Don Braben, Venture Research, and Scientific Freedom

I was at the University of Liverpool where I read physics and did a PhD in nuclear physics, and then I went to Alberta. Which I enjoyed immensely, absolutely wonderful. Alberta has huge amounts of money and most people were very busy spending the vast amount of money they had access to. Very few people were interested in doing real science, and so I had the place to myself. It was very, very good.

We had to return when my wife was pregnant and wanted my son to be born in England. We returned to the Daresbury Nuclear Physics Laboratory. I'd always wanted to be a high-energy physicist rather than a low-energy physicist, so I did a job of machine building for two years, and I designed the magnet system at Daresbury. Then when the machine worked, I became a particle physicist. I collaborated with Owen and we looked at various things. Then we did my main work, which was the pion electroproduction at threshold in collaboration with some Italian physicists.

Around 1973, the situation in Britain was a bit fraught because Britain was considering fully participating in CERN, the Geneva-based organization, and nothing to do with the European Union. They were considering closing the two national laboratories, Daresbury and Rutherford, so I would have to work at CERN. I went out once or twice, and we had meetings. I was interested in the Omega Project.

My group at Daresbury had 15 scientists, half of them Italians, and the other half Brits. It was very enjoyable, but working with 500 is a different problem altogether. I didn't want to go to CERN. I didn't want to be part of 500. One day, Alick Ashmore, the director of the laboratory at Daresbury, said, "Why don't you go to the cabinet office?" I said, "What's that?" He said, "I have no idea. Why don't you go and find out?"

I didn't know much about politics or anything else outside of science then. I went down to London and I was interviewed by Oliver Simpson, who asked me what I was doing. I told him I was looking at pion electroproduction at threshold. He said, "What's that?" He had no idea. I said, "Imagine you have two collisions. You have, say, a billiard ball and the lawnmower collide at very high energy and then you would look at the billiard ball and the lawnmower as the energy increased. But what would you think if out of this collision, a pair of scissors emerged? That is the pion, something that was not there to start with. This is the famous E = mc²." This seemed to satisfy him, so I then went, on promotion, to the cabinet office.

I was making a dramatic change. I realized that at the time I was giving up my own science. I was in the scientific secretariat at the cabinet office looking at the nation's science. Most people in the cabinet office had never even heard of the Science Research Council. They didn't know what it was. They didn't know what science was. That has not changed, by the way. Johnson has not got a clue about what scientists do. He just does his own thing.

After two or three years, I returned to the Science Research Council headquarters as a budding bureaucrat, and I was involved in the teaching company and marine technology. Marine technology brought me into contact with Jack Burkes at BP. Jack Burkes was a BP managing director, very powerful man. We got on very well. I was subsequently headhunted to go to the Bank of England, which was a big mistake, because I then had a sinecure. I didn't know it at the time. I thought I was going to do some interesting work, but it wasn't forthcoming.

Then Jack Burkes heard about this and invited me to go to BP to set up the venture research unit which has been my life's work, I suppose. BP then was so-called cash-rich, it had lots of money, and I was interested in, having spent five years looking at science generally, how bureaucracy was dominating research.

We decided to recreate the conditions under which Planck and Einstein, and et cetera, worked, how to foster complete freedom. We decided therefore to go out to the British universities and the North American universities, concentrating mainly on Europe, and also the European ones, Europe and North America. We didn't want to advertise because we thought the wrong people would apply. We had to give talks, I spent half of my life going around giving talks at universities, inviting proposals for people who wanted to do new things.

Now, over the 10 years, we got 10,000 proposals. Venture research is very finicky. We're very picky because we're looking for major discoveries, potential major discoveries. We only supported some 40 out of these 10,000, but they were very, very successful. I reckon now that this research has led to more than £1 billion.

Well, it was astronomy. I'm from a very working-class background in Liverpool, and astronomy, you can't fail to notice it. When I was a young child, I was fascinated by things astronomical. Then when I went to school, I just wanted to study astronomy. They said, "You can't do that. You can do physics if you like and mathematics," which is what I did. "Then later on you can convert it, if you like, to astronomy."

When I was at school in Liverpool, they organized a trip to the university, and I fell in love with particle physics because Liverpool is very strong in particle physics. Edward Chadwick, for example, discovered the neutron at Liverpool. They had a synchrocyclotron there, and they were doing high-energy physics. I was captivated by that.

Very much so, yes. I've never worked in my life. I've never consciously had to earn a living. I've always just followed what I want to do. It's amazing that science can provide this opportunity, which I'm very grateful for.

