Joe Lamb
Emeritus Professor of Physiology, University of St Andrews, Fife

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.54.28

In 1982, when I was Committee Secretary of the Physiological Society, it became apparent to me that the then government, run by Mrs Thatcher, was not interested in scientific research. It was also apparent that scientists were more likely to impress the government if they spoke with one voice, rather than disparate voices calling for more support for chemistry, physics and so on.

The Committee later agreed to form a new organisation which we called ‘An Association of Learned Societies in Science’. I wrote to all the societies we could identify proposing such an organisation and suggesting that each society send two representatives – their secretary and one other.

We had a number of meetings with representatives from most of the major scientific societies in the UK, discussing our lack of funding and trying to decide how best to proceed, for we had little expertise in influencing government. We had no money to employ a lobbying organisation and, in any case, Tam Dalyell advised me that it would be better to organise the campaigning ourselves. So I wrote to Keith Joseph, then Secretary of State for Education and Science, to discuss our concerns, only to find he was not willing to meet us.

Eventually the problem of attracting the attention of those in power was solved for us when Mrs Thatcher declared that academics were poor because they were pricing themselves out of jobs with large pay rises. We all felt this was nonsense but had no data to support our view. I therefore contacted Jon Turney, then at the Science Policy Research Unit at Sussex (SPRU), who very helpfully prepared a report on science funding for us. I also collected all the published data for research council incomes and the dual support element of the University Grant Commission grant, to which I applied the sophistication factor suggested by the Science and Engineering Research Council. Both of these sources suggested that basic science funding was declining, with an estimated deficit of 19% for 1984/1985 compared to 1977/1978. I then thought we should collect data ‘at the coalface’ and, having failed to find a proper statistician to do the work, I applied to the SSRC for a small grant to do it myself. This grant of £500 enabled me to visit a variety of departments of different disciplines in Edinburgh, Dundee, Glasgow and St Andrews to collect data on equipment and running costs.

The results (New Scientist 107, 61) showed that salaries were rising with inflation but that capital and recurrent costs were increasing at between 2% and 7% above the rate of inflation. The pressure on our budgets was thus due to external factors, not to pay costs. This was, I think, the first time that it was shown that the Retail Price Index (RPI) was not a good judge of the costs of doing science. A few years later Yale University showed that such costs inflated at 2% above the US RPI. Despite this evidence, successive UK governments in the 1980s and early 1990s kept decreasing research budgets, both for universities and for government departments, a situation not reversed until New Labour came to power in 1997. The underfunding in the 80s and early 90s was all the more extraordinary in that the UK was enjoying large revenues from North Sea oil, an industry based on the application of basic science.

During this time I was surprised to get a letter from an administrator at the Royal Society saying that our name was inappropriate as we did not represent all scientific societies. Although this attitude seemed unreasonable to me, especially as the Royal Society was apparently making no effort to lobby the government on research funding, I did not think it helpful to show scientists quarrelling and so changed our name to the Ad-hoc Group on Research Funding (AGREF). I learned later that the social scientists had beaten us to it by forming a group called An Association of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences, which still exists, although I am unsure if it represents all the social sciences.

In 1985 Denis Noble rang me to ask to look at the figures I had collected to prepare him for seconding the Oxford debate about the proposed honorary degree for Mrs Thatcher. I sent these on and had a letter from him saying how essential they had been. Because of this I was asked to a meeting in Oxford in the autumn of 1985 to discuss a further campaign on research funding. My recollection was that this meeting was largely organised by the physicists – but took place in Balliol, Denis Noble’s College. The idea floated was for a half page advert in The Times stating our case for more funding. I regret that I was doubtful of the value of this approach, a view which turned out to be totally wrong. We made up the advert and set up the mechanism for collecting the necessary £6000. We also spent much time on an appropriate name for the new organisation. I seem to remember I suggested Save Our Science (SOS) which was fortunately changed to Save British Science by Denis Noble.

