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Scientists need freedom to create Planck Club for this era
From Prof Donald Braben and others
Financial Times (U.K.)

June 2, 2008

Sir,

We the undersigned scientists write to draw attention to a neglected aspect of the current economic crisis. Robert Solow won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1987 for his 1950s discovery that technical change was the biggest source of growth, a discovery that seems to have been forgotten.

Scientific advances are not predictable. Lasers, nuclear power, transistors, computers, antibiotics, molecular biology, for example, all took us by surprise. Luckily, for most of the 20th century scientists could usually pursue their own agenda, and we could enjoy science's prodigious harvest. But success led to increasing numbers of scientists so that by the 1970s there were more than the funding agencies could support. In response, they required researchers to submit written proposals from which they selected the best, a policy that works well enough for the mainstream but fails at the margins where unpredictable and transformative discoveries are made.

Third-party assessments such as peer review would have been anathema to, say, Planck, Einstein, Avery, Townes, Crick and Watson, Kendrew, Perutz and about 300 others of similar calibre - we call them the Planck Club - whose work dominated the 20th century. However, their modern successors cannot escape them. In spite of increasing investments since 1970, there has been a dearth of new science. This is now a severe problem. As Solow proved, we curb the supply of new science at our economic peril. However, current policies ensure we are doing that.

Science does not lack opportunity. There are few, if any, fields that we fully understand. The potential for growth is therefore as high as it was 100 years ago, say, but we will create a 21st-century Planck Club and its attendant harvest of unpredicted breakthroughs only if we can restore the freedom that leads to them.

There is a proven way of doing this. Costs would be relatively low - some $20m-$30m a year for a global scheme - but as prospective peer review must be excluded, it is probably too radical a solution for national funding agencies alone. There may be other ways forward such as, for example, collaboration between private investors and national agencies. Dialogue will probably be the first step towards achieving that goal.

Donald W. Braben, UCL and Venture Research International, and the following, all of whom sign in a personal capacity:

John F. Allen, Queen Mary College, University of London Sir James Black, King's College London, Nobel laureate
Adam Curtis, Glasgow University
John Dainton, University of Liverpool
Nigel Franks, University of Bristol
Dudley Herschbach, Harvard University, Nobel laureate
Pat Heslop-Harrison, University of Leicester
Steve Howdle, University of Nottingham
Herbert Huppert, University of Cambridge
H. Jeff Kimble, Caltech
Sir Harry Kroto, Florida State University, Nobel laureate
Peter Lawrence, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology
Philip Moriarty, University of Nottingham
Martyn Poliakoff, University of Nottingham
David Price, UCL
Douglas Randall, University of Missouri
David Ray, BioAstral Ltd
Peter Rich, UCL
Ken Seddon, Queen's University Belfast
Gene Stanley, University of Boston
Harry Swinney, University of Texas
Robin Tucker, University of Lancaster
Nick Tyler, UCL
Claudio Vita-Finzi, Natural History Museum

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