Scientific governance in Britain, 1914–79

By Manchester University Press

Scientific governance in Britain, 1914-79 examines the connected histories of how science was governed, and used in governance, in twentieth-century Britain. During the middle portion of that century, British science grew dramatically in scale, reach and value. These changes were due in no small part to the two world wars and their associated effects, notably post-war reconstruction and the on-going Cold War. As the century went on, there were more scientists - requiring more money to fund their research - occupying ever more niches in industry, academia, military and civil institutions. Combining the latest research on twentieth-century British science with insightful discussion of what it meant to govern - and govern with - science, this volume provides both an invaluable introduction to science in twentieth-century Britain for students and a fresh thematic focus on science and government for researchers interested in the histories of science and governance.

This volume features a foreword from Sir John Beddington, UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser 2008-13.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Aug 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9781526100436

Book preview

Scientific governance: an introduction

Don Leggett and Charlotte Sleigh

This candid attempt to take possession of the whole world must be made in the name of and for the sake of science and creative activity. Its aim is to release science …¹

Writing in the first half of the twentieth century the author, biologist and science teacher H.G. Wells conceived of an age when the governance of society would be the work of engineers. This was not simply an assertion about who should wield the power behind the machine, but a bold statement about the skills required for successful governance. Engineers had distinctive values and characters: ‘They must keep on mastering new points, new aspects; they must be intelligent and adaptable; they must get a grasp of that permanent something that lies behind the changing immediate practice.’² Wells and his readers took his point to encompass all those who embodied the ‘spirit of science’, a much-used term of the early twentieth century that included scientists as well as engineers. Wells’s Anticipations, first published in a series of articles in the Fortnightly Review in 1901, caught the attention of a wide audience – including the Royal Institution, where he was asked to deliver a Friday evening discourse – for whom the connection between science and governance was a matter of deep importance. The economist and Fabian Sidney Webb shared with Wells his ‘feelings about the coming predominance of the man of science, the trained professional expert’, and saw a place for him in a government of experts.³ Not everyone was so impressed. A young Winston Churchill, newly elected MP for Oldham, wrote to Wells that ‘nothing would be more fatal than for the government of states to get into the hands of the experts’.⁴ But by 1928, in the Open conspiracy, Wells had grown only more confident about his recommendations, and though his vision of the future may not have come true, explicit debates about science and governance continued to feature in British society.

The term ‘scientific governance’ – and Wells’s mediating activities – gesture at the fact that the governance of science incorporates more components of modern society than policy makers, scientists and industry. Not least in support of this position is the post-Foucauldian insight that governance is not entirely imposed from above, but powerfully enacted from within.⁵ The term scientific governance, then, summons two key senses in which science and governance are related: the governance of science, and governance by science. The first sense, which has been the more common mode to approach the history of British science in the twentieth century, has to do with the direction of science. Scientific governance here refers to the structures and institutions that shaped science, be they the subject of individual scientists’ work, the lobbying efforts of scientific societies or the growing role of the state in producing and consuming scientific knowledge. Among a number of developments that distinguish this century are the dramatic increase in the number of laboratories and scientists funded by the state and commercial interests; the formation of branches of government dedicated to scientific and industrial research; and the appointment of designated scientific advisors across government. As Arapostathis and Gooday have most recently shown, the courtroom and the press also governed innovation and technology – including those of use to the state.⁶ The governance of science, moreover, includes the formation of relevant ideology; bookending our volume are the Haldane principle, protecting the independence of research councils, and the Rothschild report, which introduced the concept of a customer contract into scientific research. Besides these moreor-less explicit ideologies in the governance of science there are also subtler features to consider: laboratory politics, disciplinarity, gender and a hundred and one other factors – often tacit – that shape the production of techno-science.

The second sense, governance by science, is a little more elusive to grasp. The project of governing citizens and resources scientifically has been articulated and understood through a range of possibilities from the broadly rhetorical (an appeal to rationality or progress), through the planned society, to full-blown government by experts: technocracy. Perhaps the most significant development of the twentieth century in this field was the proliferation of the scientific expert, a ‘protean [figure] of authority and rational knowledge’.⁷ The expert can play a vital role in interactions between the sciences, politics and society, and yet seminal studies in both the history and sociology of science call into doubt the notion of a singular type of scientific expertise, in respect of how it is either generated or perceived by political communities.⁸ What science is in the context of a claim to expertise is unclear; this flexibility is indeed a part of its power. For Wells, it was engineers who carried the weight of national hope, while others espoused a looser sense of scientific rationality as a bulwark against politico-governmental propaganda. This second sense of scientific governance is perhaps more unique to the twentieth century, although one could point to apparently similar predecessors in Baconian fantasies of the New Atlantis, or the revolutionary rhetoric of late eighteenth-century chemistry.