The Oxford connection was vital. There were so many contacts between Oxford and the media that when, on the 13 January, 1986, the advert appeared in a good position in The Times, it was accompanied by a letter and an appearance on the Today programme (badly done by me, partly due to inexperience). Another advantage was that our first office was sited in Nuclear Physics at Oxford; as so many media people were from Oxford this meant that they were always ready to pop down for a meeting. The only problem was that Michael Heseltine resigned at the same time, which deflected some attention from us. As SBS was clearly going to have a much higher profile than AGREF, I closed down AGREF. Another vital decision made then was to appoint John Mulvey as the first secretary of SBS, a post he occupied with great distinction for many years. I was surprised to be asked to be the first chairman and served for 10 years.

I soon saw the value of the public advert in The Times when Keith Joseph phoned me and demanded a meeting – a welcome change from before. At the meeting he expressed surprise that we felt hard up for ‘no-one had told him so’; he asked us for suggestions as to how he was to distribute the available research money (we said this was not our job and so refused to do so); he would not accept the evidence from other countries that research was an economic good (‘foreigners are different’). He ended by saying it had been a useful meeting and asked if we would come to see him every month. We wanted to preserve our independence, so felt this was inadvisable and declined.

In retrospect I realise that Keith Joseph and his advisers did not appreciate the difference between tacit and codified knowledge. The point we tried to make then, and since, is that, although knowledge is published and available to all as a ‘public good’, it cannot be used unless the users have the tacit knowledge in their heads to do so. This requires much training of the users, which means that a country must invest in first class educational and research facilities. Our view about the economic good arising from basic research, although not at the time based on much economic knowledge, was subsequently confirmed by Robert Solow of MIT who won the Nobel Prize in 1987 for his work over many decades showing that US wealth depended on publicly funded basic science.

We planned that the executive members of SBS would be drawn from university and government labs and also from industries which depended on a good basic science base. In the event we were disappointed that no-one from industry would join us as we were regarded as ‘not one of us’; indeed one of the speakers I asked to give our annual lecture said that he could only do so as he was working in the City at the time, and not in industry.

As time passed people came to understand that we were not against the government but simply against the very poor support that basic science was getting. Things improved when John Major appointed William (now Lord) Waldegrave as Minister for Science, the first for some 30 years. On assuming office, Waldegrave asked firstly the then President of the Royal Society and secondly SBS to meet him. John Mulvey and I developed a close relationship with Waldegrave and with his chief scientist Bill Stewart. Things became more difficult when Michael Heseltine, as Deputy Prime Minister, abruptly moved the office of the Science Minister out of the Cabinet Office and into the Department of Trade and Industry. Eventually basic science funding started to show a real increase with the election of the Blair government in 1997. By this time, various parts of industry and many scientific societies were funding SBS, so that today we can afford to keep our excellent Director, Peter Cotgreave, his PA, Susan O’Dwyer, and two researchers, Alice Sharp Pierson and Rosemary Davies, in an office in UCL.

SBS has become the first port of call for journalists who want a view on science policy issues and might even be a model for scientists in other countries who wish to campaign about scientific policy matters. We have established this position because we have had Directors who were excellent scientists but chose to take on the SBS job and so could speak with authority on matters scientific. In addition, they were almost always at the end of a telephone to give instant answers to the media and they and other members were always willing to give talks and write articles and letters on most aspects of science policy. The Newsletter, under its editor Peter Saunders, has become a valuable means of communicating with a much wider audience. A rather curious feature is that several longer established organisations sometimes find it convenient to filter their views through us in circumstances when making a direct statement would pose political problems for them.

When starting out on this venture 20 years ago I never imagined that one day my successor would be discussing with the Prime Minister of the day (Tony Blair) whether it was nearing the time for us to be disbanded as Science was Saved, or at least to change our name to Supporting British Science. However, I am afraid that time has not yet arrived.