
156
159
162
163
165
168
169
174
176
178
181
182
189
194
198
201
202
203
206
209
213
214
217
218
219
220
225
227
228
237
240
241
244
245
250
254
257
260
261
266
273
278
284
285
287
291
293
297
302
308
310
317
318
319
321
325
327
328
333
00:00
NobeliumInorganic chemistryAlchemyChemistryActivity (UML)Toll-like receptorPhysical chemistryChemistFunctional groupHope, ArkansasMedicalizationGenetic engineeringAmino acidTopicityAreaAgricultural scienceArzneimittelforschungOrganic foodGesundheitsstörungPotenz <Homöopathie>Molecular geometryComplication (medicine)PainGoldWine tasting descriptorsBiomolecular structurePhotochemistryGlacial erraticChemical elementReaktionsgleichungLactitolBranch (computer science)Diamantähnlicher KohlenstoffBleiglanzChemical structureBrown adipose tissueSense DistrictSet (abstract data type)BaconSecretionOctane ratingElectronic cigaretteCancerGenotypeRecreational drug useChemotherapySoilAbbruchreaktionProcess (computing)Cell growthIsotropyBreed standardMetalZunderbeständigkeitProteinÜbergangszustandHondurasChromatographyPreservativeOceanic basinAcetoneBase (chemistry)Germanic peoplesChemical propertyGasPenicillinStimulus (physiology)Calcium ammonium nitrateMultiprotein complexInitiation (chemistry)CollectingMedical prescriptionBiochemistryAgeingOcean currentPigmentDeathChemical plantMüllerinMedical historyRiver sourceSystemic therapyPatentCoronary artery diseasePeriodateFoodBewitterungPeptideBoilingMolekulardynamikAmineImmunologyPolyethyleneKlinische ChemieGolgi apparatusQuartzRecreationContergankindRadiation damageAzo couplingOxygenierungChemical engineeringEconomic sectorPharmacologyAcidFatCommon landSteam distillationFarmerAlcoholBiosynthesisVitaminDiet foodKohlenhydratchemieChemische SyntheseCholesterolAction potentialHeredityNucleotidePlasticStorage tankGene duplicationMaterials scienceOrigin of replicationDiazepamStokes shiftSpontaneous combustionAnomalie <Medizin>WalkingNuclear fissionSynthetic oilPoppersAgricultureFlorenceSchwermetallSurface scienceHuman subject researchUmweltchemikalieExplosionNaturstoffData conversionBody weightColourantMill (grinding)Freies ElektronSemioticsRapidCompliance (medicine)Growth mediumMoleculeSubstitutionsreaktionPlasticity (physics)Chemische IndustrieWursthülleAtomic numberController (control theory)Photoelectric effectMachinabilityChemical compoundNitrosaminePolyphenolePhase (waves)Cell biologyNobeliumProtein biosynthesisPoisonPeptideBarton, DerekDavy, HumphryKuhn, RichardPressureScurvyTransuranium elementNucleic acidCarcinogenPasteurisierenOrganische ChemieLambicCell cycleMetallurgyMolecularityElixirSulfonamide (medicine)CarotinoidePharmaceutical drugCrack cocaine
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:12
Professor Kienitz, ladies and gentlemen, research by its nature is bound to have its wasteful side
00:23
since its outcome is essentially unpredictable. Most observations are commonplace, the majority of experiments are unsuccessful, so I must qualify the title of this lecture right away to indicate some of the particular circumstances I have in mind.
00:43
The individual researcher may feel or come to feel that he's been wasting his time, that he could have spent the same time better in another research or in some quite other pursuits. His employer may become dissatisfied with the short-term or long-term outcome,
01:03
lack of resultant profit. Society in general may come to feel that the researcher has failed to produce socially edifying results or indeed that the results may lend themselves to use for antisocial ends.
