Unions representing research council staff based in Swindon and London
calculated the number of planned redundancies from a memo detailing
negotiations over staffing levels between Cadogan and Tom Blundell, chief
executive of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.
Blundell it says, is “under severe pressure from Sir John Cadogan to reduce
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The memo, from Rae Fitzgerald, manager of the BBSRC office, says Cadogan
asked why 15 posts could not be lost on top of 28 already lost through
vacancies and voluntary redundancies. “We believe this is in keeping with the
cuts asked for in other research councils,” says Fitzgerald. By extrapolating
from these figures, the unions estimate that 500 jobs are under threat.

At union meetings this week to discuss the affair, staff expressed feelings
of anger and despair, says Kevin Brandstatter of the National Union of Civil
and Public Servants. “This is the third or fourth staff review we have lived
through in the past ten years.” Much of the anger is aimed at Cadogan himself,
whose management style has come in for heavy criticism from staff.

A statement from Cadogan’s office says he is reviewing research council
staffing, as foreshadowed in the government’s policy document, Forward Look,
published in April. “Decisions are unlikely before the turn of the year,” says
the statement. It stresses that Cadogan’s aim is to free up money from
administration for research.

Brandstatter argues that Cadogan’s plans would produce false savings. “It
is all very well to say that cutting jobs here will mean more money for
research,” he says. “But it will also mean more administration thrust onto the
research institutions because we shall have to pass on what we shall be unable
to do here.”

The unions argue that the research councils’ administrative systems are
already efficient, accounting for only 3.5 per cent of their overall budget.
The average across the European Union is about 7.5 per cent, they say, while
the administrative bill for the Ministry of Defence’s procurement executive is
25 per cent.

I owe both my life and my sanity to high-tech medicine so I approached
this challenging international series sceptically. The theme of producers
Martin Freeth and Stefan Moore is that modern medicine treats the patient
merely as part of the machinery in an advanced technology loop and pays
too little time to his or her needs.

The producers rightly point out that it was Hippocrates who said that
patients should be kept completely ignorant about the real nature of their
illnesses. By the 1990s we have progressed to the point where the Japanese
surgeon who has operated on a patient for breast cancer confronts the relatives
with the severed breast, the better to explain his procedures and prognosis.
This kind of savage honesty is simply as stupid as it is barbaric, but most
cancer patients in Japan are still kept completely in the dark, and that
cannot be right. The patient, after all, is part of the treatment and recovery.

The scope of the series is broad; aspects of medicine in 11 different
countries are described and beautifully photographed. In some Third World
countries, where the new drugs have arrived but are given with traditional
treatment in extended families, some of the most impressive results are
achieved.

We can learn a great deal from the schizophrenics in Italy who went
to the seaside for the day and decided to stay there for the rest of their
lives. The local community has adopted them, local doctors give them medication
and they are happy as anyone can be with a tormenting disease.

The contrast with the world’s richest and most powerful nation is instructive.
In the US the vogue for releasing mental patients into the community has
reached its height. Unfortunately, the community is in the habit of crossing
the road and passing by, leaving people to gibber in the gutter in permanent
but unattended reproach.

Pursuing their theme the producers focus on Johns Hopkins Hospital in
Baltimore, where there is more room for the technology than there is for
the patient. A doctor-to-be says: ‘You start to look at patients not as
patients but just a long hit or a short hit. Are they going to be a lot
of work?’

As one patient exclaims: ‘I get tired of being treated like I am the
disease.’ In hospitals in India, self is defined by the patient’s family;
the family, or some of it, goes into hospital with the patient. The divide
between Baltimore and Bombay somehow has to be filled: medicine is mostly
about humanity and the artifacts are no more than aids.

It seemed to me that some programmes were less certain about their objectives.
It is surely right to excoriate eugenics, but must we treat genetic medicine
with so much suspicion? I was sceptical about nonmedical treatments until
these programmes reminded me that no matter how dazzling the claims of technology,
humanity is crucial in our handling of disease.

I previewed these programmes in the week that the BBC’s statement of
its future, Extending Choice, was published. Pages are devoted to drama
and comedy but science is barely mentioned. Yet what a loss it would be
if series such as this disappeared: where would the general public look
for its science if not to the BBC?

Glyn Jones is a science writer.

