From a Peripatetic Oz Scholar. (October 23, 2007)

From time to time TFW is pointed to written comment so pertinent to the local scene despite referring to matters half a world away it's, well scary.

In this case the comment is the October editorial for THE INSTITUTE OF MATHEMATICS AND ITS APPLICATIONS.

The author is David Broomhead, Professor in Applied Mathematics at the University of Manchester.

But Professor Broomhead isn't commenting on his current employer but rather a former one, the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE) in Malvern, it was one of the Ministry of Defence’s research establishments and "had more FRSs than most university departments could even dream of having".

From what follows he could just as easily be writing about Australia's CSIRO.

He writes that there was something highly unusual about the organisation's management structure. "It was possible in that system to be promoted to do just science [and] the funding came directly from the Treasury. In practise, this gave such a scientist a great deal of power and autonomy, since it meant that his/her main priority had to be research. It was very difficult for a manager to get an individual merit scientist to do something that the scientist didn't feel was worth doing... In practise... it produced a dynamic tension between managers and scientists which generated informed strategic thinking and kept the organisation at the forefront of scientific developments. It also made explicit within the organisational structure the key role that the scientists played in the success of the whole enterprise.

"[In time] the system I have just described was judged to require a change of culture (we were told that we needed to be ‘exposed to the cutting edge of the market place’) and was ultimately destroyed. It was separated from the Ministry of Defence and became an agency and a new head ‘from industry’ was appointed. I remember when he first came to Malvern to set out his ideas, how deeply unimpressed I was. He gave a talk that was peppered with pseudo-statistics, unlabelled graphs and spider diagrams. This style of not engaging with his scientists did not vary in all the time I was employed at Malvern.

"After that talk I wondered how someone who did not appear to know how to address his most important asset could actually achieve anything... But I did not understand the nature and use of power in an organisation; how power can be exercised through people’s ambitions and fears. There will always be enough people with ambition who will seek positions of power, and all of us—to a greater or lesser extent—were afraid for our jobs and pensions. Within a shockingly short space of time we were filling in time sheets, fulfilling milestones and discussing with each other whose task we could charge for any scientific discussion we might have. We had acquired an organisational structure which was completely independent of the quality of the science on which it all depended— milestones completed on time were more important than papers published in good journals—and we had a total quality system whose sole purpose appeared to be to provide non-scientific managers with the capacity to be authoritative and managerial about the scientific work. The bulk of the MoD research establishments was ultimately floated as QinetiQ, a scientific consultancy which works on short-term projects (the 10-15 year [research] horizon was a very early casualty)."

Professor Broomhead continues that the new manager from industry was: "Sir John Chisholm, who is now chairman of the Medical Research Council. the MRC is a body with a huge reputation for fostering scientific excellence in long-term basic research; as was the case with the research establishments, [and currently the] political rhetoric is about the commercialisation of scientific discoveries; already there are warning signs of what Sir John’s role at the MRC might be. Mark Henderson, Science Editor of The Times relates growing concerns of MRC scientists in a recent article (21/ 08/07)

They [the scientists] say that he [Sir John] takes too active a role in decision-making for a supposed nonexecutive chairman. The Times understands that at least two well-qualified candidates to succeed Professor Colin Blakemore as MRC chief executive decided not to apply because of concerns about interference.

The Commons Science and Technology Committee is also worried, expressing ‘serious reservations as to whether Sir John is the right person to guide the MRC executive through the coming period of change’. They should be worried. Experience shows that, given concerted effort from the top, it is very easy to subvert the ethos of an organisation, even one as august as the Medical Research Council.

Will the MRC and its laboratories such as the MRC Molecular Biology Laboratory in Cambridge go the way of our CSIRO and the carnage perpetrated by its CEO Geoff Garrett as directed by his political masters?