Not at all. No, no. Around about 1970, governments the world over had decided that they would expand the universities and the number of students, not just a small expansion but a huge expansion. In Britain, it's been about a factor of three or four. Before about 1970, if you were employed by a university, then you had to apply, of course, and you had to satisfy the various departmental committees.

Then when you got there, you didn't need anything else. You could then carry on your research and do whatever you wanted without consulting anybody about what you were doing. You didn't have to write a proposal. You didn't have to formally commit yourself to any idea but now we have this system, which is dominated by consensus and peer review.

Scientists now must apply for funding. They must formally write a proposal. They must get their universities to agree that this is an adequate proposal to represent the university. This then goes to a funding agency who send it out to two or three of your fellow experts in your field. Often these people will be your principal competitors, of course. It's an amazing system.

The success rate of this system, the funding success rate I mean, in Britain is about 20%. In Germany it's about 33%. In the States, the National Institutes of Health, it's 12%. It is very low. This means that if they average about 20%, 80% of research gets lost. Therefore, scientists have to be very careful what they propose since it takes up to six months to write a proposal. You make sure that your proposal is in a priority field for that research council, which means that you tend not to go for the major problems because they're risky.

Most scientists don't care. With success rates are only 20%, average success rates, funding success rates I mean, then that's inevitable. Tenured academics now spend all their time, at least all their non-teaching time, writing proposals. Whereas before about 1970, once you were appointed, you could do anything you wanted, provided your resource requirements, provided you did not require massive resources, like you didn't want to participate in a big collaboration or something like that, when you had to write proposals, when you had to prepare a proposal.

That's right. Yes, there are so many problems. We live in a target-rich environment as far as research is concerned. 95% of the universe, of the energy-matter in the universe, is unknown to us. We have not a clue about it. In particle physics, the standard model has been immensely successful, but can't incorporate gravity or gravitons which drive the universe and make it go, and have done since the Big Bang. Then we understand very little about consciousness. There are many, many fields where we understand almost very little. It makes no sense, therefore, for research councils to set priorities to restrict inquiry, because priorities restrict inquiry.

Well, education and research are quite different, of course. Research is what drives most universities, but they do their teaching as a sort of quid pro quo to enable them to do this research. I don't think that they are necessarily related. Most universities take their teaching very seriously. Most academics take their teaching very seriously and do their best but their main interest is their research.

Well, people today have to work towards a specific objective. They have to work towards a probability of doing things more efficiently or improving on existing techniques. There's very little new science funded now. New science creates new opportunities. It changes the way we think. Look what happened before 1970 when we had things like the laser and DNA. In 1940, DNA was thought to be a junk molecule of no value whatsoever. Avery, Oswald Avery, the discoverer of this in 1945, he couldn't get funding. Well, he worked for a government organization, I think, and so he managed with whatever funding he could get from them.

That is, new science creates new opportunities and expands the gross national product, if you like, of the world. The population is rising, but even so, the world improved its scientific productivity immensely in order to more than compensate for the increase in population. Now we owe this entirely to these unpredicted discoveries that were made by people like Charles Townes, the laser, et cetera.

Well, because that's the only way a peer review can work. A peer review must have a discipline. I have found people ask me, how can you as, say, a physicist seriously consider a research proposal in mathematics or biology or chemistry or whatever? There's only one science, as Pasteur said over 100 years ago, and there is a sort of language of science.

Most people who came to us with proposals in the '80s, when we were fully operating, it took them a while to adjust to this new way of looking at things. They thought that since BP was going to be supporting this research, that we're looking at new ways of getting oil out of the ground. When we try to explain that, you must forget that. You must forget all objectives, all tangible objectives, and concentrate on what is important in science per se, it took a long time. Now, science, there must be trust. Mutual trust between the scientist and the funder is absolutely essential. Now, there's no mutual trust today. Scientists don't trust government organizations who can withdraw their funding at a stroke of a pen.

I think most scientists accept, totally accept, peer review because there's no alternative. So they have convinced politicians over the years that this is the only way, the only way of maintaining excellence, as they keep on saying, in research. For them to admit now, years and decades that it's been operating, that peer review, although it's good, it works well most of the time, it's at the margins where new discoveries are made. That peer review has a serious flaw. The serious flaw, by the way, accounts for about 90% of economic growth over the past 10 years. These are rough figures. They don't want to do that. That's what I think why they oppose what we are trying to do.

