Photovoltaic cells turn sunlight directly into electricity. Cells made
from slices of semiconducting crystals such as silicon are the most efficient:
some convert more than 20 per cent of the energy of sunlight into electrical
power. But these cells are very expensive, and so have mostly been limited
to specialist uses such as powering satellites, communications equipment
in remote areas and pocket calculators.

Cells can be made more cheaply using noncrystalline, amorphous semiconductors,
but they are much less efficient at turning sunlight into electricity. Canon
claims its new technique produces cells more cheaply than other methods,
and that they are more efficient than other amorphous cells.

In 1984, Canon started using amorphous silicon as a coating on the photosensitive
drums of its copying machines. To lay down the coating, it allows silicon
vapour to condense on the metal. The resulting material is then enclosed
in plastic.

To make solar cells, Canon sandwiches a layer of amorphous silicon between
two layers of amorphous silicon germanium. Canon claims that its deposition
process is 10 times as fast as conventional techniques and that the cells
have an efficiency of around 12 per cent.

A key problem with solar cells is that they only capture photons of
certain wavelengths. Sandwich structures such as Canon’s can mop up more
photons as the sunlight passes from one layer to another because different
semiconductors absorb light of different wavelengths.

One alternative manufacturing approach, adopted by Siemens at its solar
cell plant at Putzbrunn near Munich, is to deposit the semiconductor film
from an ionised plasma rather than a vapour.

In Japan, the solar energy programme of the government’s New Energy
and Industrial Technology Development Organisation is aiming to achieve
a 12 per cent conversion efficiency for amorphous silicon by the end of
March 1993. Like Canon, Sanyo recently claimed to have reached this target,
but the company has no immediate plans to go into production.

Canon intends to start manufacturing solar cells by 1994 in California.
By 1997 it hopes to produce cells at a cost of $2 per watt of electric
power produced. During the 1980s, the cost of cells fell from $15 per watt
to around $4.5 per watt.

Twenty years ago, you could talk about H. G. Wells without having to
describe what the writer achieved during his lifetime. Today, as he sinks
into history, all that remains is the occasional reference to his better
known works of science fiction, or ‘scientific romances’, as he labelled
them.

The Invisible Man recently resurfaced as a play. Apart from this work,
The Time Machine, War of the Worlds and First Men On the Moon, few of the
150 other books, pamphlets and other publications that Wells wrote are read
today. From time to time, someone will comment on his prescience in forecasting
the dreadful effects of nuclear weapons in The World Set Free, which, says
Michael Coren, shows that ‘Wells clearly understood the potential, and reality,
of nuclear capability quite brilliantly’. The book, though, remains out
of print.

One or two of Wells’s ‘social’ novels lurch back into print from time
to time, most notably The History of Mr Polly and Kipps. But his ‘philosophical’
and political works, or any of his fiction written much after 1910, remain
all but forgotten and unread.

That being so, why should someone come in and try to bash the old boy’s
reputation to pieces? Or, as Michael Coren would see it, put the record
straight. What record? What reputation?

Coren tells us: ‘Conventional literary and political history depicts
H. G. Wells as being unerringly on the side of the angels.’ In his prelude,
Coren says it ‘is my belief that Wells’ influence on his own age, and his
legacy to those ages to come, were, taken as a whole, pernicious and destructive.’
Coren is unconvincing. His argument seems to rest on just half a dozen pages.

The first half of The Invisible Man is a concise but reasonably complete
history of a man who escaped a lower middle class, or upper working class,
fate. The sort of person who might all too easily have ended up as a clerk
in an insurance company or as the draper’s assistant of Wells’s early days,
a ‘profession’ he used more than once in his own fiction. Wells survived
this fate thanks to a dedicated teacher, and to a scholarship, won in an
age when governments saw education as a way out of poverty and unemployment,
that took him to what was to become Imperial College.

As Wells himself described his origins: ‘Wells was the son of a bankrupt
father, a gardener and professional bowler who had taken to business and
failed, and of a mother who consequently had to return to the domestic service
in which she had begun her career after the bankruptcy of her father .
. .’

