Across Britain, girls have been overtaking boys at GCSE, subject by subject. The latest figures show that in 1993, for the first time, girls took the lead in the former male strongholds of maths and science. For all subjects, 45 per cent of girls received five or more GCSEs graded between A and C, compared with 37 per cent of boys. The question: “What are we going to do about the boys?” is now exercising the minds of teachers, education researchers and even government ministers. Late last year at the annual meeting of the Girls’ Schools Association, education secretary Gillian Shephard warned that although girls’ academic advances are a cause for pride, “there is a danger of going too far”.

Researchers have sought to explain the academic gender gap with theories of early socialisation, family expectations, and even differences in the womb. But the results of research in Suffolk, like those from Hartismere, have raised a much more straightforward question: do boys need to be made to work harder?

Suffolk is home to a series of grass-roots projects on the gender gap which builds on the work of David Jesson and his team at the University of Sheffield. They have built up a database of education performance indicators, with details of 30 000 pupils ranging from their social class to the results of various tests taken at different ages. Analysis of these data shows that the best predictor of a 16-year-old’s GCSE results in any subject is his or her reading score between the ages of 10 and 12.

Suffolk was well placed to exploit this finding because the local education authority holds reading scores for all Suffolk children who take a standardised reading test at age 12. So last year the authority offered its schools the chance to see how they had done with their pupils.

Advisers from Suffolk worked out a points system for GCSE results with higher grades attracting higher numbers of points. They then used the Sheffield data to estimate how many GCSE points pupils should attain, based on their 12+ reading scores. The expected numbers of points for all Suffolk’s teenagers, right across the ability range, were then plotted as a “county line” on a graph (see Diagram).

Advisers then took the real reading scores and GCSE results of pupils in each school and plotted them on a graph. Pupils whose GCSE performance came above the school’s line had done better than expected – the “overachievers” – while those who came below the line, even if they gained high grades, had done worse than expected – the “underachievers”.

Every pupil’s results appear as a separate mark on the scatter chart. With the data divided by gender, many schools could see not only that far more boys than girls were underachievers, but could also pick out who those boys were and start thinking about why they were underachieving.

One school to do this was Copleston High School in Ipswich. Its GCSE results, shown in national league tables, are above average and rising. In 1993, 46 per cent of its pupils gained five or more GCSEs graded between A and C. In 1994, the figure reached 48 per cent. A closer look, however, shows that in 1993, 39 per cent of Copleston boys gained five or more grades A to C, compared with 55 per cent of girls.

In 1994, the gap widened to 38 per cent of boys and 59 per cent of girls.

As a first stage in the school’s investigation, deputy head Peter Freeman pored over the school’s scatter chart and picked out pupils who had under or overachieved by at least one grade in every subject. More than two-thirds of the underachieving group were boys – 26 out of 34 pupils. Among the overachievers, 22 out of 35 were girls.

He and other senior staff at Copleston went down the list of underachievers looking for explanations. They found that a number of popular theories did not stand up to scrutiny. There was no link with ability, for example. Bright boys under-achieved just as much as those with below average ability. There was no link with literacy, indeed, the 12+ reading scores of boys and girls in the Copleston group were almost identical, seriously undermining the theory that boys’ poor performance at 16 is born of earlier literacy problems.

Factors that did crop up repeatedly were in more obvious, social categories: under-achievers had a pattern of poor attendance, misbehaviour, and summer birthdays – a known factor in under-achievement. Leaving out the birthdays, says Freeman, a picture emerged of a group of boys “generating an ethos of not working hard at school, going out in the evenings, rather than staying in to do homework”.

In the next stage, staff at Copleston tried to identify pupils with a similar risk of underachievement in time to intervene. Last autumn, Freeman circulated to teachers the 12+ reading scores of all pupils due to take GCSEs in 1995, and asked them to pick out those who were in danger of falling well below their predicted GCSE grades. Staff came back with the names of 36 boys and 15 girls. Each of these pupils has been invited to work once a week with a teacher “mentor” on study skills and exam preparation. Whether that will be enough will not be known until next summer’s results are out.

Below the line

Apart from anything else however, the experiment revealed the difficulty schools have in getting across notions of over and underachievement. When parents of the “below the line” group were asked to give permission for the mentoring scheme, several refused because they thought their children were being labelled “thick”.