Also, most scientists see value in cost and the cost of venture research is trivial. As I mentioned, over 10 years we spent 20 million over some 40 programs. That's a tiny amount of money. Most scientists, they don't see any glory in that. They're not thinking like scientists. They're not thinking of the new science that can radically change what is done. See, what fires me is science. I take vicarious pleasure now in supporting, in being associated with science doing their own thing, and making the odd comment from time to time, but the main credit for what they've done is their own. You have to take a completely different approach. I don't think most scientists see any glory in this.

It's an exciting thing to do, to talk to people about the science. The people that are appointed will have given up their own research. Like me, I no longer do my own research. You take vicarious pleasure in what other people do, and so you develop a language for developing communication with people from completely different disciplines. Disciplines mean peer review, so you must not use peer review.

I have the revised book, the republished book that has a proposal for solving this problem. It involves trying to persuade universities to set up their own venture research activities like we have at UCL. UCL system was set up in 2008. We found Nick Lane who wanted to do some very original work in the origin of life, but we've not found anyone else since that time, but this is quite normal. This is quite what I expect, because during the 20th century, there were, say, 500 major discoveries made, but that's over the whole world and over a whole century.

Therefore, in any one university, there are going to be a tiny amount. Why won't universities therefore, to set up their own venture research activities and listen to what scientists want to do and then trying to spot potential Nobel Prize winners of the future? McGill University actually responded to this. A guy called John Stix, from the Earth Sciences Department of McGill University, expressed some interest in this.

That's the idea, that if universities the world over have their own venture research activity supported from their own resources— just to give an idea of money, what Nick Lane wanted was 150,000 for three years for a largely theoretical study. Now since that time when the funding ended, he has attracted more than £5 million in external funding from research councils, et cetera. It's very profitable therefore for universities once they can see this happening.

Vice-chancellors or whatever have got to decide this, and they've got to decide that they will appoint someone in their university to look at these proposals and to make the occasional recommendation. There's very little glory in it, you see, so it will be difficult to get universities to agree to this. There will be glory once they get their Nobel Prize, but that may be 10 years or 20 years hence.

They closed us down, I think, because BP was having a major, like all major industries, was having a major rethink and decided to concentrate exclusively on its core business. They said they could not afford to give the slightest signal to their investors that they were varying this. Their core business was oil.

Therefore, venture research, which was definitely not doing any research that led to oil, because BP had its research director who spent more than £2 billion annually, and he was directed solely at oil and related products, energy products in general, so we had to go. In March of 1990, I got a phone call telling me that venture research was to be closed down.

It was a very bitter blow. We were then, I think, at the peak of our capabilities. It was very successful. We had annual conferences when we brought all these people together. I never forget the annual conference we had in June 1990. This is after we were told to close down and it was so successful. There were no disciplines involved because it was their whole— we had engineers and biologists and chemists and so on, right across the board. Note: Don later noted some similarities between venture research and Xerox PARC.

An inquiring mind! They varied in age: some of them were on the verge of retirement, in their 60s. Others were very young. They all had inquiring minds and they all took like ducks to water to our interrogation techniques, if you like, our inquiring. The people working with me, we never had to consult each other about whether or not a person was a venture researcher, as we call them. It was though so obvious that this person was on the threshold of doing something very important. We don't know what effect it would have and so therefore, we would help them to do that very important thing. There are no other commonalities other than an inquiring mind.

One of the things we did was to test their self-belief. When you're a researcher, even if you have a good idea, your vision of the future is often restricted to a few days of inquiry before you plan your next line of attack. There will be setbacks. I remember Jeff Kimball telling me about a weekend experiment that he just completed, which took him five years.

They mustn't give up, they must be determined, they must have vision, they must respond to changes in the environment, to changes in the experiment. They must try to listen what the experimenter is trying to tell them. George Lee Hirschbach told me once that an experiment might be talking to you in a language that you've not yet come across. He said, "When I got my Nobel Prize, I could understand." He was congratulated from all over the world with many languages that he couldn't understand. There was one that completely baffled him. He could more or less make out Italian, French, Greek, et cetera, but there was one that he could not make any progress with at all. Guess what that language was. Braille. He said, "How do you know that nature is not talking to you in such a language?" You've got to be always receptive to the signals that nature is giving you.

Oh, most discoverers, most people who make major discoveries are academics. The great majority of the 500 were all academics. It is therefore quite accurate. It's quite reasonable that I should want to go to universities. Now, the big companies that can still do their bit, they can still set up their activity to support the universities, like BP did. I would love the BPs, the IBMs, the Roeschs to set up their own venture research activities, but it doesn't seem to be very likely that that'll happen, not at the moment anyway.

