Faraday programme / Select Committee on Science and Technology.

  • Great Britain. Parliament. House of Lords. Science and Technology Committee.
Date:
[1993], ©1993
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: Faraday programme / Select Committee on Science and Technology. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    28/152 (page 4)
    15 July 1992] Lord Dainton 12. May I just ask, any infrastructure has a material side to it. Is it help for universities or industry or something new in which they both invested? (Sir John Fairclough) My view is that the facilities will be the key to whether the Faraday Programme would be a success. 13. Exactly. It is a measure of commitment. (Sir John Fairclough) It is a measure of commitment and many branches of research in terms of business foundation require increasingly sophisticated equipment, facilities and instrumentations. Neither industry nor universities party can afford the increasing sophistication of some of that instrumentation. The idea of taking a single centre, wherever situated, where the two communities could share the instrumentation necessary to conduct basic research on the one hand and applied research on the other in fields that are, of course, relevant to our industrial needs. Chairman 14. Although in my understanding of what you had written it was that the highest authority was to be an intermediate institution. (Sir John Fairclough) No, we were not proscriptive to that extent. There was a bias, Lord Chairman, in that direction but we purposely were not proscriptive. 15. That was just an example. (Sir John Fairclough) We said in our first paper that we should amplify the role of intermediate institutions then when we came to the Faraday Centres we saw the intermediate institutions playing an important role but not exclusively. Viscount Caldecote 16. Lord Gregson used the expression, “implanting technology in industry”. That implies some existing institution going to industry and saying, ““We have got something to offer you that will be useful to you.” That is alright if industry is receptive but surely the position is if industry is receptive there are many companies that go to universities and research associations or whatever it is and use them very effectively. Is not the great problem that whatever institutions you set up if they do not see a need for work to be done nothing new that you set up will do any good. How do we get over that problem in setting up a new organisation? We are agreed about the objectives but it is the effectiveness of the new idea. (Sir John Fairclough) The relationship between industry and the university works best in the chemistry and life sciences where what you produce in a test tube in a university laboratory is substantially the same product you end up shipping if it has commercial value. There is little engineering of the product. In the physics based industries you have to engineer the artefact and the relationship is weakest between our industrial community and the universities where engineering is involved. 17. Why is that? Engineering firms in the aerospace industry have seen a problem they could not solve [Continued themselves and they have gone to universities and got a very good answer. (Sir John Fairclough) The enlightened companies do that. You know as well as I do that our best companies have always been active. We are talking about small and medium-sized companies which is most of British industry. That is the problem. Another dimension—and why I interrupted my two colleagues—is that if we could arrange the Faraday Centres or something like it that they would be doing world-class work then that in itself would have an influence on the science that we do in our universities. It would help in setting the agenda for science. Those problems or opportunities that would emerge from that work would have an influence on how the university and research council community spent their money, through the intellectual value of the work and not through anybody deciding at the centre that it would be good to do research on this or that subject. 18. Sir John talked about small and medium-sized companies. I agree that is a problem but how does setting up a new type of institution which could solve the problem when on the whole small and medium- sized companies do not see the advantage and value they can get out of academic research or applied research? (Sir John Fairclough) It would give them access to facilities, skills and people that they normally would not have access to nor could they afford. Lord Renwick 19. My Lord Chairman, I find we have been talking in the abstract, Sir John, and I would welcome it enormously if you could give us one or two examples. Reading quite a lot of the evidence here it seems that when we come to an example—I have only got one, the first one I saw was the Imperial College and the Water Research Centre—it does not seem terribly happy. It seems happy from the Water Research Centre side but Imperial College is not so happy that it is regarded only as research. Could you give us more idea as to how your Faraday Centres would work? (Sir John Fairclough) An example that comes to mind is about new materials. There are many novel ideas for new materials, composite materials, combinations of metals and plastics, with a growing amount of interest in their application both for new products and processes, but also to replace existing material. That is a field that is generic in character where companies could share that knowledge. If you had a facility for making the new material on an experimental basis where the characteristics of the material itself need to be perfected, you would need to do some application research with the material itself, on the one hand, and in the formation of the new material, on the other. People could come together then and share that facility. There is room for PhD work from an academic point of view as well as room for real application research on the part of industry. You are sharing then a common facility in the very early days of a new material. (Dr Whelan) I would like to comment that there is an excellent example at the present time of a technology where the United Kingdom has quite a good academic position and that is surface