Similar misunderstandings appear to be common in national discussions about the gender gap. It is alleged, for example, that boys are doing consistently worse than girls. But they are not. Many boys are overachievers, and nationally in 1993, the performance between boys and girls was 1 per cent in maths and science, 17 per cent in English. When GCSEs could be gained mainly through coursework, received wisdom said that girls’ supposed steadiness and neatness would place them in a more favourable position than boys. But analysis of the Sheffield database shows that in 1994, when coursework marks were sharply cut back in favour of final exams, there was no impact on the gender gap.

Back in Suffolk, alongside the scatter chart project, a county inspector named Joe Connolly has been talking to schoolboys, examining their work and conducting studies to find out why some underperform. The emerging picture mirrors the Hartismere homework pattern. Both boys and girls sometimes left their work unfinished, but girls were much more likely to obey instructions from a teacher to finish it. Able boys also appeared less organised than their female counterparts: able girls were more likely to carry a pen, pencil sharpener, or ruler.

In schools where boys performed as well or better than girls – and in a quarter of Suffolk schools boys’ GCSE results are better than girls’ – Connolly found that the ethos of being individual, hard-working and organised, was well-established by the time pupils reached their teens. But in schools where boys were disorganised and indifferent there was no great bravado about not achieving. “Boys were saying ‘I really wish I could do this but I can’t’,” says Connolly. “It seems to be an important step to realise that boys need more checking up on, they need more supervision to make sure they are organised. The schools where the boys do as well as the girls seem to enable boys to be pupils rather than having to be boys.”

As at Copleston school, teachers at Hartismere have tried to intervene to encourage boys to works harder, but early results are patchy. Last year, Hartismere’s deputy head Sue Hargadon used GCSE grades projected from mock exams to identify pupils at risk of underperforming in the real exams. She also picked out those identified as not working hard in their GCSE year. They were offered help with studying and their parents invited to talk to teachers. Most were boys. Some did improve on their estimated grades but others, in particular the lower ability boys, did not. Hargadon feels that more extensive intervention is needed earlier on.

Support for this and other of the Suffolk findings are implied by the preliminary findings of a current study, directed by Jean Rudduck, professor of education at Homerton College, Cambridge. Her interviews with teenage boys in former mining communities also suggest that social factors along with poor organisational skills and understanding of hardwork are more influential than literacy or language development in contributing to the gender gap.

What is hard work?

Teenagers, for example, see Dad coming home having finished work for the day, while Mum returns from her job and continues to work at home, she says. In one project, when Rudduck’s team asked boys if they knew what working hard meant, they replied: “It means you get your head down,” but could not be more specific. “It’s quite hard getting them to work out that it means more time, more concentration, more revision,” says Rudduck. “Our interviews suggest there is a group of lost boys, and perhaps there has always been a group of lost boys, who want to work and don’t know how to do it.”

For those boys in particular, Rudduck suggests, the past decade’s emphasis on equal opportunities for girls in science and technology may have been damaging without an equivalent emphasis on equal opportunities for boys in subjects like English. “There are some schools where boys may have shrugged their shoulders and given up,” she says.

This raises once again the thorny question of what is to be done about the boys. At a recent meeting of Suffolk head teachers, advisers asked for ideas in schools that have improved the performance of boys. A middle school head reported that one of his teachers had observed that, in the name of equal opportunities, the school had systematically weeded out all reading books that might be classified as macho.

So the teacher went out and bought books which were full of adventures and violence – similar material to that in the boys’ favourite computer games. The boys, previously less than enthusiastic about reading, began to work harder. At the next set of tests, their reading scores had caught up with the girls’.

Should such a memo ever land on the desk of the minister for science,
he might wonder what an account of 19th-century factory conditions has to
do with a blueprint for 21st-century science. Or he might recognise the
description, as any young scientist would, for a fair account of life in
present-day contract research.

Submissions to Waldegrave about what he calls ‘the career issue’ have
been uniformly critical of the conditions under which young researchers
work. ‘The growth in short-term funding has . . . undermined the career
structure,’ argues the Medical Research Council, while the Agricultural
and Food Research Council points to ‘the insecurity of the postdoctoral
period, in which researchers face a succession of two-to-three year short-term
appointments on projects which often do not allow them to develop their
own ideas.’