When there's a significance of this lack, when it becomes obvious that there haven't been any major discoveries made in recent years— there was one Nobel Prize issued last year to Roger Penrose, who did the work that qualified for him a Nobel Prize in the '60s. This tends to be the case nowadays. When the penny finally drops and people realize that this method isn't working, however enthusiastic the people might be for peer review, it doesn't work. It doesn't work at the margins. I keep on saying, "It's not a bad approach for determining the great majority of research, but it's this tiny but very, very important tiny fraction that is not getting funded, and if we don't get that, we won't have growth."

Scientific progress, for most of humanity's history, there was no progress at all, for centuries. It was a zero-sum game and the world population hardly increased. Then suddenly, around about the 16th and 17th Century, when people began to make inquiries about science and to determine new ways of doing things, that it became obvious that this would create new sources of income. We have now come to the point where this is becoming a serious problem.

Discoveries, like the laser, create huge amounts, absolutely huge amount, trillions of dollars worth of new income that did not exist before. Now, the laser, when it was discovered, was said to be a solution in search of a problem. It took 20 years before people finally decided that this was a major discovery.

Oh, no, we're not. They're not being made at all. Peer review stifles them, completely stifles them, so there is no new science being sought or even discovered. They keep on saying there's lots of problems. We live in a target-rich environment, but nobody is interested in tackling it.

Well, Patrick Collison thought it was desperately needed. He decided that he would take me under his wing, so to speak, and republish this book. He is convinced that the outlook for humanity is not very good. When the man in the street will recognize this, or the person in the street, one should say nowadays, of course, I don't think they ever do.

They always had a vincular approach to academics before about 1970. They thought there were an odd bunch but they did come up with amazing discoveries from time to time. Now that's more or less the only relationship you can expect, but now, they have all their gizmos, all their iPhones, et cetera. They're so concerned with that that they don't even notice that there are no new things on the horizon, nothing new, completely new I mean, radically new. Not just a little bit better.

They only see technological progress. The general public only see technological progress, but I'm maintaining that new science creates new technology, and we've lost this element. At the moment, new technology must beget new technology. It's introverted. We're going round in circles. We need new discoveries. Since we understand so little about the universe, there must be opportunities awaiting discovery, but they'll only be awarded to scientists who are open. They're looking for the braille signals that the experiment is trying to tell them. You have to keep looking. Nick Lane, for example, he's been looking at the origin of life now for 10 years, and he still hasn't cracked it. It's not that he's been lazy because he hasn't twigged what it is that nature's trying to tell him.

Oh, absolutely. If a proposal could be supported by anyone else in the world, then it was not venture research. We'd say, "Why haven't you tried so and so?" Venture research has no competitors. There are no competitors. It's unique. The approach taken is completely unique. Therefore, they've had difficulty getting funding, but now they've got funded, you just enjoy it.

So many people said that to us, we've tried everywhere to get funding for this. Now, one guy from Santa Barbara told me that the only cost to me is the cost of a postage stamp, an email stamp. I'm sending this proposal in desperation. We funded him and we funded him for six years.

Well, the reason the book is being republished is about last year, I met a person called Patrick Collison. He said how impressed he'd been with my books, but particularly with Scientific Freedom. Therefore, he wanted to republish it because it was published by Wiley. They're still trying to sell it, by the way. Do you know how much it costs? $75 for paperback. He said he would republish it hardback for about $20. Well, it's now less than that on Amazon.

Well, I couldn't get published, you see. I tried all the publishers in the world, and they all turned me down, that your work does not match our portfolio. Someone said to me, "Have you tried Wiley?" I said, "No, I haven't tried Wiley." I rang the editor. She said, "What's your book about?" I told her what the first chapter's about. She said, "Oh, that sounds interesting. Send me a chapter or two," which I did and they published it. Is it $80, as you say? It's good news and bad news. At least then I got to Patrick Collison 20, 30 years later.

That's right. Your peer review dominates everything. Unless what you're proposing to do has been approved by peer review, whatever it is, then you won't get— then it can't be worth anything. It's the only way of maintaining excellence in research. We've proved there's another way of doing it.

My latest book is Promoting the Planck Club. I thought Patrick Collison was going to pick that one, actually, but he said Scientific Freedom was a better one. We'll see what happens with Scientific Freedom. If it's a great success, maybe Patrick Collison will say, "Okay. We'll go to your other books now." Let's hope that happens.