The emergence of science policy

In spite of their rugged individualism and celebrated independence of mind, scientists have always sought, and often gained, government patronage. Indeed, in many countries of Continental Europe the academic scientists were mostly, in a technical sense, civil servants, although their ‘freedom to teach and to learn’ was usually well protected by long-established traditions of operational autonomy for state universities and scientific academies. Paradoxically, in France and Germany, where these traditions are still very much alive, academic science has resisted ‘collectivization’ more successfully than in countries such as Britain, where academics are not (at least in principle) government employees, and have always been very chary of putting themselves directly in the power of the state.

In the Anglo-Saxon countries, however, it was customary for state support for basic research to be very limited, except in fields such as medicine and agriculture with direct connections to major sectors of governmental responsibility. This custom changed radically in and after the Second World War [§4.2]. Public funds soon became so vital to the advancement of science – especially the academic research carried out in universities and other higher education institutions – that they largely determined its direction and shape.

One might say, however, that until the early 1970s the scientific community largely dictated the terms on which this support was provided.

The multinational tradition of science

On ceremonial occasions, scientific notables congratulate each other, and themselves, on being members of a world-wide community that has always ‘known no frontiers’. This is an admirable sentiment, but what does it mean in practice? Paradoxically, on other occasions, the same scientists say that science nowadays is ‘going international’. This apparent inconsistency is yet another manifestation of the transition to a new regime in science.

It is quite true that science has always been a multinational activity. It has never been realistic to consider science in the UK independently of science in other countries, particularly its European neighbours. One of the features of the Renaissance was the rapid diffusion of new scientific discoveries and theories across the Continent, carried by scholars, churchmen, artists, craftsmen, mountebanks, diplomats and other travellers, as well as by printed books.

Since the seventeenth century, scientists have sought international recognition for their discoveries. The European market for scientific ideas set both the goals and the standards for research. Scientific journals, such as the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in London and the Comptes Rendues of the Acade-mie des Sciences in Paris, were published nationally, but they circulated freely and were cited indiscriminately throughout the scientific world.

A history of rapid, unimpeded growth

Ever since modern science ‘took off’ in the seventeeth century, it has been a growth industry. Knowledge and technical capabilities have not only accumulated steadily: the rate of accumulation has also accelerated over time. The scale of all scientific and technological activities has continually expanded. Every measure of these activities – numbers of people engaged, resources employed, output of published papers and patents, commercial and industrial impact, etc. – seems to have been increasing exponentially for the best part of three centuries.

Of course, that same period has seen immense growth in many other parameters of national life: population, industrial production, ‘gross national product’, education, and so on. Nevertheless, the overall growth rate of science throughout this whole period has been exceptional. In the 1680s, for example, England had a total population of about 5 million: nowadays, the United Kingdom has a population of about 50 million – ten times greater. Even if we multiply this by another factor often, to allow for the fact that people are now much richer individually than they were before the Industrial Revolution, we still fail by a whole order of magnitude to match the thousandfold growth of scientific and technological activity in Britain since that time.

Much the same elementary historical calculation could be made for other European countries such as France and Germany.

The unabdated advance of knowledge

The origins of our science and technology lie in the mists of antiquity. Most of the essential features of the present way of doing science were already established in seventeenth- century Europe. People such as Isaac Newton and Anton van Leeuwenhoek devoted their lives to observation, experiment and theory, and contributed their discoveries to a common pool of knowledge. Institutions such as universities, academies, learned societies, and scientific journals provided the means by which scientists could publicly recognize or criticize each other's work. The knowledge acquired by research could thus be tested, consolidated and made the basis for further advances.

The systematic accumulation of knowledge by this process has been going on for more than three centuries. We look back now in astonishment at how far we have come. How exciting it must have been to hear for the first time about the spiral galaxies, the age of the dinosaurs, the germs that carry disease, or the atomic nucleus. In all that time, there has been no significant break in the history of science as a human undertaking. Scientists still celebrate the lives of their great predecessors almost as if they were former colleagues – earlier members of the firm, now regrettably retired and, alas, passed on.