01:20
I must also say a word about pure and applied. That's a classification which Sir Peter Medawar considers to be terribly, terribly English. Nonetheless, I'm using it because I am both English and also a chemist, and we chemists have
01:40
our international union of pure and applied chemistry. However, I will agree with Medawar that Thomas Pratt and Francis Bacon drew the distinction more elegantly between experiments of light and experiments of fruit. During the centuries since Bacon's prophetic works
02:04
were written, we've seen, as if through successively dissolving curtains of mist, a series of completely novel mental pictures of the world and of the universe, what is in them and what is their history.
02:20
This enlightenment comes from scientific research and while being every bit as inspiring as the Aristotelian and theological cosmologies of the Middle Ages, it's derived from accurate and detailed observations and experiments, most of which can be verified by anybody
02:42
who will take the necessary trouble. As to fruitfulness, we most of us scarcely live at the standard of luxury available to Francis Bacon himself. Although, on average, we are much more comfortable than the average contemporary of Bacon's.
03:02
We're also less likely than Bacon to die of infectious disease. Communication of all kinds and possibilities for travelling, which are not easily classified as between enlightenment and fruitfulness, have changed beyond recognition
03:20
and, on balance, they've given people much more pleasure than pain. But a bitter fruit has been the unprecedented cruelty and destructiveness of the 20th century wars and the threat which Sir Derek Barton spoke of, which is still hanging over us.
03:43
But now it's time for me to proceed to the embarrassing matter I'm to talk about, embarrassing at least to scientists, who do not often care to ventilate such a topic themselves, although over the centuries they have been accused of every kind of dubious activity,
04:01
including wastefulness, by non-scientists. It seems also at the present time that the barrage of accusations is on the increase. Nearly 40 years ago, J.D. Bernal, in his Social Function of Science, pointed out that scientists are a bit like medical people
04:24
in not criticising the activities of their profession in public. He went on to discuss various aspects, what he called the inefficiency of research. Much, of course, has changed in the last 40 years and most of my comments turn out to be quite different ones,
04:44
though that's partly because I won't try to deal at all with detailed conditions and organisation of research. And I'm very aware that I'm only capable of dealing very patchily and unsystematically
05:01
with such a large and complicated topic. And it's also inevitable that most of my instances will be drawn from chemistry and biochemistry, as those are the fields of activity where I have most experience. Well, of course, in former centuries
05:23
there were scarcely any people who did research as such for their living. Apart from observatories, the first institutions which were specially commissioned for experimental research seemed to have been the French Academy of Sciences, whose members were paid by the revolutionary governments in France
05:45
to work on particular projects. And there was the Royal Institution, which was founded in London in 1799 by Sir Benjamin Thomson, the Count Rumford. The first two directors of the Royal Institution,
06:02
Sir Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday, were each in their own way quite outstanding research workers. If we go back further, we find most of the important experiments were done by mining engineers, medical men,
06:20
apothecaries, clergymen, college fellows, or outright members of the leisure classes. Indeed, in the 18th century, a chemical laboratory was quite a usual feature of an English gentleman's residence. As all these people got their living from other sources,
06:42
they were under no obligation to do experiments. Probably only their more striking discoveries ever got published or talked about. So we get the impression that nearly all the scientific research in the 16th to 18th centuries was done by geniuses.
07:01
There must really have been a great deal of unrecorded effort put into experiments in those days. A good deal of it was purposely concealed so that any real innovation could be exploited by its discoverer. Henning Brandt, for example, is believed to have discovered phosphorus,
07:22
which was exhibited around the courts of Europe. The recipe passed secretly against cash from hand to hand until it was eventually published, and that was posthumously by Robert Boyle. He put the document into a sealed package
07:42
which he deposited with the Royal Society until his death. In general, of course, the alchemists were concentrating on one particular chemical discovery which each one hoped to exploit for his own ends, and that was the transmutation of baser metals into gold.