Journey to the Centre of the Universe A series of 13 radio programmes,
BBC World Service, from Monday, 6 July, at 04.15 GMT, repeated at 09.15
GMT and on Wednesdays at 15.15 GMT

Change or else . . . was the ultimatum handed down by the BBC hierarchy
12 months ago to Antenna, the amiable monthly magazine of all the science
that Horizon had not covered. Editor Caroline van den Brul has changed Antenna
into a brash weekly half-hour synthesis of the tricks of pop science television.

The first programme of the new series, each of which will be built around
a single scientist, gives space to David Deutsch, an Oxford theoretical
physicist, on time travel – the next frontier. The new Antenna is pledged
to view the cultural context of science in each film, so we are treated
to the vision of the vulpine, if affable, Deutsch making toast in his kitchen,
and visiting his local pub. But here’s the rub: the pub contains a pinball
machine from which a quick metamorphosis is made from the hard balls of
Newtonian physics to the doubts and probabilities of quantum mechanics.

For quantum theory proves, or allows for the probability, that time
travel is possible even if we will not have the technology for a few aeons.
Deutsch’s journey into quantum theory is assisted by such servants of the
myth as the original Tardis, as well as several different manifestations
of Dr Who, all saying pregnant and vaguely threatening things as they pass
by.

Deutsch is not afraid of the paradoxes that his thesis presents. For
example, if I travel back in time to see my grandfather, what happens if
I shoot said grandfather before he has time to sire my father? Deutsch obligingly
shot himself in one special effect – but stayed with us until the programme
ended because he had killed himself in another, parallel universe.

The fun was spoiled from an unexpected source, Stephen Hawking. He does
not believe in the possibility of time travel. Instead, he came up with
the principle of chronology protection which, although not explained, sounded
absolutely final.

If you think that Deutsch is wasting his time and our money, bear in
mind that he needs only a personal computer, a pencil and electronic mail
– presumably to correspond with alternative universes – to make his theories
come alive in his front parlour.

The production by John Wyver and direction by Steve Ruggi verged on
the wild side. This is certainly a rejuvenated, if rather anarchic, series.
It will be worth watching further programmes by stalwarts such as Bob Williamson
(with Fiona Holmes producing) and fresh evidence about evolution, directed
and produced by David Malone.

Also well worth listening out for, if you can pick up the BBC World
Service, is a series by Martin Redfern. Called Journey to the Centre of
the Universe, it consists of 13 programmes, each 15 minutes long. Redfern
starts from Spaceship Earth, moves past the Sun through the Solar System
to reach beyond our Galaxy out to the billions of other galaxies. Will the
Universe expand for ever and just where is its centre are two of the issues
Redfern handles.

The epigraph of the series is by William Blake: ‘If the doors of perception
were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.

Glyn Jones is a film maker and science writer.

Is is a truth universally acknowledged by the manufacturing classes
that a young man or woman may emerge from our great universities with a
first class honours degree and yet be unable to distinguish between a nut
and a bolt.

Adam Hart-Davies, producer of the science programme QED, began the new
series on 12 February by following four teams of engineering students who
had the remedy to this disturbing lacuna dropped on the table before them.
It took the form of a box of bits of metal, rubber belts, gears and motors.

Harry West of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology devised this
test of ingenuity. He believes that each box held enough parts for students
to build – in several different ways – a machine to snatch up and store
empty bottles, cans and cartons. ‘The Battle of the Bottles’ demonstrated
a problem in engineering design to which there was no single right answer.

‘When to Change Faces’ (19 February) tackles a more harrowing topic:
when to repair a harelip. At Great Ormond Street Hospital, we saw consultant
Michael Mars operate on a 16-year-old patient whose face had grown deformed
after the original surgery. Her second operation was successful but the
question posed was: should lips and palates be repaired early or later in
life to avoid teenage facial problems? Mars took a team of 30 specialists,
paid for by Britain’s Overseas Development Agency, to Sri Lanka where there
had been no surgery at all. Hundreds of would-be patients beseiged them.

The team operated each night until early morning, leaving the hospital
free for its daytime programme, for a month with a gap of 30 seconds between
each of 400 patients. The stress for the medical staff was difficult to
cope with but the result was worth the effect. ‘We’re giving her a normal
life, the chance of marriage and children,’ was how one member of the team
rationalised the demanding schedule they obeyed to a discussion group. At
times the tension trickled like sweat onto the screen. Paul Sommers’ direction
caught the moods well. The producer was Gillian Strachan for Aspect Films.