A game with moving goal posts

We began this book with the visible evidence that science was passing through a period of radical structural change. Subsequent chapters presented a deeper analysis of the origins and extent of this change, showing in detail how it affects every aspect of scientific life and work. To give substance to the analysis, I have focussed on the UK, where a transition to quite a new regime started in the mid-1970s, and is still going on. But the history of UK science in recent years is only part of a larger story, involving scientific activity throughout the world. Science has always been a multinational cultural form. The same forces for change are at work everywhere, and many of the same features have emerged in other countries.

The notion that a distinctive new regime is emerging may be too simple. In some countries, the transformation process is apparently only beginning, and may take a different turn. Everywhere, the scientific world still seems like the Irishman's impression of New York: ‘Sure, it'll be a fine city when it's finished.’ On the other hand, scientific activity is becoming increasingly transnational, both for general political and economic reasons and in response to the pressures of the ‘steady state’. UK science, for example, is now inextricably caught up in the complex of interconnected institutions that is developing in Europe.

Research institutions

Research is not undertaken by individual scientists or by specialized research groups; strictly speaking, it is undertaken by institutions. The basic organizational ‘entities’ that typically devise and perform research projects are usually too small to stand alone as independent enterprises [§5.10]. It is true that there are now many commercial firms, ranging in size from self-employed individuals to sophisticated outfits employing dozens of scientists, engineers and management experts, offering research and consultancy services or even undertaking speculative near-market R&D in the hope of producing saleable technological innovations. But an enterprise trying to live on grants to do basic science cannot be financially viable unless the overheads and uncertainties can be spread over a large number of different research projects. Although research entities may behave very much like independent small firms in bidding for research projects, they are almost always embedded legally and organizationally in what we might define generally as research institutions – that is, substantial corporate bodies such as universities, hospitals, charitable foundations, research councils, government departments, quasinongovernmental agencies, and industrial firms.

The policy of privatizing some of the research establishments in the public sector [§4.2] does not seem to be an essential feature of ‘steady state’ conditions. It may well seem politically desirable to cut taxes and solve the resource allocation problem at a stroke by putting on to the private sector the responsibility for funding the research in question.

Instrumental sophistication

Scientific research has always been a highly technical activity. Scientists have always employed the most advanced technologies available to them. The scientific revolutions of the seventeenth century were only made possible by such recent inventions as the airpump, the microscope and the telescope. It is simply not true that the best research always used to be done with ramshackle apparatus consisting of bits of glass tubing held together with sealing wax and string. A new piece of equipment often has to be improvised or specially designed for a novel experiment, but scientific instruments in general have always been at the very forefront of the state of their art. Throughout history, major scientific discoveries can be traced back to the use of new or improved technological capabilities – a more refined optical glass, more accurate machine tools, purer chemical compounds, better defined breeding stock – many of which had been developed outside the research world.

The striking feature of our own times is the extent to which scientific advances fuel general technological progress. But general technological progress, in its turn, fuels the development of more powerful techniques of research, thus providing the means for further scientific advances. This cyclic process within the science/technology complex is not merely self-sustaining: it has begun to spiral wildly outwards in scope and scale.

The demography of the scientific profession

The transition to steady state conditions is having a profound effect on research careers. Ever since science became a regular profession in the late nineteenth century, it has continually expanded in numbers and in employment opportunities [§4.1]. This has kept it a buoyant open-ended enterprise, where talented newcomers were welcome, and where they could look forward to opportunities for personal advancement right through their working lives. Yes, it was an uncommon profession, open only to a gifted, dedicated, minority. Yes, it was highly competitive, requiring exceptional tenacity to get to the top. Yes, it was not very well paid, and the reward of success was fame rather than fortune. But, even for the socially unambitious, it provided a secure, well-respected niche from which to explore nature, and seek honestly after truth.