08:02
Robert Boyle was somewhat scornful about the alchemists' ideas on the elements, and eventually he gave his own empirical definition of a chemical element, and that definition has survived. But Boyle was very far from abandoning
08:22
the search for transmutation into gold, and it's clear that he thought himself in 1689 fairly near being successful because he petitioned Parliament, and he petitioned them successfully, to repeal a 14th-century statute,
08:45
which was a very early example of anti-inflation measures, incidentally. Henry IV had made the multiplying of gold a felony. That is a serious crime in England. Well, many years had to pass
09:01
before the chemical elements in the modern sense were generally recognized, and the idea that gold could be produced from other cheaper substances ceased to promote chemical endeavor. Even if their hopes were bound to fail, the alchemists over many centuries
09:21
had made a wealth of discoveries in inorganic chemistry and metallurgy. It's worth remembering that Sir Isaac Newton probably spent more of his time on alchemy than on mathematics and physics, a very proper qualification for him to become master of the mint.
09:41
Newton scarcely published anything about that aspect of his scientific work, possibly partly because his experiments had never produced any generalization comparable with his physical ones. The parallel search by the alchemists for the elixir of life
10:01
was aimed at a goal which today seems less attainable than ever. The people engaged in that research, though they produced rather few useful drugs after the early medieval introduction of the distillation of alcohol,
10:22
and an even less profitable research with which some of these early biochemists, you might call them, occupied themselves, was the synthesis of a miniature human being or homunculus. How could people who had believed van Helmont's recipe
10:40
for the spontaneous generation of mice in a basket containing corn and dirty linen, how could they know this goal to be unattainable? Faust's Emanuensis Wagner was intended by Goethe to portray the patient medieval research worker
11:00
of limited outlook toiling on towards a goal which, because it lay within the closed church Aristotelian system of cosmology and demonology, must somehow be attainable as well as knowable.
11:22
It took all the time from the days of Bacon and Boyle to the days of Pasteur for the miasma of medieval thought to evaporate and for research workers to learn to set themselves more limited and seemingly attainable objectives.
11:41
But obstacles inherent in nature can still block the progress of research and it's worth spending some time thinking about these before considering the purely human influences which also result in waste for research. Historians of science have been classified as internalists
12:03
and externalists, those who believed in discoveries emerging sequentially on the basis of the logic of previous discoveries and those who believed in discoveries being made because of public or private interest in their possible application.
12:22
And obviously these approaches are not mutually exclusive. But looking back, I would disagree with Hessen's emphasis on military and commercial requirements and so forth as having determined the efflorescence of astronomy,
12:40
statics and dynamics in the 16th and 17th centuries the external requirements were certainly there. But these relatively simple discoveries were possible because they could be made by quite simple observations and measurements interpretable on the basis of Euclidean geometry
13:01
which had already existed for many centuries. Other branches of science were not in a position to advance until a sound descriptive basis had been laid. For chemistry, this required a much better understanding of the properties of gases and a considerable shift of interest
13:23
away from the narrow obsessions of the alchemists towards the commoner substances of everyday life. Priestley and Lavoisier were in an incomparably better position for inaugurating modern chemistry than was Boyle.
13:40
Biology required longer still up to days of Pasteur and Darwin. Yet much earlier Jenner had dealt with smallpox and Lind had dealt with scurvy as isolated responses to acutely felt public pressures responses which were based on
14:02
limited but acute observations. I would say that in our own days we've seen much the same thing happening about cancer. A biological mystery which is perhaps yielding up some of its fundamental secrets just in these very last
14:20
few years. But for 60 years or more enormous resources have been earmarked for cancer research. Almost every new branch of biology and chemistry has in turn been fruitlessly explored. Yet the practical achievements to date I can mention surgery
14:42
radiotherapy chemotherapy and the removal of environmental carcinogens those arise from acute but un-theoretical observations which are worthily comparable with those of Jenner and of Lind. I think cancer research
15:01
is the best modern example I can give of how an obstacle inherent in nature can frustrate the outlay of enormous human effort. Yet on a smaller scale research often runs into similar impasse. One example could be the study of the chemistry
15:22
of proteins during the last two decades of the 19th century before the clarification brought about by the Fischer-Hofmeister polypeptide hypothesis. Another was Otto Hahn's work on the supposed transuranic elements which
15:41
Graf Bernadotte mentioned some of us heard in this very theatre a remarkable lecture about. In fact, important discoveries have to be made in a sequence which cannot be altered very much. Progress in one branch of science
16:01
can only follow previous progress in another. Scientists are liable to become prisoners within a confining set of concepts out of which it's not too easy to break. TS Kuhn has dealt well with these matters in his book The Structure of Scientific Resolutions
16:21
and I'll not go further into his concept of paradigms except to say that the people who break out of these intellectual prisons have often been thought of by their colleagues as interlopers or amateurs which has usually meant that they've had
16:40
experiences in quite other fields of science or of everyday life which caused them to see the problems some different way round. The recognition of nucleic acids as the carriers of heredity and the determinants of ontogeny is a wonderful story of this kind
17:00
from our own lifetimes. But now for the commoner human failings. Work is often repeated because the research worker is unaware that it's been done already. Wilstetter has made this point well with its converse that I've just mentioned that too much familiarity
17:21
with the literature inhibits its creativity.
