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THAT THERE is something wrong with British science is probably not seriously in dispute. Many suggestions have been made as to what exactly is wrong, but one possibility often overlooked is the British class system.

Some years ago I worked for the Medical Research Council (MRC). One of my jobs as a scientific administrative officer was to visit the council’s research units scattered throughout Britain’s universities and keep a rather inexpert eye on what was going on. I paid one such visit in the company of a colleague from the MRC’s headquarters. We talked to a number of scientists, and one of the younger ones impressed me – I think he was an electron microscopist. On the way back from the visit, I offered my view about this particular scientist and was rather taken aback by the reply: ‘Yes, I suppose so, but he is awfully working class.’ I looked at my colleague’s well-cut suit, compared it mentally with the scientist’s scruffy jeans and sweater and felt my class hackles rise. But on reflection, I realised that his rather snobbish remark did perhaps say as much about British science as it did about himself.

I remembered, for instance, that as an undergraduate in the University of London 15 years before, I had been friendly with a young woman who had been at school at Benenden – where Princess Anne, now the Princess Royal, had been a pupil. When we first met, or soon after, she said: ‘I’ll bet you’re a scientist.’ How could she tell? She replied: ‘You are wearing a pullover your mother knitted for you.’ After that I noticed that law students wore suits with double breasted waistcoats or the like. Years later, in Oxford, I first heard the expression ‘northern chemist’.

Students reading chemistry came, or were thought to come, exclusively from northern grammar schools or what they had been transformed into – comprehensive schools. Chemists did not seem to arrive at Oxford from Eton and the other great public schools in large numbers.

I asked a friend, a well-known Scottish lawyer, who was educated at Kelvinside, a preserve of Glasgow’s middle classes: ‘Did many of your compatriots become scientists?’ ‘Two,’ he said, but added, ‘they were scholarship boys.’

The idea I want to put forward is that science does not fare very well in Britain because professional scientists are largely drawn from the lower strata of British society or, just as important, they are perceived to be. If this idea has any validity, we should find evidence to support it in patterns of application for entry to universities, and corresponding patterns of acceptance. This is easy to do, because British children can be readily assigned to a social class according to whether they are educated at state (maintained) schools or private – that is, fee-paying or independent – schools.

Figures supplied by the Independent Schools Information Service (ISIS) suggest that about 93 per cent of children are educated at maintained schools and the other 7 per cent at independent schools. The first question, then, is whether children from maintained schools are more likely to read science at university than those from independent schools. Figures from the admissions office of the University of Oxford demonstrate pretty conclusively – both in terms of applications and admissions – that in Oxford at least, maintained schools are associated with science places, independent schools with arts.

In some ways, however, the University of Cambridge makes the point more graphically without the use of figures at all, although I think it makes it rather unwittingly. Look no further than the front page of its prospectus, which is intended to sell the university to potential students. Presumably one of the intentions is to attract applications from pupils at state schools, as four out of the six students featured on the front page are from comprehensive and high schools. These four are reading maths, natural sciences, engineering – and English literature. The other two, from independent schools, are reading medicine and law.

Of course, Oxford and Cambridge are hardly typical British universities. It turns out, however, that they may be representative, at least when it comes to the background of those who opt to read science. The Universities Central Council on Admissions (UCCA) collects data on all applications and admissions to all universities. The findings are particularly telling, as the 1987 figures for England and Wales, reproduced here, demonstrate.

Using UCCA’s data, you can construct a sort of league table comparing the preference of the maintained and private sectors for different subjects. Within either sector, the popularity of a chosen subject is simply the ratio of the numbers of those applying to read it divided by the total number applying to go on to university from that sector. For each subject, the ratio of these two numbers, one for the independent and one for the maintained sector, give a measure of the relative popularity of that subject for the two sectors.

This table obviously supports the idea that the sciences are much more popular with children at state schools than private schools. The spectrum runs from subjects such as maths, anatomy and physiology, physics and chemistry, which are popular in state schools, through to medicine and dentistry, the humanities (history, philosophy) and law, which are popular in private schools. (I do not attach too much significance to ‘general and other combined’ group, which looks a bit of a rag-bag.) So the ‘hard’ sciences are most popular in state schools while the professions and humanities are popular in private schools. This pattern is largely preserved in the figures for admissions.

This rather clear picture of the social differences in people’s preference for different subjects does not say everything, of course. In the first place, the number of children in state schools is much greater than the number in independent schools – although the way the league table has been constructed is designed to take this into account fairly even handedly. But in practice, because of this, any university class is likely to have more students from state than independent schools in it. In a maths or physics class, there are at least five times as many.

It is also true that neither the maintained nor the independent sectors are homogeneous. You can distinguish four types of state-supported schools – comprehensive, sixth-form college, grammar and secondary – and the same is presumably true for private schools, which range from the large, well-known boys’ public schools to small schools essentially run as family businesses. Certainly within state schools we can discern a pattern of preference – grammar schools are most like independent schools, secondary schools least like them.