Alison Dunn would assent to that. Last year, despite reaching three
shortlists for research council funding, her work on the genetics and diseases
of cereals at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne failed to gain contracts
to continue the work. Newcastle, one of a minority of universities with
bridging funds for researchers between contracts, agreed to save Dunn from
the dole for five months. Meanwhile, the AFRC, which had turned down the
Newcastle project, proceeded to approve a related project at the University
of Lancaster, which would have depended on the Newcastle research.

The Lancaster application was for a contract researcher at the bottom
of the pay scale. Dunn is paid at the top of the scale because of her experience
and her age: she is now 48. The only apparent solution was for her to be
offered the Lancaster job with a 25 per cent cut in salary.

After an appeal by the project leader at Lancaster, the AFRC agreed
to make up her salary. But she says the humiliation remains: ‘I think the
whole thing is very unjust. I have been forced to apply for a job . . .
in which the work can’t be done without my cooperation and without the results
that I have produced in the last five years.’

Fifteen years ago a researcher with Dunn’s success rate would have anticipated
a permanent post, either as a lecturer or in a research council programme.
The radical change in research management since then is revealed in figures
quoted repeatedly in evidence to Waldegrave: in university science and engineering
departments between 1977/78 and 1990/91, the number of short-term contract
staff has doubled to 12 000. Simultaneously there has been a loss of 1100
permanent lecturing posts. Short-term staff, who once comprised 22 per cent
of those departments’ workforce, now make up 44 per cent.

Yet those who believe that contract research is good for science if
not for scientists, point out that if Dunn had been in a permanent research
council post during those years, she might still have been out of a job.
It was the need for widespread and painful redundancies among research
council staff in the 1980s, in response to cuts in the Science Budget and
erosion of government money for universities, that provoked the switch to
paying researchers on a contract-by-contract basis.

Tom Blundell, director-general of the AFRC which lost nearly 3000 posts
in the 1980s, is not sold on the widespread use of fixed-term contracts.
But they do have advantages: ‘It’s important to have some flexibility built
into the research programme. It’s useful to bring in someone with fresh
ideas for a limited period. One doesn’t always want to invest in a person
for the next 40 years.’

The same point was made last July by the government’s Advisory Council
on Science and Technology in its report on university research. Short-term
research assistants provide universities with ‘a large pool of highly intelligent,
skilled people, the size of which can be readily adjusted to meet demand,’
the report observes.

And when the pool is overflowing and those outside cannot find a job
in science, they can fulfil the government’s policy of putting more scientists
in industry, says Terence Kealey, lecturer in clinical biochemistry at the
University of Cambridge and an advocate of a free market in research. ‘From
the perspective of the country’s economy these people will almost all end
up in industry,’ he says.

One not going to industry is Beki Barthelmine. Instead, she leaves this
month for the Danish government research centre at Riso. Her salary will
be 2.5 times what she earned last year in the Climate Research Unit of
the University of East Anglia. Barthelmine, 29, is a meteorologist who specialises
in wind energy and offshore turbines. She spent last year working outside
her field on a project the CRU found for her because she had no contracts
left.

‘At first the insecurity isn’t a problem,’ she says. ‘It’s quite nice
having to work in a number of different areas. But later you want to specialise,
you don’t want to keep moving into new things when you are getting expertise.
The longest contract I ever had was 18 months, the shortest was three weeks.
It seems like an endless search for money to work on things you want to
work on and you are good at.’

Dunn and Barthelmine have both landed on their feet, for now. Many others,
often with mortgages and families, continue to work on, demoralised and
uncertain of the future (‘How to get on in science’, 91av, 7 April
1990). But critics argue that fixed-term contracts are not only bad for
scientists but also for British science.

According to figures sent to Waldegrave by the white-collar union, the
Institution of Professionals, Managers and Specialists, most researchers
on short-term contracts with the Natural Environment Research Council leave
long before their contracts end. Between 1986 and 1990, the average contract
lasted 2 years 10 months, while the average time that researchers worked
on those contracts was 1 year 9 months. Of 165 researchers on contracts,
only 47 finished the job.

Given the argument that short-term contracts place artificially short
limits on research horizons anyway, the effect of losing a researcher little
more than half-way through the work – because people grasp the opportunity
of longer-term grants or jobs – must be considerable on the quality of research,
says the IPMS. This opinion is shared by the House of Commons Select Committee
on Education, Science and the Arts. In January 1991 it observed: ‘Short-term
appointments do not encourage more vigorous and exciting science, as is
often claimed, but instead encourage high staff turnover; loss of accumulated
experience and expertise, and thus damage the research base.’