18:54
The scientific physics and the botanics of the
19:00
Monteverdi, Zwett and Mollisch as foregangers. So often when a foreganger is the foreganger but a short foreganger is the foreganger of the foreganger
19:27
from I feel that in my own search for simple peptides in plants from 1950 to 1965 I became in just that way immersed too narrowly in protein biochemistry.
19:41
Wider reading and wider acquaintanceships would have shown me much sooner that I was really studying coupling products of amino compounds with polyphenols and quininoids. It's much more serious when an important discovery is forgotten or suppressed.
20:00
Mendel's work on hereditary variation published in 1866 in a relatively obscure journal was nevertheless quite widely discussed at the time. But it seems that the basis in cytology for understanding its significance had yet to develop. Meanwhile Mendel's work was gradually
20:21
forgotten and had to be rediscovered around 1900. The failure of organic chemists and biochemists to take up Zwett's well published discovery of chromatography from 1903 or 1906 to take it up a tall widely until nearly
20:41
30 years later has been put down to Wilstetter's tendency to minimize Zwett's work and to present himself as the ultimate authority on plant pigments. But the failure was partly because chromatography yielded such small quantities of product that microchemical analysis
21:01
was needed for these and that was only widely adopted during the 1920s on the basis of Kuhlman's and Pregel's work. At any rate Wilstetter made handsome amends by drawing the attention of Richard Kuhn and Edgar Laiderer to Zwett's
21:20
methods when they began to get involved with carotenoids about 1930. Since then chromatography has steadily increased in favor with analytical chemists. But perhaps the most outstanding lapse by neglect of such a kind was the failure of
21:40
chemists to pay proper attention to Avogadro's hypothesis which was published in 1811 and it wasn't until Cannizzaro forcefully reminded chemists about Avogadro's ideas at Karlsruhe in 1860 that proper ideas of molecules
22:00
and atomic weights began to be generally accepted and only then could Kekulé, Lebel and van't Hoff begin to formulate their ideas of molecular structure, the importance of which Professor Keenitz mentioned
22:20
in his introduction this morning. The sheer volume of scientific publication nowadays increases the chance of lapses through pure ignorance occurring. The big task ahead for the information scientists the advent of
22:40
microfiche journals such as Chemi Engineer Technique and the new Journal of Chemical Research may lead to higher standards in primary publication and then the abstract journals, some of them have greatly improved their indexing arrangements there's the Science Citation
23:02
Index which has its special uses and there are all kinds of partly realised or potential applications of electronic computing. I think that the information people have served science well so far and particularly they have
23:22
served chemistry well but they can't afford to be complacent and there's a big task ahead of them. Well, wastefulness by duplication of research need not be accidental or unconscious.
