Science and Technology in Britain and Other OECD Countries

Spending, Output, Value for Money
Why do governments spend money on research and development? Why do they spend money on the unforeseeable, unownable, blue sky process of basic research? The reason, in Tony Blair’s words, is “because the science base is the absolute bedrock of economic performance.” In some larger sense, most of what you are going to talk about during this meeting is an epiphenomenon of the existential advance of science.

The science base creates new knowledge. More importantly, governments spend on it because it buys a ticket into the club that provides access to the new knowledge created in other countries, which will always be larger than that created in one’s own, even in the United States. Even more importantly, it creates successive cadres of appropriately trained people, some of whom will cycle back into the process of basic science and more of whom will spin out into the civil service, business and industry, and the City, bringing that analytical, rational approach to the world with them. The paradox at the heart of government-supported science is that most of the people doing the basic research aren’t doing it for socially motivated reasons, even though that’s why they are being funded. They are doing it for reasons of pure hedonism and the pursuit of pleasure. They certainly are not doing it for the money.

How much should governments spend on basic research? The kind of figures with which most of you will be familiar are total expenditures on research and development by the public and the private sectors. In the OECD countries, these figures typically range around 1–3 percent of GDP annually. Only a few countries, such as Switzerland and Sweden, spend 3 percent of GDP. Countries like the United States, France, and Germany are in the range of 2–2.5 percent of GDP and Britain is a little low at about 2 percent of GDP. Smaller countries tend to spend less. And the ratio of public to private money tends to vary. Within the scientifically developed countries, essentially the OECD countries, expenditures on the science base itself typically runs around 0.6–1 percent of GDP—from a high of around 1 percent in Japan, Switzerland, and Sweden, to a low of around .6 percent of GDP in the United States and the United Kingdom. That’s the input side. It’s the sort of thing with which my colleagues in universities are obsessed.

Equally important is what you get for your money. What are the measures of output? Well, ultimately, they’re the way you harvest the new knowledge. To directly measure output of new knowledge itself, one might calculate the number of papers published (roughly a million a year in science, medicine, and engineering); or the references to those papers within that literature (roughly ten million a year); or the papers cited as inspirations in patents; or prizes. If you just add up the total volume of papers in any one year, roughly about a third are published in the United States, about a third within the European Union, and about a third in other parts of the world.

But total volume is a funny measure. It is a mixture of quality and size of units. Looking at the 2000 Summer Olympics, one might think the United States was the best performer because it won more medals. But if you re-scale output to population size, Australia was far and away the dominant country and the United States was not in the top twenty. Similarly, if you re-scale scientific research to population size, you get an interesting measure. Counting papers or citations in relation to GDP per capita, the top performers are Switzerland, Israel, and Sweden; Scotland would be third if it wasn’t dragged back by being lumped together with England. The United Kingdom, shading the United States, both just scrape into the top ten. Germany, France, and Japan—other powerhouses that do some superb science—all just scrape into the top twenty.

Particularly interesting is a value for money measure, if you think of this as a kind of enterprise (although that’s not how most practitioners think of it; it’s a very existential creative enterprise). In terms of output in papers or citations last year in relation to the money spent three or four years earlier, or papers cited as inspiration for patents in relation to earlier expenditure, the United Kingdom has been top of that league for the past decade. This performance is partly because the United Kingdom is very strong in output (though not the strongest) and partly because it is near the bottom of the league in input. But there is a cluster at the top of the value-for-money measure that includes the Anglo and Scandinavian countries, Switzerland, and Israel. Value-for-money measures for Germany and France are about half that of the average Anglo or Scandinavian country. And for Japan it is one-fifth. That’s a dodgy statistic, but it’s worth reflecting on.

My personal view is that it’s not fashionable to ask questions. What was so special about Pericles’ Athens or Shakespeare’s London? What are the things that are the sparks of this oxymoronic concept of managing creativity? One characteristic of the best performers in terms of value for money in science is that their science is done around universities or other places infested with the irreverent young, free of hierarchies, of dominance, of deference. In other words, you make sure young people are free to express themselves from the earliest age. A second characteristic is that money is given out in an appropriately competitive way. Although superb science is done in Japan, it performs poorly on a value-for-money basis. The money given to universities, which is a lot of the money expended on science, is given out on an uncompetitive per capita basis.

Overriding all of it, of course, is how to instill in people from the earliest age an interest in science, medicine, or engineering and, particularly in increasingly knowledge-driven economies, how to make sure that appropriate cadres of people are trained very broadly in the social sciences, life sciences, physical sciences, engineering, and medicine. There are interesting statistics here. One of the biggest revolutions that has happened in the United Kingdom in the last twenty-five years is one on which very few people in the United Kingdom ever reflect. Twenty-five years ago, just under 7 percent of twenty-four year-olds in Britain had university degrees, counting the polytechnics as universities. Today, more than 35 percent have university degrees. It is a five-fold expansion in twenty-five years. In fact, we have just moved ahead of the United States in having a higher proportion of twenty-five year-olds with university degrees—just over 35 percent versus just under 34 percent. The only OECD country with a similar expansion is Spain, which has gone from about 4 to about 20 percent. Not even South Korea has had such an expansion as the United Kingdom. This expansion has created all manner of interesting problems for how you fund, manage, and appropriately diversify that expanding enterprise. We are still wrestling with it and too many of us are wrestling with it without even noticing that we’re doing it.

