Sex, Science and Profits

I read through Terence Kealey's Sex, Science and Profits over the weekend, wearing my philosopher of science hat. Prof Kealey is the Vice-Chancellor at the University of Buckingham and a proper scientist in his own right, so his is a practitioner's view. He's arguing that science funding is best left to the private sector (the University of Buckingham is a private university) and the State should keep its nose out. He doesn't like patents and IPR much either.

The book is worth reading even if you think the State should be funding science. It's one of those books where the evidence is more interesting than the theses. Prof Kealey has two theses. First that all worthwhile advances in science and technology are made in the private sector by practitioners, and that academic theoreticians lag behind the experimentalists and industrialists, not run ahead. Second, that the idea that science is a public good, available to and benefiting all, is a serious mistake.

Let's look at the first thesis. Unless you count royalty and aristocracy as “the State”, when most of the best mathematics has always been funded by the State, there was no State – in the modern sense of an all-pervading, intrusive, executive bureaucracy taking a sizeable chunk of earnings in taxation – until after the Second World War. Hence almost all of the advances in technology and science had to have been made by people of independent means, funded by aristocrats or wealthy merchants, or working in a trade because that's all there was. “Big Science” was born in the Second World War, with the Los Alamos programme and the development of radar and associated technologies in the Rad Labs. These were the most expensive and successful research efforts in the history of mankind – and both depended on a theory so abstruse it is best understood through the mathematics: Quantum Theory and Relativity. And those were developed by a bunch of university academics with no connection to business at all (a Swiss patent clerk was a civil servant).

Since then, the record of State-funded science has been pretty dismal – especially in the countries that now form the EU: the only exception is in high-energy physics, which can only be funded by the State. By definition, high-energy physics can have no commercial applications (because there's a super-collider in every office...). The record of much European technology is also pretty dismal, and one reason might be that the major industries in Europe were until recently owned by the State. Another might be that Americans know how to organise research and Europeans don't.

A swift word about Bell Labs. This legendary research centre, part of AT&T, was the home of radio spectroscopy, the transistor, the discovery of cosmic background radiation, the Unix operating system, the C programming language and the idea of object-oriented languages, amongst others. But it was run as the best engineering department in the USA. It employed people who were bright and original and didn't expect them to fill out grant applications, objectives and progress reports. When it turned into Lucent Technologies, and did expect the progress reports, it ceased to be the legendary Bell Labs. Nothing interesting came out of Lucent, which was absorbed into the French company Alcatel in the oughties.

So it's not about public and private, it's about the way the institution is run. It just so happens that there are more private-sector people who are better at it than public-sector people (the difference between the two kinds of people is real and I swear it is genetic).

The real insight is delivered in the chapter “There is no such thing as science, only scientists”. Kealey's point is that modern science is so complex that it can only be understood by people who specialise in it. Science is not a public good because the general public have no hope of understanding it (the technical papers, not the pop science books). A senior manager or board director is not going to be able to pick up some fabulous idea from the journals because they don't speak the language. So they have to employ scientists to review the journals, attend the conferences and learned societies because only the scientists can understand the work of other scientists and translate it into a product. Now here's the really neat bit. Why do companies let their own scientists publish? Partly because publishing scientists are happy, productive scientists - Kealey says it's something to do with status and making time with pretty girls – but mostly because if your people don't publish, no-one talks to them and they don't get many invitations to conferences. The real benefit isn't from reading the journals, it's what you pick up while networking. No-one is going to network with people from a company that only wants to learn from but not contribute to: free-riders not allowed.

This might do as a definition of a “knowledge industry”: one in which there is a net advantage to allowing the smart people to publish substantial research (if delayed a little to give product development a chance). Financial markets are a knowledge industry, but retail banking is not: telecoms engineering is a knowledge industry, but telecoms operations is not. The law (with one exception) is perhaps the ultimate knowledge industry – it's all published (see the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting in the UK) – while the UK's secretive local government, social services and Family Courts are probably the ultimate “ignorance industries”. (We're talking about useful research here, not the carefully PC textbooks for social workers.) By the way, Kealey mentions businessmen talking about “best practice” as a way of sharing knowledge: in my experience, the more people talk about “best practice” the further they will be from it after they've finished their seminar. “Best practice” exercises are usually futile, because there's never any budget for making the IT changes needed to support any changes – they are there to scratch an itch, not to make progress.

Returning to the thesis, by the same argument, there's no such thing as fashion, there are only designers. Because just as most people can't make an antacid after hearing a seminar about recent work on stomach acid production, they can't make a dress or suit by looking at the photographs either. Some can, and they make a good living ripping off catwalk fashion for the high street, but there are probably no more of them than there are digestion scientists. But you're not going to deny there is such a thing as “fashion” - there is, and only a few can do it. It's the same with science. There is science, but it's as accessible as, oh, Michelin-star cooking and needs about the same length of apprenticeship. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist – just ask anyone who has to pay for either a Michelin-starred supper or the development of a new drug.

The value of any argument or book is not that it's right, it's that it make you think. And Prof Kealey's book is well worth the time it takes to read it.