Blundell argues that conditions in British science act as a deterrent
on potential researchers. ‘It’s my belief we have gone to too great extremes
in pursuing short-term contracts. It will be self-defeating if we can’t
attract good young people into these posts,’ he says. And he is not alone
in this view.

‘I recently had someone in my office weeping because after 23 years
in the same college, her research contract had come to an end,’ says Peter
Campbell, chairman of the Association of Researchers in Medicine and Science.
‘I had another one unemployed after nine years. Nobody has taken the trouble
to help them try and see their future. It’s quite disgusting, and the point
is that even if you don’t think it’s disgusting the school kids think
it’s disgusting.’

The answer, according to ARMS, is to create a cadre of career scientists.
‘Everybody running research is appointing people entirely independently
of everybody else,’ says Campbell. ‘They take the view that they can appoint
anybody they like. We think people should be assessed after a couple of
postdoctoral appointments, and given a kind of national accreditation –
after which everybody would have to do their damnedest to keep them at least
in five-year stretches.’

The ‘chartered researcher’ is an idea also promulgated by the Royal
Society. In The Future of the Science Base, published last September, the
society says researchers should receive longer-term support after one or
two contracts. The support should include research expenses, for equipment
and materials, and a salary that can be switched from one institution to
another, so that universities and research institutes must compete for expertise.
Researchers should not be tenured but should receive regular reviews.

The Wellcome Trust is working on plans for a similar rolling career
programme, based on its present staircase of awards: studentships for PhD
students, five-year fellowships, senior fellowships of five years, extendable
for another five years depending on review, and principal research fellowships
offering 10 years’ support with possible extension. As yet only six of these
senior fellowships have been awarded. According to Robert Howells, Wellcome’s
project director, the intention is to construct a lifetime career: ‘This
would allow people to get increasingly senior awards – but they would have
to apply each time and show evidence of continuing productiveness and development
to get renewal, let alone promotion.’

To support such high-fliers, the Royal Society, ARMS and others say
there should be a cadre of ‘research officers’ who are competent researchers
but do not want to lead a team. The Advisory Board for the Research Councils
goes further All researchers should have regular career advice and appraisal,
it says, and masters degrees should become acceptable qualifications in
themselves, rather than a stepping stone to a PhD.

They should be considered part of the science infrastructure, argues
Campbell: ‘Some people are super at running the mass spectrometer or making
monoclonal antibodies: they have no intention of becoming team leaders and
they would accept a more modest salary in return for permanency. It’s crazy
to lose their skills each time a contract ends.’

In fact, an agreement for giving such steady contract researchers some
security and progression already exists. The deal includes bridging funds
for people between contracts, ‘portable’ salaries, and access to funds for
training and attending conferences. It is called the Good Employer Agreement,
and was signed by the Association of University Teachers and the university
vice-chancellors in October 1990.

It would cost £600 000 annually to implement, according to Tom
Wilson, the AUT’s research officer. The universities asked the research
councils for the money: the research councils said the universities, as
employers, should pay. Charities, which are substantial funders of short-term
research, have said they will implement the agreement when the universities
do.

The ABRC in its evidence to Waldegrave, seemed to support the researchers’
case. ‘We do not consider it desirable for researchers to be funded long-term
on soft money,’ it said. Then, however, it continued the collective hand-washing,
arguing that the councils and universities should fight it out between them:
‘To ensure that the research councils gain the best results from their investment
in research, they should seek assurances from HEI’s (higher education institutions)
about the effectiveness of their personnel policies.’

‘It’s a scandal,’ argues Wilson. ‘The nation spends all this money training
postgraduate researchers, wasting something like 20 years of taxpayers’
money, and then rather than pay £5000 more each so they can have
a career structure, it abandons them so they all go off and become accountants.’

Karen Gold is a freelance journalist who specialises in science and
education.

The short-term relief is unlikely to solve the long-term problem. Figures produced by the Association of University Teachers show that while the gap between lecturer salaries and those of other good graduates is Pounds sterling 5000 after five years of working, the salary gap between academic and non-academic researchers is Pounds sterling 8000 after five years.

Yet academic researchers do not put money at the top of their list of problems, according to a survey of 4000 of them commissioned by the Advisory Board for the Research Councils and carried out by the Institute of Manpower Studies (IMS) at the University of Sussex. Only 25 per cent of researchers complained about salary scales – compared with the 90 per cent who were dissatisfied with the uncertainty and lack of security in their jobs.

