Letter: Letters: Second leg needed

From JOHN MULVEY

Readers of Tam Dalyell’s Thistle Diary (30 May) may well have wondered
how, given the failure of the research councils to fund Frank Watt’s interdisciplinary
research, Frank nevertheless has been able to establish a scanning proton
microprobe (SPM) facility which leads the world in its field. Among other
successes, it so impressed scientists at the Louvre museum in Paris that
they now have one of their own (Technology, 4 July).

As a senior member of the Oxford Nuclear Physics Department in 1986
when the critical decision was taken, I know the answer: dual support was
still, just, alive. Although University Grants Committee research funds
for the department were being cut, it was agreed Frank Watt should approach
the Wellcome Trust for the cost of the 2 MeV proton accelerator he needed,
with the department underwriting the other costs – including salaries –
for his small group. There is no possible shadow of a doubt that were the
same decision faced today the department’s answer to Frank would be ‘No’.

The point missed by Tam Dalyell, and also by William Waldegrave as reported
in Thistle Diary (11 July), is that whatever improvements are made in the
operation of research council peer review, there will still be failures
of the kind which nearly stopped Frank Watt in 1986. The restoration of
a strong second leg of dual support, independent of the central research
council committee structure, putting funds at the disposal of local managements
able to judge ability and potential – especially for interdisciplinary,
speculative, or non-fashionable areas of research – is essential for the
vitality of British academic science.

Finally, your reporter should have noted that Oxford Microbeam, who
designed and built the high precision magnetic lenses at the heart of the
Louvre’s ‘arty accelerator’, are Frank Watt and his colleague Geoff Grime.

John Mulvey Save British Science Oxford