Wells became ‘one of the most prolific of the ‘literary hacks’ ‘ of
his time, as he put it in 1943, in his own ‘auto-obituary’. Apart from a
severe case of self-importance, Wells’s biggest crime seems to have been
to mistreat his wife and some of his girlfriends, an area of the author’s
life that has been aired many times before. Today such behaviour might lose
him his job as a cabinet minister but in a writer it would go unremarked,
if not condoned. It was hardly a punishable offence, even in the first quarter
of the 20th century.

Wells was at his best when he turned to science, either in search of
ideas for his fiction, or in his analysis of how science could influence
society. Coren rarely gets around to this aspect of Wells, apart from the
remarks on nuclear power and the strange episode of Hilaire Belloc, fighting
back against the inexorable rise of evolution by attempting to shoot down
Wells’s treatment of the topic in The Outline of History.

Wells described this book as ‘an attempt to tell, truly and clearly,
in one continuous narrative, the whole story of life and mankind so far
as it is known today’. A runaway success, the fat book sold two million
copies in 15 years, which explains why it crops up so often in second hand
bookshops. Belloc did not like its espousal of evolution. Coren presents
this argument, and other disputes that engaged Wells’s attention, as a clash
of two literary titans. In reality it was a battle, albeit it a significant
skirmish, in a war over modern biology and its implications for religion.

Apart from his attacks on Wells, which, as in the case of the author’s
alleged antisemitism, Coren builds on scraps of evidence, all but ignoring
the vast body of the author’s work, much of which is described in some detail
but without much critical insight, this biography unearths little new material.
It is not, though, a rehash of past material. Coren has put in plenty of
research, although some is through suspect devices such as interviews with
known haters of Wells and his works.

Coren reinvents Wells through modern eyes. He makes far too little attempt
to interpret his evidence against Wells in the light of the time when it
was current. For example, antisemitism, which Coren has to work hard to
heap upon Wells in the half-a-dozen pages that seem to be the justification
for the biography’s excoriation of the author, was all too common when
he was writing. The fact that Wells was less than perfect hardly makes his
influence ‘pernicious and destructive’.

In focusing on people and Wells’s alleged personality faults and ignoring
most of his ideas, Coren falls in with most earlier biographers. In particular,
few have bothered to consider the writer’s use of science, or his influence,
if any, on the area. And yet throughout his life Wells insisted, perhaps
stretching a point, that he was a scientist.

It would be silly to berate Coren for the book that he did not write.
This is a no-frills biography that also offers a chance to find out a bit
about the work of Wells without having to go through the chore of reading
it.

Perhaps 1996, when copyright finally lapses on the work of H. G. Wells,
might be an appropriate time for something more gratifying that the sight
of publishers rushing to make a quick buck. Perhaps someone will write a
reasoned assessment of this jumped-up scientist’s role in making his subject
a fashionable topic for the chattering classes of his day.

Michael Kenward is a science writer.

* * *

The Invisible Man, Pan Books, pp 102, £3.99 pbk

The Time Machine, Everymans Library/Dent, pp 116 , £2.50/Pan,
pp 128, £3.99

War of the Worlds, Pan, pp 192, £3.99

Restructuring of the scientific enterprise must include elements that
set out to open up the endeavours of scientists to a wider audience. This
does not mean tax concessions to all freelance science writers; nor getting
science onto television, or scientists as characters in Eldorado. Such role
models might entertain, but they do little to drum the message into the
often thick heads of Britain’s captains of industry.

Walter Bodmer sums up what he thinks should be the scope of the White
Paper’s remit in his letter accompanying one submission to Waldegrave. Bodmer,
the current chairman of the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science
(COPUS), says that the White Paper should give ‘particular attention to
the means of improving public understanding and awareness of science and
technology’. By this COPUS means the ‘meeting of the nation’s needs, in
employment, decision-making and leisure, for scientific and technological
information through formal and informal education, through actions of the
scientific communities, through media information, and through individual
and local activity’.