Contract research used to be a temporary initiation into academic life. Young postdoctoral researchers would spend three to five years gaining confidence and autonomy in supervised research and teaching, which would qualify them for an academic post.

But the IMS survey shows that what once was temporary has become permanent. The number of researchers has increased dramatically in recent years: up 71 per cent between 1976 and 1986, and up another 19 per cent between 1986 and 1989. Those researchers are now not only carrying out the additional research for outside bodies which universities, responding to financial and political pressure, increasingly need to attract. They are also filling in gaps in teaching and departmental research created by the departure of lecturers. (Between 1986 and 1989, while the number of contract researchers increased by 19 per cent, full-time university staff fell by 2 per cent.)

As they do so, they get older. The IMS survey found that in 1976 almost half of contract researchers were aged between 25 and 29; in 1986 that number had fallen to 38 per cent and now almost half were over 30. (The situation is worse in universities; the small number of polytechnic contract researchers are younger.)

They are also highly qualified and experienced: 48 per cent have completed their PhDs; 45 per cent have been employed on a previous research contract. Some 12 per cent of the total sample had started in contract research before 1980 – and the same proportion had been unemployed between contracts at least once, most of them for four months or more. As far back as 1983 the Royal Society spotted the bottleneck created as researchers competing for dwindling lecturer jobs pitted experience against youthful creativity, and introduced its University Research Fellowship Scheme, which, it said, was intended ‘for outstanding young scientists, primarily for research but holders will be encouraged to undertake some teaching’.

Today, 169 scientists have been appointed to the ‘1983 fellowships’, each lasting five years with possible subsequent three and two year renewals. Fellows are usually aged between 26 and 33 (although exceptions have been made for women whose careers were delayed by young families).

From the start, the Royal Society has made clear that these fellowships were meant to lead into jobs. Applicants must have a ‘host department’; preference is given to departments with few young staff, and heads of department have to state that the prospective fellow will be ‘a very strong candidate for a permanent post at the end of the Fellowship’.

Some have jobs already. Others have been promised them, sometimes way into the 1990s. Even those whose future are less clear are undoubtedly able to research and publish with far more security than their 11 000 colleagues whose three-year contracts – often with unfair dismissal or maternity leave waivers – rush from ill-prepared beginnings, through unsupported projects, to a final year dominated by a search for the next job. The IMS survey found that 80 per cent of contract researchers have no support staff, and 84 per cent had nothing definite to go at the end of their present contract.

The test of the fellowships of 1983 will come in 1993, when the first 30 fellows complete their maximum 10-year span. It seems possible that even some of this research elite will not find academic jobs, because there are none in their fields.

But their prospects are still better than most of their peers – and their peers recognise it. A survey in 1986 by the Association of Researchers in Medicine and Science of biology and medical departments advertising research posts found that 30 per cent of those advertised posts were not filled, and 10 per cent were readvertisments.

One third of the posts were being advertised because the previous holder had left before the end of the project. A third of the advertisers told ARMS that either the response to their advertisement had been small, or that the quality of respondents was poor. All of which makes the final IMS finding shocking but unsurprising: when 52 per cent of researchers were asked about their future plans, they said that they would leave research altogether in the next three years.

Karen Gold is a freelance journalist specialising in education.

Further reading Contract Researchers: The Human Resource. IMS report no 163, by Carol Varlaam, Pounds sterling 6 from IMS, Mantell Building, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9RF. ARMS Report on Survey on Posts for Postdoctoral Research Workers. ARMS, c/o Clinical Science Laboratories, 17th floor Tower Block, Guy’s Hospital, London Bridge, SE1 9RT. AUT – The Case for Increased Investment in Our Universities. AUT, United House, 1, Pembridge Road, London W11 3HJ.

ANDREW JEPHCOAT

Age: 32 Qualifications: BA Physics (Oxford) PhD (John Hopkins, geophysics) Career: Postdoc in Carnegie geophysical lab, Washington. Invited to set up Oxford’s Pounds sterling 500 000 high pressure states laboratory. Royal Society (1983) Research Fellow.

‘I gambled’ is Andrew Jephcoat’s explanation of why, when he arrived in the US, he changed from physics to geophysics before starting his PhD. It seems to have paid off. Jephcoat is now back in Britain in a Pounds sterling 500 000 laboratory hardly out of its cardboard box, and is charged with taking Oxford to the international forefront of research into high-pressure states.