Great Opportunities, Deep Challenges
Out of all the excellence in science in so many countries are coming all manner of new discoveries. We have learned more about the external world in the last fifty years than in all of previous human history. But what’s going to happen in the next fifty years is going to make that look mild. These days we particularly think about the human genome and other genomes that are going to open possibilities within the next twenty years that will transform healthcare literally beyond imagining. But much more than that, our understanding of other genomes opens the doors, appropriately used, to developing crops much faster than the hit-and-miss methods of breeding that have served us for the last 10,000 years. If we use that knowledge wisely, it will give us more environmentally friendly crops growing with the grain of nature rather than against the grain of nature. It will give us new methods of clean-up; it will give us new materials.

At the same time, these opportunities will bring with them challenges. They will bring with them worries about ethics and safety. In the longer term they have deep philosophical implications. As an evolutionary ecological biologist, to me one of the most amazing things about our extraordinarily accelerating knowledge of our own and other “books of life” is the degree to which we share genes with plants and animals. For example, more than half the banana genome is shared with humans (a fact more evident among some of my acquaintances than others). We have yet to come to terms with the deeper implications of these discoveries, both practical and ethical.

A More Open Dialogue between Science and Society
The dilemma at the heart of democracy is conducting a dialogue between those who must make decisions and the public, or the many publics in their many forms. Too often the dialogues are conducted in fora like this, as if you were representative of the public, or as if the social scientists that turn up at the Science and Society discussions are representative of the public. They are not representative of the person on the street. And yet that dialogue is one we have to learn to conduct in a world that gets smaller and where the dialogue increasingly is going to be about how we make use of the potential opened by scientific advance, especially when that potential is based on deeply complex science.

There are three common misconceptions that I wish to blast open and dismiss before turning to what I think in principle is the answer to this dilemma. One misconception is that people these days distrust science more, that they are more worried about science than they used to be. This is nonsense. People’s distrust of the new a few centuries ago was expressed in more draconian terms, at worst, by burning the harbinger of the new, as with Bruno or, at best, as with Galileo, confining him to house arrest and forcing him to recant. There were riots in the streets in Britain over smallpox vaccination two hundred years ago. This was all conducted in a contemporary idiom of Dr. Frankensteins, although Frankenstein hadn’t been written yet.

There is enthusiasm for science, but worry about its outcome. Eighty-four percent of people in Britain surveyed in an in-depth poll conducted by MORI said science makes life better. Three quarters of the people said it is the aim of scientists and engineers to make life better. They even said a life as a scientist or engineer must be wonderful (which suggests they didn’t capture too many of my academic colleagues in the sample). But the same people, more than half of them, said the pace of modern advance is too fast for effective government regulation and oversight.

The second misconception is that arguments in favor of genetically-modified foods or stem cell cloning would be much better received if the populace was better educated in science. Not true. Surveys that ask people not just trivia questions about science of the kind you see on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, but deeper questions such as, What’s the nature of the experimental method? What do you mean by a “control group”? What do you mean by a “confidence interval”?, show a big gradient in Europe. At the top, in the seventieth percentile, is Denmark, followed by the United Kingdom. At the bottom are some of the Mediterranean countries, in the thirtieth percentile. When asked, “Do you see science as making life better?” all countries, on average, say yes. But the less the people know about science the more unequivocally enthusiastically they say, “Yes, it’s good.” And that’s how it ought to be.

(It’s also interesting that the very countries that are most skeptical of the euro—Denmark and Britain—are also the top scorers in scientifically-educated citizenry. And the countries ahead of them—Switzerland and Norway—are not EU members. Switzerland just had a referendum again asserting they do not want to join.)

The third misconception is that many of the attitudes and debates about genetically-modified foods and the like are debates about the conservative Old World versus the enthusiastically new-embracing New World. One would have to have a short memory to believe that. When the gene-splicing techniques that are delivering products now first appeared in the ’70s, the discussion left an agonized aftermath on the east and west coasts of the United States. Paul Volcker, as a trustee of Princeton, will remember as I do the delay of over a year in Princeton’s Molecular Biology building as we debated the conjectured worries. Wally Gilbert of Harvard University had to cross the Atlantic to do the work he couldn’t do in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Europe, there were no such reservations. It is the color of local events—BSE, for instance—that sit on top of an otherwise great similarity.

So, how do we manage these things? The answer has to be consulting widely, taking time, asking people what world they want to build with this science, and doing it all openly rather than as confidential advice to ministers given in secret by closed coteries. We’re learning to do that. We did it in exemplary fashion in Britain just recently over the question of stem cell cloning. Ten years ago, after long discussion, Britain put in place legislation that enabled embryonic stem cells to be used in research to produce fertility treatments, a medical advance now warmly embraced in countries such as Italy or Germany where the research is still illegal. Britain just extended that legislation after a long three-year consultation and debate and an open vote in Parliament.

This process is the wave of the future, but it is easier said than done. We need to learn to do it. The twentieth century has been a century of huge advance in understanding the external world and changing it to make life better, but with some unintended consequences, including climate change and loss of diversity. The twenty-first century, as we read the molecular machinery of life itself, is going to give us the ability to change not just the external world but ourselves. The debates of today are going to look like shadows on the wall at a Trilateral Commission meeting of this kind in twenty or thirty years. The role of science is not to impose the values, but to delineate the choices. In the words that Brecht put in the mouth of Galileo, “Science is not a path to infinite wisdom, but it is a way of avoiding infinite error.