While this assessment of the extent of the problem is undeniably correct,
Bodmer would doubtless agree that the White Paper really cannot do everything.
Just as COPUS itself wisely steers clear of much that goes on in the educational
world, even though that is where the antiscience rot sets in, Waldegrave
can hardly sort out the problems of Britain’s schools in a document devoted
to the state of science.

The main thrust of COPUS’s submission is that the Office of Public Service
and Science should identify the public understanding of science as ‘an area
of concern in its own right’ and should initiate ‘a major programme’. The
committee was set up essentially by the Royal Society, the British Association
for the Advancement of Science and the Royal Institution in 1986. The Royal
Society and the British Association are key players, and the Science Museum
is a stalwart supporter. But the Royal Institution, sadly, does not seem
to have risen to the challenge with quite the same imagination, vigour and
enthusiasm.

With limited resources, COPUS has achieved a great deal, or rather it
has provided a focus for its three main players to come up with a sometimes
bewildering array of events, initiatives, programmes and prizes. Sometimes
they have given added impetus to existing programmes by bringing them under
the umbrella of COPUS. Occasionally they have coaxed companies to chip in
with handsome sponsorship, as in the case of Rhone Poulenc’s support for
the Science Book Prizes.

Almost as important as new ventures have been moves to change attitudes.
In this, the Royal Society itself has been most innovative. The body nearest
to the scientific chalkface, it could easily have been the stuffiest and
least flexible organisation of the lot. Thanks partly to the enthusiasm
of past president George Porter, the society has done a lot to bang it into
the heads of scientists that it is in their interest to encourage the public
understanding of science.

The Faraday Medal is one weapon that the society has wielded to hammer
home this message. It does not reward the year’s best widget, or most mind-blowing
theory. It recognises the scientist who has done the most to forward the
cause of public understanding over the year. This is important because it
cocks a snook at the stuffy and small-minded individuals who look down their
noses and start bitchy common-room gossip about scientists who stick their
heads above the parapet.

Nearly as important as the medal is the society’s encouragement to those
on the receiving line of its research fellowships to ‘think public understanding’
when they report their results. It is not clear that the society has achieved
as much as it would like here, but if every research grant from every organisation
were to carry a similar requirement, we might get somewhere. After all,
the taxpayers foot the bill for most academic research, why can’t scientists
tell us, in words that we can understand, what they have done with our money?

Other sponsors of research should emulate the Royal Society. To pick
on just one victim, perhaps because other worries have weighed it down the
Science and Engineering Research Council has not taken up the cause of public
understanding as vigorously as it might. Word, or Bodmer’s letter to Waldegrave,
has it that the SERC ‘has agreed a substantial programme of activities’.
And about time too. Now let’s see some imaginative schemes.

The SERC really needs to be more vigorous if it is to avoid accusations
of elitism and caring only about its own turf. In particular, the council
could do more to further its cause with industry. Buried in its various
committees there are some excellent programmes of research that are challenging
and industrially relevant. The people who run these endeavours seem to receive
less help than they deserve in spreading the word to industry. Instead of
begrudging this money, those on the more esoteric fringes should hold up
those ‘useful’ activities as examples of where science takes us. Persuade
companies that work on lasers for industry is a good thing, for example,
and they might lean on their friends in government to support particle physics.
Such outside backing will carry more weight than any special pleading from
within.

Which brings us to a key issue for work on the public understanding
of science. Industrial research and development is not really the mainstream
of the activities of the Royal Society, and yet it does as much as can be
expected of it to encourage this sector of the research enterprise. COPUS
has yet to come to grips with this particular constituency. Its paper to
Waldegrave calls for an increase of £1 million per year for work
on the public understanding of science. As its paper admits, COPUS’s plans
for spending the money cover pretty well the same territory as past work,
with talk of new initiatives aimed at the media, civil service, industry,
education and Parliament.

