Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
I recently re-read CP Snow’s marvellously scathing attack, in his 1959 “Two Cultures” lecture, on the British literary intellectuals who looked down on scientists. The literary types, he noted, had even started referring to themselves as “the intellectuals”, thus excluding luminaries like Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Edwin Hubble and John von Neumann from the canon of genius. Snow’s basic thesis still feels relevant. Even though every pushy parent now wants their child to study Stem subjects, and those who opt for humanities at the tender age of 18 no longer look down on scientists, there is still far too strong a sense that we are part of either one culture or the other.
A recent visit to Oxford left me wondering whether we should also be talking about a third culture: entrepreneurship. Perhaps the starkest division in Britain today is not between the arts and the sciences, but between entrepreneurs who put brilliant ideas into practice, and those who have no clue what it means to take risks, move fast and make things happen.
I was visiting the new Ellison Institute of Technology, whose buildings are rising out of the ground like beacons of hope. Giant cranes dot the verdant paths of Oxford’s science parks, which loop around the offices of companies like Oxford Nanopore and other university spinouts.
Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, is giving over £100mn to develop a world-class institute tackling global challenges from health to energy to soil. This won’t just do pure research; it will also be a giant incubator, taking equity stakes in promising start-ups.
British science has too often foundered in the so-called “valley of death”, with innovative ideas ending up being commercialised elsewhere for lack of scale-up capital. If this institute can help bring in more early-stage capital, it could encourage more investors to take risks on science IP.
The investment is a huge vote of confidence in Britain’s scientific brains, the integrity of our research and our enterprising spirit. If an American of Ellison’s stature is prepared to believe in us to this extent, perhaps we should start believing in ourselves again?
The UK is currently plagued by a sense that everything is over and that we’ll simply have to put up with low growth, spiralling debt and mounting social tensions.
Now, I am as prone as anyone to this melancholy streak in the British character. But I find the best antidote to it is visiting people who have founded businesses or charities. Business entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs generally don’t moan when things get tough: they look for a different way through.
Britain is still an enterprise nation — we just don’t talk about it much.
Our scientific response to the pandemic was a huge success story. The government may have stumbled over lockdowns but there was no inertia in the genetic sequencing of the virus, the rapid rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine, or the swift discovery of dexamethasone as a treatment for Covid-19, which saved over a million lives around the world.
Part of this was down to the relative lack of hierarchy in British science, whose researchers are open-minded collaborators across disciplines and borders. It was also due to close working with business and with ministers who were willing to suspend some of the usual restrictions in order to facilitate breakthroughs.
That wartime mentality suits us. In a national emergency, the British state proved itself capable of moving fast and taking some calculated risks, getting out of the way of the experts who could deliver. Yet after the pandemic, all the old rules reasserted themselves and so did the gripes.
As soon as the government committed to invest in the Oxford-Cambridge Arc, there were predictable complaints that the money should go to the north, not to two of our best-performing universities. The Ellison Institute has had to overcome the usual planning and environmental challenges, plus local reluctance to reopen an old passenger rail service that connects the Cowley car plant, on the outskirts of Oxford, to London’s Marylebone station.
Some people have even moaned that Ellison should stick to funding pure research, not back enterprises that could turn a profit. These classically obstructive responses assume that it’s purer to publish papers than build anything, and better to dribble public money around rather than bet big.
This has to change. We can’t admire the plucky start-up, then complain if it succeeds. We need to ensure that the next DeepMind can scale up in the UK, rather than having to sell in California. It would help if we could bridge the disconnect between a polity that pumps out high-minded papers about productivity and growth, and doesn’t deliver.
Despite the top priority of Labour’s “industrial strategy” being to tackle Britain’s high industrial electricity costs, these are now threatening to derail the government’s own plans to build data centres. Far from reducing regulatory burdens, as the strategy promises, ministers are imposing new taxes and punitive labour laws.
The challenge is cultural, not just political.
In the US, it’s normal for professors to have a start-up on the side. In the UK, those who dabble in business are regarded as not quite playing the academic game. Few British scientist-entrepreneurs are household names. Many have a terribly British, self-deprecating modesty. But we should be a lot less British about dragging their achievements into the light — and to market.