Meanwhile, quite a lot of people go on to university not straight from school but from some other institute of higher education. And some go later on as mature students; yet others choose to read for a second degree after completing their first. Or they come to British universities from overseas.

The picture is also muddled by the fact that men and women have quite different patterns of preference in what they opt to read at university. More than three times as many men as women read maths; two-and-a-half times as many read physics. In medicine and dentistry, however, the figures are more equal with a discrepancy of only 20 per cent in favour of men. For law, the figures for the two sexes are very similar, while rather more women than men read biology and two-and-a-half times as many women as men read languages. Finally, the data are incomplete. For many students, UCCA does not know their school of origin. For all these reasons we can draw only tentative conclusions. On the other hand, these complications probably do not detract much from the overall patterns of preference between state and private schools.

So we have established that the sciences – particularly the ‘harder’ ones – are the favourite subjects among students from state schools, while those from private schools tend towards the professions and arts. Two questions remain: Why does this state of affairs exist? Why does it matter? Both questions can be illustrated in a number of ways, but I will choose two. One is the example provided by Margaret Thatcher and the other an observation made by the Marxist historian, Christopher Hill.

The Prime Minister offers us quite a searching insight into what this article is about. She was quoted recently in Science in Parliament, an extract from Hansard, as saying that she has a ‘passion for science’. And indeed she does take a personal interest in science, whether it is molecular biology at the MRC’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, which she has visited a number of times, or in the work on elementary particles going on at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics in Switzerland.

In her interest in science she resembles an earlier Tory prime minister, Arthur Balfour, of whom Sir Ronald Storrs, the British governor of Jerusalem in the early part of the century, once said: ‘A statesman with his heart in science would take refuge from party routine with a scientist whose soul was in politics.’ In other ways, Thatcher resembles the scientist Storrs was referring to: it was Chaim Weizmann, the Russian-born northern chemist, from the University of Manchester, later to become the first president of Israel. For Thatcher, too, began her career as a chemist, but her soul was clearly in politics. And needless to say she was at grammar school, at Kesteven and Grantham – not strictly northern but not far off – before going on to read chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford. There she was tutored by Dorothy Hodgkin, who was later to win a Nobel Prize for her work in crystallography.

DOD’s Parliamentary Companion, which gives brief biographical notes about MPs, tells us that after leaving Oxford Thatcher earned a living as a research chemist for four years. But, and surely this is what is significant about her, the next thing it reveals is that she was called to the Bar three years after that, having contested her first seats in parliament.

Given her social background, the fact that she should choose to read chemistry, and even make her living at it, should come as little surprise. But being ambitious, she presumably realised she had made a mistake. The prospects for ‘upward mobility’ are very much greater in law, and then in politics, than as a research chemist – whether this is in an ice-cream factory or elsewhere.

The Labour politician Aneurin Bevan said that the trouble with the British was their ‘poverty of ambition’. Those with worldly ambitions are not likely to choose science as a career. Indeed, it is striking how success in science is measured in terms of the regard other scientists have for your work, not by how much money you make, or what power you have. How often are the very best scientists rather unworldly, or even naive – you have only to think of the Curies or Einstein. These scientists were in the best romantic tradition, where the best reason for the pursuit of knowledge is knowledge itself.

Christopher Hill made an entirely different point in a recent Conway Memorial lecture he gave to the Small Place Ethical Society in London. There is a nice irony in being able to quote him, introduced as ‘a committed Marxist in a hostile climate’ in almost the same breath as the Prime Minister. His point is that science is a culture very different from that of those who have traditionally ruled us. Not an original point, but a very good one nevertheless.

‘Gentlemen educated at Oxford and Cambridge,’ he said, ‘learnt to quote Horace and despise science which dirtied your hands. Nonconformists, who were educated at dissenting academies, learnt modern subjects and produced the inventors who created the Industrial Revolution. The split between the cultured amateurs who rule us and the dirty-handed scientists who have the ideas, still lingers in the English educational and political systems with unfortunate results.’ The ‘unfortunate results’ are presumably that we are ruled by politicians and a civil service that are both largely scientifically illiterate. I suspect that few politicians and senior civil servants read a science – any science – at university. Nor will they have made a study of science as a process rather than as a heap of largely unconnected anecdotes. For example, Sir David Hancock – until recently Principal Permanent Secretary at the Department of Education and Science – read philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford. It was an interesting experience some years ago to hear him, as guest of honour at the 40th anniversary of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, give a speech suitably adorned with Latin quotes.

It would be nice to know the educational backgrounds of our senior civil servants. It is unnerving even to consider the possibility that the vast majority of them know no science and may not wish to know any. And yet it is difficult to imagine that they do take an active interest in science. Anyone very senior in the civil service has made it to the top as a result of being trained as a nonspecialist, to ‘suit the requirements of a highly centralised bureaucracy’. Such senior civil servants must be prepared to move at the drop of a hat from one ministry to another. Such nonspecialism is very much not in the spirit of science.