Industry and education belong at the head of the queue. The rest are
either icing on the cake or already the subject of new initiatives that
need time to settle down. In particular, the Parliamentary Office of Science
and Technology has achieved a great deal in its short life. It is now making
the transition to receiving funds from Parliament. COPUS would do well to
leave Parliament to POST for the time being at least.

Industry is particularly important; not just because it needs to get
its scientific act together but because it is also a way of getting at
a large, albeit shrinking, chunk of the general public, the workforce. Industry
also needs to worry about how it will be able to satisfy its need for an
educated workforce. A technically literate populace will also have a better
understanding of industrial realities.

Just as industry and the uses of R&D must be key components of the
White Paper, it also has to address attitudes to research in industry.
Britain cannot wait for a generation of technically literate managers to
rise to the top of the heap and replace the accountants and equally flaky
professionals who often run industry.

Michael Kenward is now a freelance science writer, but whiled away the
1980s editing 91av trying to improve the public understanding
of science. He was also one of the first members of the Committee on the
Public Understanding of Science.

The electronics industry has used CFCs for years. These solvents are
chemically inert and can remove grime from printed circuit boards without
affecting their electronic performance. Boards washed with CFCs dry easily,
without having to be heated. Copper circuits can oxidise at the temperatures
needed to dry circuits washed in water.

When electronics companies realised that concerns about the ozone layer
would deprive them of CFCs, they started to look for substitutes – usually
other organic solvents, such as HCFCs.

Phil Hamilton, ICL’s process technology manager at Kidsgrove, rejected
this approach because HCFCs still damage the ozone layer and started to
look at water-based cleaning, a route taken by other electronics companies,
including IBM.

The manufacture of printed circuit boards involves photographic processes
that transfer the circuit pattern to the board, followed by etching with
solvents to remove excess material. Until recently, the industry used chlorinated
solvents. However, before ICL could abandon CFCs, it had to develop an alternative
process chemistry, with soldering systems and fluxes that washed off in
water, rather than CFCs.

ICL has found that boards made with the water-based chemistry are better
than circuits made with CFC solvents. Circuits ‘grown’ in solvents spread
out across the surface as well as down into the board. However, they spread
less in the new process so a circuit board can contain 25 per cent more
connections, allowing designers to pack more components on to a board.

Circuits are even cleaner when washed in water. Contamination can encourage
short circuits to grow on the surface of a board. Water washing halves the
surface contamination, making it easier for ICL to meet tougher military
specifications. An additive in the water prevents the copper from oxidising
during drying.

Water cleaning also pays for itself. ICL spent £1 million on
water washing machines and processes in its plant. These cut the company’s
solvents bill by £290 000 a year. In 1988, when Hamilton started
his work, ICL’s production line used 35 tonnes of CFCs a year. In all, Kidsgrove
consumed some 250 tonnes of chlorinated hydrocarbons a year. Now that water
has replaced the organic solvents the cost of filling just one tank has
fallen from £500 to 50 pence.

The drawback of water cleaning is that ICL now consumes four times as
much water as it did when washing with hydrocarbon solvents, with a water
bill of £120 000 a year.

Uncertainties over patent rights and safety regulations are deterring investors from putting money into bio-technology companies. Venture capital organisations in Europe invested £62 million in biotechnology in 1991, down from £101 million in 1989, according to figures published last week by the European Venture Capital Association and KPMG, the management consultancy firm. In Britain, venture capitalists invested £15 million in biotechnology last year, down from £35 million in 1989.

Garry Watts, KPMG’s biotechnology specialist, describes the area as ‘potentially a very high reward industry’. But the patent situation in Europe is ‘a bloody muddle’, says Watts, who believes that the European biotechnology industry is under pressure from the Far East, where safety regulations are not as strict.

Innovators wanting to launch new companies in any area of high technology are finding it increasingly difficult to raise venture capital. KPMG’s report Venture Capital in Europe, shows that the amount of money invested in high technology has declined by 22 per cent over the past two years, from a peak of £693 million in 1989.