23:40
The bandwagon effect is well known. An outstanding example was the study of the nucleotide codes for protein biosynthesis whose results on one occasion were being published in a New York daily newspaper. Cavalieri has even accused research workers in the
24:01
so-called genetic engineering field of rushing ill-advisedly ahead into dangerous experiments in order to get Nobel prizes. But competitiveness is not the only reason for unnecessary duplication. People who lack self-confidence and originality
24:21
come to feel that to be trendy is to play safe. You have only to look at the research topics in biochemistry for which the British Science Research Council has made grants to university scientists to be brutally reminded of this phenomenon.
24:42
I think some of the people who apply for these grants should really think more seriously about the direction in the longer term into which their researchers are leading or how their researchers are going to mesh with social requirements
25:01
in a generation's time. Another way of playing safe is to apply some routine if possible prestigious technique as a substitute for thought. Ever since automatic amino acid analysis was made available by
25:21
Spakman, Moore and Stein these fairly expensive analytical machines have been churning out results of dubious relevance to most of the physiological and pathological problems on which they are employed. But the results are publishable
25:41
and money is seen to be spent. Of course the limiting case of trendy research was in biology in the USSR and it was the doing of TD Lysenko and his political promoters. In this case research workers with alternative approaches
26:02
were physically removed from the scene and the whole world is the poorer for what these people and their pupils would have achieved in the last 35 years. Well, now that one or even as much as 2%
26:21
of the national income of most of the developed countries is being devoted to scientific research it's easy to understand popular demands that these expenditures should not be wasteful. I suppose it was mainly because of what happened during the Second World War
26:42
that the Baconian proposals in Bernal's book came to be implemented over quickly and therefore not always wisely. Of course, comparable fractions of national effort are laid out on collecting taxes,
27:01
on advising taxpayers how to pay less tax and on lots of other non-productive services of varying popular esteem. Nonetheless, scientific research still tends to be judged very much in terms of fruit rather than light and just personally
27:22
I'd like to say that I get much more uplift from colour photographs of the surface of the moon and of Mars which are extremely expensive to obtain and involve a lot of research than I do from the objects of abstract art which you can
27:40
see in modern galleries. But let us think now in purely economic terms about which aspects of scientific research can be considered wasteful. There's a tendency among financiers and economists to measure outgoings on research as a fraction of turnover
28:02
or of the value of the product. This is implicit in some documents such as the Rothschild report in Britain. British expenditure on research and development relating to different branches of industry has been compared with corresponding figures
28:20
for Japan by Sir Ewan Maddock and he's demonstrated some striking contrasts. Japanese expenditure in the different branches of industry is fairly evenly adjusted to value of the product whereas British expenditure is very unevenly balanced with 47%
28:40
on the aircraft and electronic industries which together account for only 6% of the value of total industrial output in Britain. Of course it could be argued that special help is needed by industries in a phase of rapid development.
29:01
But now that the Concorde fiasco is reaching its consummation, I think we should look elsewhere for an explanation of the British imbalance. And I would say that it has been promoted as a covert addition to military research expenditure which I'll say
29:21
something more about soon. To the extent that the British Agricultural Research Council has adopted a Rothschild or Japanese approach to financing different lines of research in relation to the value of annual output of each commodity on British
29:40
farms, they could be said to be playing safe. They're helping farmers to overcome their current problems and opening the way to new and improved practices in the future. Their secretary has pointed out that with farming production in an overall decline and farmers short of investment
30:01
capital, the farmers are only in a position to use some of the aids to production which arise from such research. Thus a newly bred plant variety will sweep the country, whereas an improvement in livestock husbandry involving perhaps extra fencing and
30:21
new buildings will not be implemented for lack of capital resources in the hands of the farmer. Fruits of research may thus not materialise just when society needs them most. Just as farmers can be sold new plant varieties, doctors can be sold
30:41
new drugs. Drugs are products requiring relatively little capital expenditure on manufacture by the chemical industry at a time when the profitable employment of capital on heavy organic products such as plastics is threatened by rising costs of raw materials
31:01
and energy, static demand and a sense also of having reached an inherent limit in the likelihood of discovering any new plastic material that will be much superior to those already in existence. One consequence is that doctors are inundated
