Culture : For Mothering Invention, the Royal Society Is Tops : Creating an atmosphere for science and scientists, like China’s Fang Lizhi, is the prime mission of Britain’s oldest academy.
It’s been nearly 100 years since the British physicist Sir Ernest Rutherford discovered the structure of the atom and declared to the world that anyone who thought energy could be extracted by splitting those things was “absolutely mad.”
Rutherford was, nonetheless, awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1908 for his discovery.
Seventy-one years later, British scientist Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield also shared a Nobel Prize in medicine for his part in inventing the device now universally known as the CAT Scan. But it was developed and marketed worldwide by the U.S.-based General Electric Co.--not by Hounsfield’s British firm, EMI.
Humbling as it may seem, they are both enduring anecdotes in the Royal Society, Britain’s pre-eminent scientific academy, which was thrust briefly into the news last week with the announcement that the society will be sponsoring the research career of newly freed Chinese dissident Fang Lizhi.
Taken together, the brilliant misadventures of Rutherford and Hounsfield underscore the peculiar nature of science, invention and discovery in the land that brought the world its first understanding of such weighty concepts as gravity and evolution.
“In Britain, we are, or have been, extremely bad at implementing science,” the Royal Society’s president, Sir George Porter, himself a Nobel Prize winner, said in an interview last week. “And it isn’t just a matter of saying we are bad at exploiting British inventions. We are bad at exploiting inventions period.”
What Britain is particularly good at, though, as last week’s sponsorship of astrophysicist Fang illustrated, is mothering invention--creating an atmosphere some would say is unmatched anywhere in the world for harboring basic scientific research, an atmosphere that is the stuff from which Nobel Prizes, if not the accompanying fortunes, are made.
On the average, a British scientist has won a Nobel Prize every other year for the past century--nearly 50 in all during the 90 years that the prize has been offered. And at the heart of that record lies the 330-year-old Royal Society.
Little known outside Britain and the arcane international community of scientists and researchers until it surfaced last week, the society is the oldest academy of sciences in the world. Created by the royal proclamation of King Charles II in 1660, it counts among its founding members Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Robert Boyle, who gave the world the basic principle of physics known as Boyle’s Law in 1662.
Financed entirely through charitable contributions and government grants, the privately run society has, through the centuries, supported thousands of scientists and contributed to an untold number of inventions and discoveries worldwide. Pioneering British physicist Michael Faraday, for example, who was made a fellow of the society in 1824, discovered electromagnetic induction and invented the first dynamo.
Despite its relatively low popular profile, the society, since its inception, has tried to be international in scope. In the beginning, the effort was confined to an international secretary who was responsible for corresponding with scientists in other countries, a policy that continued even at times when Britain was at war with those countries.
But in recent years, the society has expanded its international operations. Fang, for example, is just one--albeit, the most politically controversial--of more than 100 Chinese scientists already working in Britain at the society’s expense. Similarly, Fang, who was offered the research appointment in a personal letter from Porter last December, is not the first politically sensitive case the society has handled.
Porter flew to Moscow several years ago in an effort to help free dissident Soviet nuclear physicist Andrei D. Sakharov by offering him a research appointment. Sakharov was freed from a Soviet prison a few weeks later but declined the society’s offer in favor of continuing his research at home in Moscow.
In Fang’s case, though, the society’s offer was instrumental in the Chinese decision to permit the dissident scientist to leave after a year of living in refuge at the American Embassy in Beijing. A senior British official privately confirmed that the Chinese feared “they would lose face if Dr. Fang were permitted to go to the United States, so we all tried to find a way to bring him to Britain.”
“We really have two major missions,” Porter said. “Obviously the first is improvement of knowledge, but the other is to promote the freedom of scientists and to protect them. So, in the case of Dr. Fang, there’s a double purpose here.”
To further those missions, though, Porter has had to be equally vocal within Britain itself. He personally crusaded in speeches and private appeals to exempt the society and science in general from Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s budget-slashing privatization policies. And the society continues to hold impromptu press briefings on scientific controversies that erupt in the headlines--issues ranging from ozone and the greenhouse effect to Britain’s peculiar crises with impure drinking water and a devastating cattle encephalitis known as “mad cow disease.”
For Porter, the ozone controversy has a particular appeal--and, in it, a lesson that may help explain the British caution that has made it as slow to capitalize on scientific discovery as it is effective in nurturing it.
Porter, as it happens, discovered the substance--chloric oxide--that is making the hole in the ozone layer, although not even he, himself, understood that at the time. Here’s how Porter, a 1967 Nobelist in chemistry for his work in high-speed chemical reactions, explained his discovery in a speech to the society last November:
“I was pleased with it . . . though, when challenged, I had to confess that I could not foresee any possible use of my work. I certainly did not foresee that this transient little molecule would one day be called the ‘smoking gun’ which must be sought out and destroyed.” It was years later before it was determined that the very same molecule was eating through the ozone layer over Antarctica.
“I mean, look at it this way,” Porter said last week, as Britain was hosting an international conference on the ozone layer. “We’re now talking about giving 50 billion pounds (about $85 billion) to the world to stop using what we invented for them.”
Although Porter conceded that an overemphasis in the British educational system on theory and specialization is partly to blame for Britain’s poor record of applying its great advances in science to everyday life, he cites the ozone issue to note another aspect of the question.
“What lessons can we learn from the ozone story?” he asked rhetorically during his November speech. “Perhaps it is that, like children with a new toy, we are inclined to play with our science before we properly understand it. There has been much pressure in recent years to concentrate our scientific efforts on the applications at the expense of the fundamentals.
“We must not use the power of the knowledge that we now possess to manipulate the world without ensuring that we also have the knowledge to understand and mitigate unforeseen disasters.
“We shall come to no great harm if we go a little more slowly in applying our science and give a higher priority to getting a better understanding of the world where it is to be applied and of the people who apply it.”