While the amount of venture capital invested in Europe increased from £2888 million in 1990 to £3242 million last year, less of the money went into high-technology companies. Computer-related technologies are the most popular investments for venture capital funds in high technology. They account for around a third of the funds invested in hi-tech ventures over the past five years. Other areas of electronics are the next most popular investment.

John Hustler, head of venture capital at KPMG, says that venture capital organisations have moved away from investing in new companies and high technology. They now put more money into management buy-outs and expansion schemes. Hustler believes that this is partly because venture capital organisations do not have enough people with the technical expertise to assess high-technology proposals.

The growth of the European venture capital business also makes it harder for investors to analyse proposals from small companies, the source of most hi-tech projects. ‘The industry needs ever more people to deal with the flood of money,’ says Hustler. Small companies also need more ‘hand holding’ on the part of the venture capitalists.

Hustler says that universities turn increasingly to venture capital organisations when they want to commercialise their research. But academics rarely have the makings of successful entrepreneurs. ‘It is difficult enough to teach managers in multinational companies to become entrepreneurs, let alone academics,’ he says.

One sign of the universities’ growing interest in commercialisation is the increase in their patent activities in biotechnology, says Watts. Andrew Newland, who is responsible for ’emerging technologies’ at KPMG, says that the universities ‘have a long way to go before they are professional at commercial exploitation. I am not in favour of academics becoming entrepreneurs, but we need a better interface between them and the innovators.’

One option that KPMG is developing with some universities is for them to establish their own companies to bring their products to market, perhaps partly owned by a commercial organisation. The exploitation company would ferret out promising research in the university and act as a ‘marriage broker’, bringing academic researchers into contact with entrepreneurs who would then, if appropriate, sell the idea to venture capital funds.

Another year, another short list. We will soon know which lucky author
has won a cheque for £10 000 for the best science book published
in Britain last year. As this is the fifth round of the Council for the
Public Understanding of Science science book prizes, it is worth looking
at the event as well as the books that have exercised the judges.

The biggest change in the five years has been the arrival of a commercial
sponsor. That £10 000 cheque comes from the corporate coffers of
Rhone-Poulenc, the chemicals company. Clearly someone sees the prize’s publicity
potential. A tenfold increase in the value of the prize has yet to deliver
a commensurate increase in publicity for the event, but the signs are there.
The column inches given over to the books and the event have risen steadily
over the years. Perhaps newspapers will pay even more attention this year
as science and religion clash in their pages.

Progress has been slower on other fronts. Beyond raising the profile
of science books written for a wider audience, another objective of the
COPUS prize was to persuade publishers and booksellers, especially booksellers,
to pay attention to this neglected genre.

Some publishers have started to note the prize, but the pattern is patchy.
For example, when the Reviews Editor sought copies of this year’s short
list for the annual roundup, only a half of the books turned up. (The COPUS
secretariat at the Royal Society lent me its spare set.)

Bookshops have been even less responsive to the prize. My furtive forays
into bookshops have yet to reveal one using the short list to try to shift
books. with the honourable exception of the bookshop at the Science Museum,
the first sponsor of the prize. Even then you have to know what you are
looking for: the bookshop staff received nothing in the way of display material
to alert the passing throng.

Apathy in the book trade comes as no surprise. Many bookshops devote
more shelf room to astrology, ‘natural healing’ and other carbuncles on
the rear end of science than they do to the real thing. Few have a scientifically
literate staff. Any who tried to read Stephen Hawking will have been put
off science books for life. (One of the many correct choices that the judges
of the COPUS prize have made over the past five years was to pass over this
particular volume of impenetrable mysticism.)

One bright spot on the marketing front this year was a mail order advertisement
in the Times Higher Education Supplement, but not, sadly, 91av,
pushing the whole short list.

So much for the evolution of the prizes, what about the books? Evolution
is the name of the game this year. Five of the six books are heavily into
the subject. (You could even include the sixth, of which more later.) Evolution
has already delivered two winners in the short history of the prize, so
you would have thought that there was little new to say on the subject.
In many cases, this is so. But as you would expect of a short list drawn
from 68 entries, the writing puts these books ahead of the rest of the pack.