31:21
with an ever-changing variety of drugs, many of which are not essentially superior to others already in use. They may in fact have been devised by Firm A simply to circumvent a patent belonging to Firm B. The amount of wasteful medical research engendered
31:40
by such sparring around patents is obvious from a look at the patent literature relating to drugs and we have the occasional thalidomide episode thrown in. Moreover, the attention both of doctors and of medical research workers becomes concentrated on drug therapy to the
32:00
detriment of other therapeutic approaches such as those dependent on immunology, manipulation, dietary and spar regimes, exercises and so on, all of which have been in an unfashionable phase now for 40 years or more. While on drugs it's interesting to compare
32:22
and contrast the approaches of different sections of the industry. In chemotherapy we could start with Prontosil rubrum de Mark's notable discovery. It turned out that it was not the pigment moiety of the molecule that was effective but the sulfanilamide
32:42
grouping and hence the development of the whole series of the sulfonamides. Woods then discovered the antagonism of sulfanilamides to the bacterial vitamin para-aminobenzoic acid. The hope appeared before us that by
33:02
intensifying the study of bacterial chemistry new drugs could be developed in a rational way. Well that's more than nearly 40 years ago and that hope has not yet really materialized at all. At present there seem to be three general approaches to developing
33:22
new drugs. You have chemical variations on an already promising theme and then you have the empirical approach of trying every new synthetic or natural compound for every conceivable purpose in agriculture, industry or medicine.
33:41
That's an approach that tends only to be economic for a large firm with its fingers in many different pies such as the British Imperial Chemical Industries. The third approach is to keep on following a number of imaginative or half-baked ideas
34:00
in the hope that a small proportion of them will yield successes. Such an approach in the firm of Hoffman and LaRoche led to the synthesis of Librium and Valium which turned out not to be the substances that it was intended to synthesize even, but they have been a winner for the firm
34:21
and it has emerged from the various lawsuits in which that firm has been involved that it has an enormous research expenditure and that it's very far from frequent for anything as good as Valium to be discovered. Can we say with any certainty whether or not such research
34:40
is wasteful, particularly if most of it is eventually published either in the patent literature or in scientific journals. The story of Penicillin is fairly widely known but it's worth recalling that during the Second World War when the natural
35:00
product from the mold had proved promising for the clinical treatment of bacterial infections in the hands of Florian Hein, the British government imposed official secrecy on research into its chemistry. They were no doubt hoping that an efficient chemical synthesis
35:20
would be found so as to make the drug available for mass treatment of war casualties. Even at the time the official secrecy had seemed doubtful in relation to the Hippocratic oath and to the Geneva conventions. But anyway very many good organic chemists
35:40
were drafted onto the problem and with some crystallographic help they did find out the structure of Penicillin but to this day no complete chemical synthesis exists which is more efficient economically than biosynthesis or partial biosynthesis by the mold. And the collective book on
36:02
Penicillin Chemistry which was published not long after the war indicates that to determine the structure of Penicillin took up more person research hours than had ever been devoted to any other organic compound of comparable complexity.
36:20
So bureaucratic ordering up of research under conditions of secrecy rather than the inherent difficulty of the problem must be the explanation. Of course during the war conventional economic wisdom did not count for much and things got done because individuals or society
36:41
judged them to be important in their own right. And that brings us right on to military research which by its nature is done under conditions of secrecy. We have our suspicions from the scale of the expenditure that it may often be wasteful of research effort in achieving
37:01
the ends contemplated. On the other hand some of its results have been extremely spectacular. We can take as instances radar, nuclear bombs, rockets, artificial satellites and space travel. And here we've come the whole distance
37:21
and the wastefulness or otherwise of the research will be determined primarily by the uses to which society puts such inventions. We can go on to argue that the overwhelming mass of research is directed by present day societies too narrowly
37:41
towards immediately profitable commercial activities or to military purposes. If scientific research were being directed towards truly long term human interests more attention would be being paid to such matters as finding novel and better catalysts for chemical engineering,
38:01
improved capture of solar energy by conventional or novel means, better understanding and then improvement of tropical soils, study of the short and long term determination of climates and a number of other similar neglected topics.