He began working on high pressure states at Carnegie where the diamond-anvil cells and synchotron radiation can create pressures similar to those at the Earth’s core. He was invited to Oxford during a phone call in the spring of 1988.

He asked for $1.5 million to set up a laboratory basing his shopping list for the University Grants Committee in Britain on state-of-the-art laboratories in the US. This was whittled down by funding politics about Pounds sterling 500 000. It is still substantial, gained – Jephcoat regrets – at the expense of other small British teams in earth sciences which lost out when the UGC’s ‘pruned’ the subject.

Not that he has everything: the UGC, he says, has already reduced its commitment to research support from 10 per cent of start-up funds annually for five years, to 9 per cent for three years. ‘They’re moving the boundaries all the time – that’s the down side of UK research,’ he says.

There are other disadvantages: his salary (far lower than in the US) is not enough for a mortgage; his fiancee, a space scientist, cannot find a job. ‘I have mixed feelings, he says. ‘It’s an exciting position, but along with that goes the responsibility to get this thing going.’

MARGARET COLLINSON

Age: 37 Qualifications: BSc Botany (Bangor) PhD (London: palaeobotany) Career: A series of six research contracts and short-term posts in five years. Royal Society (1983) Research Fellow; term expires 1993

Margaret Collinson’s days are divided between sifting through sacks of silt from the south coast and studying the remnants by scanning electron microscopy. She classifies fossilised plants, as well as tracing the process by which they, their seeds, flowers and pollen have become fossilised since the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago.

From them she and her husband Jerry Hooker have created the first comprehensive picture of life in southern Britain between 55 and 35 million years ago – a progression from tropical forest populated by arboreal mammals to cooler, marsh vegetation supporting larger, herbivorous animals.

The work won one of the Royal Society’s 1983 fellowships in the first year of the scheme, a virtual job ticket it was thought. But in palaeobotany there are no jobs. She estimated that there have been five since her fellowship, several of them not in her main field. Seven years into her fellowship, with at most three more, she has a four-page publications list, a wealth of part-time teaching experience, a sliver of an office in King’s College, London, and no permanent position.

Her problems were exacerbated when the college merged with two others. With three biology departments combined there was no chance of filling posts when staff retired. She had been expected to be appointed to one of those jobs.

‘The prime consideration for new appointments now is how much you can earn from external sources’ she says. ‘There’s no money in what I do . . . it’s very, very difficult. I can apply to research councils and smaller bodies for topping-up money, for a research assistant or fieldwork. But there’s nowhere I can turn to, apart from academia or a museum, for a salary for me.’

HOWARD JACOBS

Age: 34 Qualifications: BA Natural Sciences (Cambridge) PhD (Glasgow: molecular biology) Career: Postdoctoral fellow, California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, US Royal Society Shell Research Fellow, then 1983 Fellow. Probable Glasgow University lectureship 1994

Howard Jacobs uses molecular biology techniques to study the mitochondria of sea urchin embryos. Mitochondria are subcellular organelles that carry their own genes. He wants to know how they cooperate with parallel DNA in the chromosomes in the nuclei of cells. He is also intrigued by the idea that invading bacteria may have carried in these ‘extra’ genes some 15 million years.

Neither subject is apparently instantly applicable. It is, he says, ‘pure science’, what he always intended to do since, as an undergraduate, he assumed that ‘academia was a self-perpetuating system and you never had to get a real job. Which is very much a bygone age now’.

In fact, he has a real academic job on offer: a lectureship at Glasgow when his five-year Royal Society fellowship ends. With no family or dependents, he says he hopes not to take it: ‘soft money’, in the form of research grants, would enable him to pursue his research without having to do much teaching and departmental administration.

At present he can, as he has just done, spend six months working hard at the laboratory bench with almost no interruption. Soft money would keep him there, as well as being ‘hugely to the advantage of the department’, he says.

Eventually he imagines himself looking for a senior fellowship from the Royal Society or a research professorship. ‘That would be the logical development of my career. I’ve never had to do work that was more marketable. I wouldn’t want to do it. I think if I wasn’t able to do what I am doing I would probably get out of science.