The natural place to start is with the massive biography of Charles
Darwin. The authors of Darwin, Adrian Desmond and James Moore, do not endear
themselves with their dismissal, in the introduction, of previous biographies
as ‘curiously bloodless affairs’ that ‘have broken little new ground’. This
is one of those ‘everything and the kitchen sink’ biographies, hardly new
ground. The authors leave no laundry list unread. While this approach ensures
that we understand the times in which Darwin worked, you have to dig deep
to find a coherent account of Darwin’s contribution to science. This is
no criticism, of a biography. A science book is another matter. And that
should be the yardstick when judging the book’s claims as a prize winner.
This book has already made its mark, by winning the James Black Tait Memorial
Prize, beating those huge volumes on the lives of literati whose impact
on the world looks like that of an ant alongside Darwin’s revolution.

A throwaway comment also made me instantly suspicious of another of
this year’s short list. In his introduction to Fossils by Niles Eldridge,
Stephen Jay Gould, who won last year’s prize with his excellent book Wonderful
Life, defended his colleague from accusations that Eldridge had written
a coffee-table book. Well, this certainly has all the hallmarks of the genre
with its many glossy colour pictures and an arty layout, with lots of white
space. But read the book and you quickly see that Gould has a point. The
text is far more than decoration. It is one scientist’s account of his own
role, and that of Gould and other contemporaries, in the development of
theories of evolution. As Eldridge says, evolution ‘is an idea, a picture
that explains why there is a pattern of similarity interlinking all forms
of life, living and extinct’. But the idea is only the beginning. Eldridge
has been a leading player in putting flesh on the bones, in understanding
the pace and mechanisms of evolution, in his case by trying to understand
the importance of extinctions.

Jared Diamond has come up with a book, The Rise and Fall of the Third
Chimpanzee, from the usual mould. It has a conventional balance of science,
people and illustration. He puts mankind, the third chimpanzee, well and
truly at centre stage, drawing lessons from the studies of other animals
to illuminate our own behaviour. I like books that bash perceived wisdom.
Diamond is particularly good at demolishing the myth that hunter-gatherer
societies lived in harmony with their environment. Some, the Maoris of New
Zealand for example, did a pretty good job at despatching species to extinction.
Another good read on the evolution game, this account is let down a little
by the writing. It reads like an extended scientific paper in which the
author’s concession to a wider audience has been to excise ‘difficult’ words.
Long passive sentences, and too many references to what ‘we shall see in
Chapter X’ or ‘as we saw in Chapter Y’, do not speed the eye across the
page and along with the argument.

In Dawn of the Millennium, Eric Harth also ponders on the evolution
of mankind. Transparent writing – neither a joy nor a horror to read – and
an interesting thesis, that our genetic heritage is at odds with the evolution
of consciousness, the attribute that sets humans apart from the rest of
the animals, put this in the lead among the ‘straight’ texts on evolution.
It deserves to be read by anyone following the current science and religion
debates.

Last, but by no means least, in the evolution game we have Last Animals
at the Zoo, by Colin Tudge. Here evolution plays a supporting role, rather
than the lead. Tudge explains why zoos are essential if evolution is not
to come to an end for many species. The knitted muesli brigade of animal
lovers who hate people equate zoos with concentration camps. Tudge puts
the lie to this tosh. He explains why, without zoos, too many animals will
join the dodo. He tells us why zoos are no longer the prisons they once
were. And he does so in a style that shows up the academic origins of the
other books. Tudge drip feeds you with science. You’ve read it, enjoyed
it, even understood it, and passed on to the next bit before you have had
a chance to think of it as ‘difficult’. I own up to knowing Tudge for longer
than he might care to remember. But my natural inclination is to bend over
backwards in the other direction to discount personal considerations, so
I can only say that I will be most upset, but not, sadly, very surprised,
if this book does not bring home the bacon.