Glyn Jones produced Tommorrow’s World.

The aim of all decent documentary makers is to tell the truth in a reasonably
entertaining way. Horizon returned this month after six months with 16 weekly
programmes that range from the search for the first language, an examination
of how the diet of a pregnant woman can affect the health of her children
50 years later, Harold Wellman’s contribution to geophysics and last year’s
solar eclipse to a report on the efforts to find a vaccine to protect against
malaria. It begins with a difficult topic: breast cancer. What hope is there
for a principled film on this subject when the medical profession cannot
agree on the best treatment; the government speaks with two voices on breast
care; and there is no certain cure in sight. Where is the truth to be found
here – where the entertainment?

These facts must have made a dispiriting start to Christopher Riley’s
pursuit of truth for Horizon. The figures alone add up to an enormous tragedy:
150 000 women in Britain have breast cancer; 1 in 12 women get it, 15 000
die of it each year – that is, one woman every 30 minutes. And on the breast
cancer map of Europe coloured from green (low levels of the disease) to
red (high levels) Britain stands reddest of all – the worst afflicted country.
Our mortality rate is the worst in the world. The US and Sweden have more
cases than we do, but fewer women die from it in these two countries.

Faced with this raw material, Riley set out to establish what was best
practice. He found it at St Margaret’s Hospital, Epping, where patients
are treated with evident humanity. The women are screened every three years
– despite doubts about this programme – and should a tumour be discovered
by the breast clinic (surgeon, pathologist, oncologist and nurse counsellor
in a sort of standing committee), she is asked to come back for further
examination.

Clearly, the news devastates those who learn they have the disease.
But they are not only told by the surgeon himself, the nurse counsellor
is on hand to ease the mental agony. If, when they get home, patients remember
questions they should have asked, they are encouraged to ring in with them.

Most women fear mastectomy, removal of the entire breast, but this is
rarely done at St Margaret’s, where the smallest incision possible is made
– from 5 millimetres upwards. Patients are then treated with radiotherapy
and chemotherapy. The women likeliest to survive are those who find the
lump early and seek treatment immediately – it is as blunt as that. Factors
influencing breast cancer include late children, no children, late menopause,
obesity, increase in age and family history.

Riley handled his material with care and candour: whether in the operating
theatre or the clinic, no issue was ducked. We were introduced soberly to
the ‘wonder’ drug tamoxifen – the trials of which have just finished (see
This Week, 11 January).

For me the crucial point was reached when the veteran cancer specialist
Sir Patrick Forrest suggested politely that it was time for the medical
profession to sort itself out and agree on a common best treatment. But
much will still be left to the women themselves – weaving through the film
was the story of two sisters: one, operated on early, lives; the younger
one, operated on late, is dead.

At the end of 50 minutes I felt that I had clearly seen some truths
– as far as they are known – about a baffling disease. I had not been entertained
so much as absorbed and shaken by a traditionally-made and piercing Horizon.

The second Horizon, ‘Pest Wars’, concerned itself with a truth that
ought to have been self-evident with the birth of insecticides, but wasn’t:
in spraying our fields to destroy what we call pests we are also annihilating
our natural allies, the predators which prey on them.

This ultimately leads to the situation where indiscriminate spraying
actually increases the number of pests. For every tonne of crops we consume,
1.5 tonnes has to be grown – the surplus is destroyed by insects. Since
the world population is likely to double in the next 30 years, it is clear
that we need some drastic action which doesn’t involve the use of a double-edged
sword like pesticides, to save millions of people.

The answer is undoubtedly biological control, in which insect predators,
harmless to crops (and us), are bred to attack aphids and the other creatures
which feed on our food while it is still in the fields.

This can be a fairly simple matter, sometimes. British farmers have
ripped up 240 000 kilometres of hedgerow, destroying the breeding grounds
of the spiders and beetles that prey on the pests. It is possible to grow,
quite cheaply, hedge grasses which nurture our friends to go out into the
fields to feed on our foes – and to replant our hedgerows. There is a neat
symmetry to this cycle which gives me great pleasure.

Brilliant photography by Oxford Scientific Films set alight a rather
pedestrian script. Producers were Sean Morris and Chris Haws.

