IChemE speakers blast UK attitudes

British science is plagued by `a brute capacity to create snobby hierarchies where you bloody don't need them,' according to the chief scientific advisor to the government, Sir Robert May. This attitude threatens to turn British science into a quaint backwater, he warned the delegates at the Institution of Chemical Engineers' research event (see p26).

Britain has always `punched above its weight' in research, with more universities, published papers and Nobel and other prizes than would be expected for a country of its size. But May repeated the warning that this success is not translated into ownership of patents, and the fruits of UK research are still ending up in the US and Japan.

Government often points to the fact that British research has a higher proportion of funding from industry than almost anywhere else. However, May noted, this masks a surprisingly low investment in R&D from British companies. Generally, they plough 2.6 per cent of their revenues into research, compared with a worldwide average of 4.7 per cent. The disparity is even more marked when it comes to profits. UK companies spend the equivalent of 23.7 per cent of their income on research. The worldwide average is 72.1 per cent. And in Japan, companies spend more than twice as much on research and development than they take in profits. If this situation continues, May warned, the UK could be reduced to the status of `an upmarket Disneyland for tourists from the countries that get it right.'

Meanwhile, the IChemE's Jubilee lecturer, social scientist and Southampton University vice-chancellor Howard Newby, warned that industry is still misreading the public's perception of risk, and that this is having a direct effect on the UK economy. `People behave on their perceptions of reality, rather than on reality itself,' he said. `These perceptions in turn influence the political framework governing the pace and direction of technological change and, ultimately therefore, economic competitiveness.'

The problem, Newby believes, is that scientists and engineers, who are used to the concept of risk, don't understand the difference between risk assessment and risk perception - and also can't see that this positively encourages the suspicion and mistrust that the public now seems to feel towards them. `Let us please, once and for all, move away from that old declension: "I am an expert; you are ignorant; they are irrational",' he pleaded.