I have another reason for favouring Tudge. He is not an American. Or,
to put it less provocatively, he is British. I am not disappointed by the
facility with which American scientists write about science: I am disappointed
that their British colleagues are so dismal at it. Were I setting the rules
for this competition, I would look for some way to restrict it to books
published first in Britain. On that count, only two of this year’s books
would qualify.

Alongside Tudge there would be The Natural History of the Universe,
by Colin A. Ronan. Another coffee-table book, a good example of the art
of the packager, this deals with that other religion masquerading as science,
the Universe and its evolution. With illustrations of sometimes dubious
relevance, and a text that is workmanlike rather than a delight to read,
Ronan has written more of a collection of separate essays than a coherent
narrative. This is yet another good overview of our understanding of the
Universe. But these appear regularly. Well worth reading, but not, to my
mind, good enough to knock Tudge off of the podium.

Michael Kenward is a science writer who is thinking of writing his second
book in 20 years.

* * *

Darwin by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Michael Joseph, pp 771, £20

Fossils by Niles Eldridge, Aurum Press, pp 240, £29.95 The Rise
and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond, Hutchison Radius, pp
330, £16.99

Dawn of the Millennium by Eric Harth, Penguin, pp 208, £5.99
pbk

Last Animals at the Zoo by Colin Tudge, Hutchison Radius, pp 266, £16.99

The Natural History of the Universe by Colin A. Ronan, Transworld, pp
212, £20

In March, the DTI invited commercial research organisations and higher
education institutions to submit proposals for pilot schemes in which graduates
would work towards a higher degree while undertaking industrial research.
The move was a response to the report of the working group on innovation
set up by John Fairclough, head of the Engineering Council. That report
called for the creation of ‘Faraday centres’, based on the German Fraunhofer
institutes (‘British innovation, German style’, 91av, 21 March).

The DTI, which intends to establish five trials, invited all universities
and polytechnics in Britain and more than a hundred research organisations
to submit bids; 58 responded. The department expects to announce the ‘winners’
before the end of May.

Neither the Fairclough report nor the government laid down a detailed
blueprint for Faraday centres. There is some concern at the DTI that its
trials are being seen as the model for future centres.

Some of the organisations that submitted bids certainly see the trial
in this way. This is why ERA Technology, a research organisation that specialises
in electrotechnology, submitted a proposal that questioned the wisdom of
tying research organisations to a single academic institution. ‘We cannot
find a single (institution) that has the required level of excellence in
all the fields we want to work in,’ says Michael Withers, managing director
of ERA.

Bob Whelan, director of the Centre for Exploitation of Science and Technology,
who championed the introduction of the Fraunhofer concept in Britain, agrees
that it could be limiting to restrict collaboration to ‘one-on-one’ arrangements.
But he also believes that the aim should be to produce ‘strong couplings’
rather than ‘diffuse relationships’ between organisations.

Once the scheme begins, the DTI says students will receive grants of
£7000, and higher education institutes will receive £2500 per
student from the Science and Engineering Research Council to cover their
costs. Whether participating research organisations will receive government
money is still open to question. But Withers denies that what the companies
will get out of it is a ‘free pair of hands’. ‘Students would displace engineers
who would bring in £50 000 a year turnover,’ he says.

The Association of Independent Research and Technology Organisations
(AIRTO) responded to Fairclough’s report last week. It argues that higher
education institutions and their spin-off companies should not be eligible
as industrial partners in the centre. Nor should government-owned laboratories
that have been granted agency status.

AIRTO also says that research organisations should be able to do research
of their own choosing. Companies commission mostly short-term projects,
making it difficult for research organisations to carry out strategic R&D.
For this reason, AIRTO welcomes Fairclough’s statement that untargeted government
funding is vital if these organisations ‘are to be able to pursue their
function of anticipating the market needs of their customers’.

Disclaimers done, let battle commence.

Too many academics are an organisational disaster. Calls go unanswered,
faxes fade before anyone bothers to read them, office hours are a joke.
When it comes to deadlines, journalists may have made me prematurely grey
with their nonchalant disregard for the progress of time, but beside the
average academic, writers are as reliable as the appearance of Halley’s
Comet. Don’t take my word for it. Aston University, in its newsletter, recently
went so far as to chastise ‘phone hogs, people who leave their telephones
off the hook for hours, even days, on end, disrupting business and making
the job of the switchboard operators impossible’.