Glyn Jones was the first producer of Tomorrow’s World

A millennium is always an excellent excuse for a celebration so there
was every reason for Tomorrow’s World to mark its thousandth programme on
9 October with a retrospective that spanned 26 years. Inevitably, there
are those who would sooner be told about all the things that the programme
had got wrong over the years, and it is true that self-criticism was not
the mood of the night, but I find that forgivable.

What was in many ways more fascinating was the way in which some inventions
easily outstripped the prophetic powers of the programme. In the very first
edition (7 July 1965) we went to a school in Essex to see it take delivery
of a second-hand computer about the size of a saloon car. We speculated
that one day every school in Britain would have one – that was the easy
bit. What we failed to predict was that within 20 years children would be
playing with pocket computers faster and more powerful than the original.

There are, on the other hand, bright hopes that have made little progress
since the year they were shown – magnetic levitation in Britain has remained
little more than a curiosity without a foreseeable future. Treatment for
infertility was in the wind, especially for private patients, but nobody
seriously expected that testtube babies would become relatively common,
nor was open-heart surgery expected to save the lives of many thousands
of people worldwide (including my own). The programme, however, was present
at Britain’s first heart transplant.

Optical fibres were spotted early on, but nobody seriously expected
one strand to carry 40 million calls a day. A factory robot made a tentative
bow in the first programme but for some years their onward march was slow.
They became more robust, they got cheaper, and they spread – the story of
pretty well every successful invention on Earth.

More to the point, what about Tomorrow’s World’s conscience and the
way it treats its viewers? It took time to get to grips with profound changes,
such as the menace to the ecosphere. The nature of a newsy magazine programme
makes it difficult to cover vast issues that need much time to develop arguments
and see them crystallise and compete. But Tomorrow’s World is now good at
covering facets of the overall argument.

For example, five weeks ago there was an item about a solar car rally
in a Swiss village and in the latest edition Judith Hann took us around
a Swedish forest whose floor was covered with plastic to withstand acid
rain. The object was to see how land regenerates when protected in this
way.

It is in reflecting the world’s detailed and specific attempts to save
itself that the programme succeeds. But there are times when better informed
viewers want a deeper, more sober treatment of an issue about which they
may know a little but suspect a lot lies below the surface.

Editors have a duty to satisfy almost every appetite. But there have
been times when Tomorrow’s World has seemed to fear the slightest drop in
its momentum. In the hearts of some previous editors lurked a fear that
viewers, if not whirled from issue to issue at ballistic speeds, would tire
and take to cruising around the other TV channels.

I think that editors should be made of sterner stuff because I suspect
that viewers are sometimes ahead of them – why do they tune into Tomorrow’s
World in the first place? Curiosity surely, and that curiosity has not always
been repaid with the respect it deserves. Many editions ago I remember an
item about telephones that opened with some crazed presenter sitting on
top of a telegraph pole. This neither whets nor feeds curiosity – and it
certainly does not impress the kids.

Too often over the past 26 years, the audience saw the meretricious;
yet Tomorrow’s World has frequently shown that it can hold a grown-up audience
with a grown-up concept. Incidentally, the audience are not all teenagers.
Research shows that each age group is about evenly represented with a slight
bulge in the 25-34 year olds, all the classes are evenly represented and
men and women divide almost exactly 50:50.

The present editor, Dana Purvis, has said that while she must stand
up for populism she wants to see the programme less frenetic and is prepared
to try single subject issues (91av, 13 October 1990). She deserves
support for her position. Tomorrow’s World is now broadcast opposite Coronation
Street, the most popular programme in Britain. For the new series, its initial
audience has dropped two million from its average of seven million. The
pressure will be on to descend to the meretricious again. This should be
resisted because it would merely mean that the BBC has lost its nerve and
is no longer prepared to trust the curiosity and maturity of its viewers.

Tomorrow’s World has had a good few imitators around the world but they
have all failed to achieve its blend of information, excitement and learning
lightly worn. Perhaps only a public broadcasting service could risk experimenting
in the presentation of science and technology. No doubt there are scientists
and engineers who dislike any such idea. They can try Horizon.

The programme is now almost inconceivably different from its first sooty
black and white edition because it has kept itself in the van of the electronics
revolution. It makes the early days look something like the early silent
movies. But one thing they haven’t bettered; the original signature tune
written (for £25) by a rising young musician called John Dankworth.

Glyn Jones devised Tomorrow’s World and was its first editor.