38:20
But it's not my job today to assess research that is scarcely yet being done. And in conclusion I just want to go into an embarrassing and potentially dangerous aspect of the growth of a substantial class
38:40
or hierarchy of scientific research workers. That was something which began during and immediately after the second world war and it's persisted up to about the beginning of the present decade. With the cessation of exponential economic growth
39:01
and with increased popular criticism of our activities we feel our positions and the prospects of our students are threatened. In the new medieval set up which we have in which the real power is exerted by the three estates which I will
39:21
name as the bureaucrats the financiers and the trade union leaders. We try to carve out for ourselves a niche as a fourth estate. No better example of work by our estate on its self preservation can be given than in the industrial application of nuclear
39:40
fission to the generation of electric power and similar purposes. As Professor Barton pointed out more than enough nuclear bombs had been produced for all conceivable political and military purposes. But rather than show once again the versatility of the many
40:00
scientists who turned from other branches of science to military enterprises during the war the nuclear establishment had to continue its own expansion building up unsolved waste disposal problems for future generations without any outstanding economic achievements in the present or
40:20
promising economic prospects for the near future. A glance at the energy sections of chemical abstracts gives an idea of the predominance of scientific effort devoted to applications of nuclear fission whereas the prospects for advance in economic energy utilization seem to lie in better
40:41
understanding of photochemical and photoelectric phenomena in improved utilization of solar energy through the green plant and perhaps also in controlled nuclear fusion. None of these topics receives more than a tiny fraction of the attention devoted to nuclear fission.
41:01
And then there are these consequences of indiscriminate developments in nuclear fission, metallurgy, chemical and agrochemical industries determined mainly by profitability that they've raised many problems of pollution and consequent poisoning.
41:21
Some of these may be genuine though I bow to Professor Barton but they are seized upon by our fourth estate to promote its own interests and the media assist by playing upon genuine and understandable concern felt about these matters
41:40
by the lay public. Scientists are quite good at taking in one another's dirty linen to wash particularly if jobs for the boys can be generated thereby. Topics other than chemical pollution can also be taken up. Just
42:00
as illustrations mention two problems each of which deserves a whole lecture to itself. One question is do nitrosamines in European diets promote malignant disease? The second one what are the roles of various major
42:20
dietary components particularly alcohol, sugars, cholesterol, saturated and unsaturated fats in relation to heart and arterial diseases. Here we are only talking about normal dietary constituents because nitrosamines can be formed during the traditional storage
42:41
or cooking of many ordinary foods. The evidence showing any of these substances to be dangerous as they are ordinarily consumed is pretty thin. Publicised ventilation of such questions can be made to generate research jobs
43:00
even from governments which are feeling financially embarrassed and at the same time as generating research jobs we tend to generate a health and safety neurosis in people who are actually enjoying such good health and safe living
43:20
conditions as never before in history. I think activities of that kind are alarmist as well as being wasteful. Well every advance of science by discovering new phenomena or substances each advance
43:41
makes possible experiments which couldn't have been envisaged previously. So scientific research is in principle infinite and it behaves like the sum of a geometric progression. The problems which research can generate and then solve are infinite whereas the human resources
44:02
to carry out research are limited. There will be a time when people in general will be much better educated and also more contented with their material circumstances whatever those are. They may even want to engage in research as a recreation as did
44:22
gentlemen in days gone by and wastefulness will cease to be an issue. But that's for the future. Today the last thing we should allow is for the so-called economic crisis to be used as a pretext for further damage to our educational arrangements.
44:44
As to research it may well be inadvisable to extend the sum total of publicly financed research activity but nevertheless the crisis should provide us with a stimulus towards working out which
45:01
particular lines of research can best help towards getting us out of the crisis whatever we may consider that to be. And with this end in view research workers can help by taking more initiatives and proving themselves a good deal more
45:22
adaptable. Thank you very much for listening.