MAX WALLIS

Age: 48 Qualifications: BA Maths (Cambridge) PhD (Manchester: astronomy) Career: Maths lecturer, Manchester University. Resigned to do space science research abroad. Temporary research contracts for 18 years. Honorary Research Fellow at University College Cardiff. Unpaid

If space science had taken off in Britain, Max Wallis’s career would have taken off with it. That still seemed a possibility when in 1970 he resigned from a lectureship at the University of Manchester to get wider experience in astronomy labs in Sweden and France. He returned after two years to Oxford and then Cardiff, specialising in comet observation, in particular, theoretical calculations for the instruments used in Europe’s GIOTTO mission to Halley’s Comet.

In the early 1980s, when the government established the British National Space Centre, prospects for space research seemed brighter. Wallis had short-term contracts with the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory and the University of Kent, waiting for the expansion that never came.

He also applied for lectureships, but at over 35 was too old to be eligible for the universities’ ‘New Blood’ scheme which comprised almost all the vacancies. Colleagues in Europe, particularly collaborators on GIOTTO, could not believe he did not have a post with tenure, he says.

The unpaid fellowship Cardiff granted him in 1983 gave him computing, office and travel support, but no salary. It also meant he could supervise and examine research students, which produced the income he needed to support his family.

Currently between contracts, he says he exists on ‘bits of money coming in here and there’. His only hope is the high) profile successor to space science: he and Cardiff colleagues are bidding for money to measure the contribution of aerosol particles in the stratosphere to global warming.

DICK WORLEY

Age: 42 Qualifications: BSc Science (London) PhD (University of East Anglia: endcrinology) Career: Lab technician, then mature student 12, years contract research; final salary Pounds sterling 19,310. Unemployed. Retrained as health and safety office: salary Pounds sterling 10 509.

Dick Worley spent 23 years of his life in laboratories. He went into one straight from school and took his first degree part-time while working as a technician. A year ago he led a team of three at the University of Bristol, as he approached the end of his fourth consecutive contract from the Medical Research Council.

Much of that year, which should have been devoted to investigating the effect of the hormone oxytocin on the production of sperm, was actually spent applying for grants to continue work related to male infertility. He was also following his usual ‘insurance policy’ of applying for one non-research job. Three years before, at the end of his previous research contract, he had been offered a further education college lectureship. His MRC grant came through just in time for him to refuse.

His family was in a state of uncertainty: ‘It was terribly stressful’ he says. ‘You are always thinking ‘Will we have to sell the house? Will the children have to change school?’ Then the news came that the MRC would not renew the grant. He was unemployed for three months before retraining as a factory safety inspector at a much lower salary. As far as he knows, the research into oxytocin has ceased: ‘When I started in science, if you had the enthusiasm and talent and you could get the qualifications, then that was it. You thought you would get a university lectureship after a couple of research contracts and progress from there. . . Now there’s no possibility of me going back. The work I was doing was worth continuing. It just seems so wasteful.’

LYNDSAY RADNEDGE

Age: 29 Qualifications: BSc microbiology (Surrey University) PhD (London; genetic engineering) Career: London postdoc job ended early when money ran out. Rejected for permanent lectureships. Leaving Britain for research contract in US.

Towards the end of her PhD investigating DNA repair in E. coli, Lyndsay Radnedge applied for, and won, a postdoctoral research job, joining a team at University College, London.

The UCL project was funded by the ‘Antibiotic Club’, a consortium of pharmaceuticals companies, government and the Science and Engineering Research Council, which contributed Pounds sterling 1.5 million into the next generation of antibiotics. Radnedge was one of two researchers cloning DNA into streptomyces plasmids, on whose stability the effectiveness of antibiotics depends.

Shortly after joining, she and her colleagues had their 27th birthdays, entitling them to an extra pay increment. They asked the college for it, it never arrived. Their supervisors applied to the Antibiotic Club for the extra Pounds sterling 11 000. They were turned down. After more than a year of letters, phone calls, and filling in forms, Lyndsay was informed that because of her extra increment the project would end, incomplete, four months early. Postgraduate students would finish off the work. She would be unemployed.

She applied for three lectureships and was rejected. She saw a postdoctoral job advertised at the American National Cancer Institute in Maryland, US – near friends she intended to visit anyway. She sent the laboratory a CV and asked to visit.

‘I was whizzed around the lab trying not to look too impressed,’ she says; ‘It was better than anything I had ever seen. I never had a technician at UCL, for instance. It’s another short-term job, and it’s at the same level. But it’s an opportunity to go to a lab with great facilities – and they offered me a job straightaway.’