During his distinguished career, Hancock worked for the Board of Trade, the Treasury, the Office of the Permanent Representative to the European Community, the Cabinet Office and the Department of Education and Science. This is not intended as an attack on him. He is clearly very able and no doubt did very well what was asked of him, but he is, I suspect, an excellent illustration of Hill’s point.

In general, however, I was unable to obtain this sort of information about civil servants. The Civil Service Commission told me it does not hold such records centrally and that I was unlikely to get it anyway except in a very piecemeal fashion. Nevertheless, it seems fair to suspect that the upper reaches of the civil service are largely peopled with products of our independent schools with their inclination towards arts and humanities.

It is possible to make other telling comparisons, by looking at groups of people in our society who are indisputably influential, and then comparing their social origins. Judges provide a useful example. You can hardly overestimate the importance of the law or the social cachet that is attached to being in a particularly eminent part of it. Where do judges come from?

There are rather more than 400 circuit judges listed by the Lord Chancellor’s Office. With the help of Who’s Who and the official ISIS guide I identified the schools of a random sample of 70 – that is, the first 70 in an alphabetical list whose schools are listed. This revealed that 48 of the 70 were educated at private schools, the remaining 22 at state schools. With only 7 per cent of children being educated at independent schools, this means that the chances of a child at such a school becoming a circuit judge are about 30 times as great as those for a child at a maintained school. A similar analysis of Conservative MPs, an influential group of very roughly the same size, produced strikingly similar figures: 24 out of 70 came originally from maintained schools, while 46 came from independent schools, including no fewer than 11 from Eton.

Judges are presumably at the top of the legal tree. Circuit judges are not quite at the very top, but they are close. For scientists, the top of the professional tree in Britain is to be a fellow of the Royal Society. This group is possibly twice as large as the total number of judges, but no more than that. In 1957, the Royal Society listed the schools of all the fellows elected in that year; or at least all those that were known. In that year, 23 fellows were elected, including Fred (now Lord) Dainton, a particularly eminent northern chemist. The schools of five fellows were not listed; two had been educated abroad (in the West Indies and Australia). Of the remaining 16, 14 had all apparently been educated at maintained schools. I could not identify the two remaining schools, but they are certainly not independent schools today, and it is a pretty safe bet that they were also state schools.

Last month, 40 new fellows were elected. Of the 21 whose schools could be identified with the help of the Election of Fellows Secretary, two had been educated outside Britain and of the other 19, 12 were educated at maintained and seven in independent schools. Although these figures are not quite as extreme as those for 1957, they do nevertheless show that the preference for science among children educated in maintained schools is reflected in the backgrounds of those elected to the Royal Society, 20 or 30 years after they left school. And this finding is in marked contrast to the example of the circuit judges, where those with independent-school backgrounds are much more strongly represented than would be expected, either in terms of their proportion of the whole population or even of the proportion who opt to read law at university. In absolute terms, more students from the maintained than the independent sector choose law.

There is no doubt that scientists are an accepted part of the British society. But as a profession – if they are indeed a profession – they are relatively new on the social scene compared with lawyers, doctors and civil servants. In many ways, they share the problems that teachers in Britain face. Seen on the one hand as essential to the fabric of society and to be the key to future prosperity, they are not well paid, they are starved of resources and they are often the whipping boys (or girls) of society. I suspect that most teachers, too, are themselves the products of maintained schools.

In the case of science there is also, as Christopher Hill says, a distaste that science is something that you do with your hands: its roots are in the work of craftsmen and skilled labourers. The other day, I was talking to an engineer, who said: ‘Usually when I tell people that I am an engineer, they look surprised. They clearly expect someone in a flat cap with a pipe wrench. I actually design petroleum refineries.’ A lot of the best science does require a scientist to use his or her hands, although some of the best experimenters did not do their own experiments. Rutherford is a good example – his technicians, who did the manual work, went on to found Pye Unicam, the Cambridge instrument company.

There is clearly also a perception, by the better-off middle class, that science is no way to make a career. Parents in this class view their children’s choice of science as they would a choice to go on the stage or become an artist. And they are right: for most scientists there is no proper career structure and the pay is poor. Although there are science stars who win the Nobel, and lesser-glittering, prizes, most scientists, like most actors, must be content with much less. Their wealth, if any, will be modest. And for the most part any prizes they win will be considerably less than glittering. In his book Two Cultures, CP Snow, the physicist turned writer of scientific soap operas, wanted scientists to be ‘on top’. It looks, as the sociologist Barry Barnes puts it, as though the best they can hope for is to be ‘on tap’.

Dr John Galloway is a northern physicist at the Cancer Research Campaign in London.