It wasn’t the sob story from Aston that alerted me to academic disorder.
This harangue was actually sparked off by a recent project that required
me to track down about a dozen university researchers. Five weeks later,
numerous telephone calls, and not a few faxes had failed to smoke out some
of the victims.

August, when I started my quest, is, I know, the month of holidays,
but academics do try to kid the world that, with such distractions as students
out of the way, this is when they do their most productive research. And
even if they aren’t available, someone somewhere should be able to respond.
In reality it is as if some universities had shut for a month.

Don’t take my word for it. I recently went to a conference where a posse
of academics were, among other things, trying to persuade industry that
it cannot afford to ignore their research. As this was supposed to be a
showcase, the shrewd organiser of the meeting asked someone from the other
side to tell the academics where to get off.

The speaker, who will, like the ‘collaborators’ she excoriated, remain
nameless beyond saying that she was in the software business, and had also
‘lost’ researchers. This corporate collaborator suddenly lost contact with
researchers who were supposed to be a part of a joint project. Worse than
that, the disappearance was unannounced. ‘If you want to go on holiday in
August, tell us,’ she pleaded.

This eager soul had innocently embarked on four attempts to collaborate
with academics. All had come to grief for various reasons, one of which
was the gulf in perceptions on both sides. Academics want corporate money,
but they seem to be reluctant to deliver something that could help a company
to make money.

What on earth do academics think companies exist for? Businesses may
be kind to pets and sponsor green events, but profit is the name of the
game. Our nameless victim had entered one project with the under-standing
that she would get a prototype software package that she could turn into
a product. One day her academic collaborationist said, as if in disbelief,
‘You want to sell this stuff?’

‘That’s when I knew I had trouble,’ our casualty told her audience.

It turned out that the researcher thought that he had been hired to
write a few simple trial routines and then to deliver a proposal. I have
news for academics who would like to try this one: you write proposals at
your own expense.

Another project should have put this poor soul off academics for life.
It involved hiring two researchers. ‘We were told that they had a lot of
expertise in knowledge engineering. I knew nothing about the subject so
I went out and bought a book. One day they came in to see me, and one of
them said, ‘I see that you are reading that book.’ I told him where I was.
He was a chapter behind me and knew less about the subject than I did.’

Despite this grisly catalogue of disasters, the company concerned hasn’t
given up. She wasn’t even booed off stage by the assembled leading lights
in the academic community; her diatribe provoked an embarrassed silence.

It probably didn’t help the academics’ case when the organiser of the
event, who happens to have something like £7 million a year to dispense
to the country’s universities and polytechnics, kicked off the meeting.
He apologised for a few of the organisational problems that some of his
contributors had caused. His problems included the researcher who missed
a deadline. ‘You didn’t put the date on the first page of the letter,’ this
supposedly intelligent person whined. ‘Don’t you read the second page of
letters?’ the victim asked.

Then there was the unavailable envelope. Like many conferences, this
one had a poster session. Delegates were given plenty of warning, and strict
specifications for the size of their posters. One contributor failed to
deliver on time, saying: ‘We don’t have any A3 envelopes.’

All of this adds up to a rotten advertisement for collaboration. Companies
are not perfect, some of them are far from it, but they would soon go out
of business if the lack of an A3 envelope, or the failure to read page 2,
got in the way.

I wouldn’t want to leave academics feeling totally unloved, so let me
say in their defence that few academics have the benefit of secretarial
support. And government cuts have chomped large lumps off the infrastructure
at many universities. But that if academics do want industry to put some
work in their direction they have to find some way around these problems.
Like the rest of us, more professors will have to learn how to use a word
processor and to deal with telephone calls. The next time they leave the
phone off the hook for the morning, it might just prevent someone from getting
through with an offer to build a shiny new laboratory.