Of course, the scientific profession has seen some hard times. At various periods, in various countries, military defeat, economic depression, or political repression have temporarily disrupted research careers. The biographies of many of the greatest European scientists of the twentieth century are punctuated with episodes of personal insecurity, hardship or exile: the stories of many of the lesser figures are even more tragic. In Mao's China, almost the whole scientific community was banished into squalid rural drudgery for a generation.

Scientific knowledge

The purpose of science is to obtain scientific knowledge. That is to say, scientific work is directed towards acquiring a special type of information, either for immediate practical use or for publication in textbooks, encyclopaedias, learned journals, etc., under various headings such as physics, chemistry or biology. A typical item of scientific information might be, say: ‘The benzene molecule contains six carbon atoms arranged in a ring’. This is clearly somewhat different from the sort of knowledge usually to be found in novels, law reports, sermons, or political manifestos – for example, that ‘it is love that makes the world go round’, or ‘the greater the truth, the greater the libel’.

But what are the distinguishing features of scientific knowledge as such? This traditional philosophical question is important because it may decisively affect our actions to know that a particular piece of information is ‘scientifically’ warranted (cf. §16.3). It is also one of the key questions about science as a human activity, for it asks about the fundamental objectives of research.

Towards a social psychology of science

Science is what scientists do. The scientific life is notorious for the demands it makes on the mind and on the spirit. The social psychology of science is thus an essential metascientific discipline, along with philosophy, sociology, politics and history.

The traditional academic ethos (§6.3) lays great stress on the individuality of scientists, and thus emphasizes the distinctive mental and emotional traits that tend to separate them from the mass of people and from one another. The naïve history of science is a chronicle of heroic or saintly personalities who have triumphed through their innate abilities and virtues. More seriously and soberly, psychologists have tried to delineate or discover the personality types that are characteristic of scientists in general, or of scientists in particular disciplines, such as theoretical physics or experimental biology.

Unfortunately, these investigations have not proved very conclusive. Mature scientists, and even science students, are not, presumably, ‘just like everybody else’, but careful empirical research on their personality traits has not provided reliable insights that are superior to everyday ‘folk’ understanding of these matters.

Science as an instrument

Up to this point, we have been looking at science from the ‘inside’: now we take an entirely different standpoint, and consider science from the ‘outside’. The external sociology of science considers it simply as a social institution, embedded in society, and performing certain functions for society as a whole, on a par with other institutions associated with law, religion, political authority and so on. For the moment we shall treat science as a ‘black box’, whose inner workings are of no significance except to ensure that it can perform the functions assigned to it. Eventually (§12.5) we shall reopen this box, and reconsider the internal sociology and philosophy of science from an externalist point of view.

Science is valued by ordinary citizens, by powerful individuals such as politicians and company directors, and by corporate bodies such as commercial firms and government agencies, primarily for its use. It is fostered mainly as a resource to be applied to the furtherance of individual and/or collective activities whose goals are not specifically the advancement of knowledge. This conception of science as essentially an instrument for achieving a variety of goals other than the acquisition of knowledge is so widespread and so dominant in our society that it overshadows all other conceptions of its social function.

Costing the benefits

The purpose of R & D is to provide benefits. But how should the value of these benefits be assessed? It is all very well to say that research on insecticides has resulted in improved crops of bananas, but was the improvement worth the cost of the research? Research costs real money and its outcome is very uncertain. It might have been more profitable to invest the money in a new plantation. Without some rough estimate of the relative balance of costs and benefits, the use of science as an instrument of policy (§12.1) is based solely on blind faith.

The inputs to R & D can easily be quantified in money terms. The cost of employing researchers and providing them with suitable apparatus, buildings, technical staff, telephones, travel to conferences, and so on would normally appear as line items in the financial accounts of the corporation or agency supporting the laboratory.