To identify a problem and to diagnose its origin is relatively easy but its solution or, better put, the amelioration of its effects is at once more difficult and more important. The major provider of money for university research is Government through the University Grants Committee and the Research Councils. These bodies are necessarily subject to a measure of political constraint although the experimental introduction of an advanced fellowship scheme by the Science Research Council shows that the existence of the problem has been recognised by at least one of them. The sums at the disposal of the Royal Society are very much smaller but even so I believe there is an opportunity for it to make a significant contribution. The Society has in its gift some eighteen research professorships and a substantial number of research fellowships of various types. We are hoping to use these professorships and fellowships as they become available to provide support for outstanding younger scientists and to build around them small groups of advanced workers so as to provide nuclei to initiate the scientific discoveries of the future and to retain and develop the best of our young people on whose work our technological future will ultimately depend. There are of course many problems to be faced and not least that of ensuring continuity. For the Royal Society cannot enter into a permanent commitment to maintain a group or unit. After a period of years - perhaps five or seven - a group supported in this way would either have fulfilled its aim and be ripe for dissolution or it should be taken over by and incorporated in the university where it is located. Those of us who have had experience of the takeover problem as between charitable foundations and the universities are well aware of past difficulties but I do not believe they are insurmountable. Only time will show if the efforts we are making will be successful; but I believe the attempt should be made and that it is in the best tradition of the Royal Society. In these days of rampant egalitarianism our concern for an elite in science may be regarded by some as outmoded. But it is not. In science the best is infinitely more important than the second best; that is the belief of the Society and a country which ignores or forgets it does so at its peril.
APPENDIX IV. Extract from Anniversary Address 30 November 1978
Reprinted from Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A. 365, xii-xvii (1979)
Nowadays one often hears statements to the effect that civilisation is at a turning point and these statements are not infrequently coupled with a very gloomy outlook on the future of society or even with a denial that it has a future at all. Certainly it is true that there is much to discourage us the present scene. The subject was touched upon by the President of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States in his Presidential Report for 1977; he summarised the situation in the following words:
Consider the current scene: the largest, deadliest arms race in history, in a world that almost nourishes international tensions and conflict; self-defeating population growth in those nations least able to afford it; hunger and malnutrition on a vast scale; the countdown as domestic and foreign supplies of liquid and gaseous fossil fuels decline; uncertainty concerning the future of nuclear energy; pressure from the industrially less developed nations for a 'new economic order', generating ever harsher political strains; dependence of the industrial economy of the nation upon access to diverse mineral resources outside our boundaries, resources upon which we can no longer count simply because they are there; the economic consequences to this nation of the increasing industrial productivity of others; the new social problems attendant upon an aging population; the changing economic circumstances of various regions of our country; over-capacity of the nation's educational plant imposing constraints upon the career aspirations of young scholars; unsatisfied aspirations for opportunity, equity, and justice of various segments of our society; growing egalitarianism coupled, too frequently, with a lowering of educational standards; the twin spectres of unemployment and inflation; continuing decay of most of our cities; an inadequate but ever more expensive health care system; escalating costs of all services. Withal, we are sufficiently affluent to demand protection of the environment, both for aesthetic reasons and for protection of the public health, and to place ever greater emphasis on the safety of the materials, products and processes with which we traffic, introducing economic costs of considerable but uncertain magnitude.
These words were, of course, addressed to an American audience; but they could be addressed equally to a British one or to one from most other industrialised nations. And they certainly give food for thought. Change is inherent in progress (however one defines that term!) and so at all times people feel that there is something special about the particular period in which they live. Yet this is not necessarily so since our perspective of the present is distorting and the future is continuously being determined by us and by what we make of the present. Major transitions are rare although they do occur from time to time; one such was associated with the industrial revolution which began about two centuries ago and which has largely shaped the world we know today. That transition was, I believe, mainly due to one of the inventions that triggered the industrial revolution - that of the steam engine - which gave us access to plentiful and flexible mechanical power. All our tremendous scientific and technological achievements since then rest essentially on the stimulus given to society by that one invention. The social systems built up during previous centuries were unable to cope with the new circumstances of the industrial revolution and so there were many upheavals - some of them violent - from the French Revolution onwards during the period of flux before society, in the late nineteenth century, came to some kind of terms with the new world. But that accommodation could not last in the face of ever-accelerating technological advance and we are again in sore straits.