This volume is grounded in a strong intellectual tradition in the historical and sociological study of science, according to which the making of scientific knowledge is a political act.⁹ Scholars in Science and Technology Studies (STS) have developed sophisticated methodologies and a wealth of case studies for understanding the making, settling, institutionalisation and utilisation of scientific knowledge and practices. They have found that these processes cannot be separated from the domains in which knowledge is used, be they advisory boards to government, courtrooms or forums for public debate, and that this has important consequences for both the governance of science and the public understanding of science. For example, in her study of Britain’s bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or, colloquially, mad cow disease) scare of 1996, Shelia Jasanoff takes it for granted that government institutions were expected to manage this episode of scientific uncertainty, and that their failure to do so created palpable ‘civic dislocation’. It is this insight about the governance of science that is so powerful and relevant for our book. It was neither necessary nor inevitable that tiny fragments of protein, and their passage through the food chain, should be expected to be a governmental matter. That this was the case shows how governmental institutions were regarded as the proper space for the exercise of scientific expertise – at least in this case study, in areas such as health and diet.¹⁰

Such a co-production of science and social order is not peculiar to the twentieth century, as many studies in the history of science testify. Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin’s magisterial Leviathan and the air pump (1985) reveals such connections between the integrity of experimental methods and the political order of Restoration England. Richard Drayton’s Nature’s government (2000) traces the idea of ‘improvement’ to reveal the links that sustained science and empire both in Britain and abroad. Finally, in this extremely brief review, Jon Agar’s history of the computer traces its function as both a metaphor and a technology of governance from the mid-nineteenth century, using it as a lens to examine the role of various ‘expert movements’ (statisticians, economists, operational researchers). ‘Technologies’, as Agar notes, ‘are manifestations of ways of ordering nature and society.’¹¹ In short, there has always been an important relationship between scientific knowledge and political power, and the co-production of science and social order has long been a conceptual cornerstone to the history of science.

In proposing scientific governance as a category for analysis this volume draws upon well-established traditions in STS in order to claim, firstly, that there is something particular about science, politics and society in the twentieth century; and secondly, that there is value to introducing this notion into the historiography of twentieth-century British science.

Why scientific governance?

Governance offers a revealing ‘big picture’ lens through which to view the changing contours and constitution of science in twentieth-century Britain. It is offered not as a context in which to understand British science – as is industry, warfare or imperialism – but as a way of connecting those involved in, and affected by, science in the twentieth century. It is not an actor’s category, but an analysts’ term that we propose for the ongoing study of the sciences, politics and society in twentieth-century Britain (and perhaps beyond). Prevalent actor’s categories, like technocracy, fail to capture the historical terrain that we attempt to chart in this volume. Technocracy, understood as governance by technical elites – or experts – fails to account for the role of figures like Wells. He, like other figures in this book who do not fit this category – ranging from military officers and science fiction fans to BBC programmers and academic philosophers – played a role in the interface between science, politics and society that is very far from peripheral. Technocracy is also an unhelpful category for the historical study of this period on the grounds that, first, it does not capture the political realities of the British experience, and second, that it fails to break from a dichotomous understanding of experts and civil servants. This latter approach does not reflect the intricacies of government departments, their varied uses of scientific expertise and how policies were made.¹²

One can, moreover, historicise criticism of the term technocracy in Britain.¹³ The crystallographer and Marxist J.D. Bernal, who discussed the idea of ‘the scientist as ruler’ (citing Wells), objected to what he called the ‘vogue of Technocracy’. He believed that the premise of technocracy could never be realised on the grounds that ‘no one can think of any way of transferring control into [scientists’] hands’, and ‘that most existing scientists are manifestly totally unfitted to exercise such control’.¹⁴ Yet, despite this dismissal, Bernal saw potential for the scientist to effect real political change: ‘the scientist will certainly have a large and critically important part to play in the formation and development of the social organization of the future’.¹⁵

While the idea of technocracy per se is problematic in the British context, the history of governance reveals an increased use of techniques that drew on experts and expertise during the twentieth century. Patrick Joyce and others have brought new attention to the technologies and ‘techniques of governing oneself and governing others’ that are suggestive of scientists’ intervention in the governing of Britain.¹⁶ These technologies ranged from letters and filing systems to cameras and railways; in this volume they are extended more radically to such apparently non-bureaucratic entities as laboratories and wheat seeds.¹⁷ Ultimately Joyce remains sceptical of the unbound authority of experts: ‘there was limited chance of a rule of experts usurping the state’, but the technologies and techniques of governance that experts possessed ‘were still highly orchestrated by the state, which initiated some forms of expertise and appropriated others’.¹⁸

Scientific governance embraces these insights and provides a more inclusive concept of the politics of science than technocracy has offered the historian of Britain. It offers a path towards a new historiographical cohesion in the study of twentieth-century British science in which technical experts, policy makers and administrators can be analysed alongside popularisers, mediators and the users of scientific knowledge. This is particularly important, given the public profile of science intellectuals in twentieth-century Britain and the political historiography that has emerged around them.¹⁹ The problem with integrating these public scientists with the governance of science revolves around two principal issues: whether the public pronouncements of scientists reflected the realities of British science’s political standing; and the extent to which the discourses of public intellectuals like Wells, Bernal and C.P. Snow connected to the experiences of laboratory technicians, researchers in industry and academic scientists.²⁰ Studies of public science and science policy have done much to resolve these problems by tracing the boundaries of public debate and the networks of the actors involved.²¹ This brand of historical reconstruction is arguably more productive than the terminology of ‘anti-histories’ that David Edgerton has applied to the public writings of these figures, and the declinist accounts of British science that they offered.²² By placing various scientific actors all on the same historical terrain, we can better understand the peculiar values and authority ascribed to science in the twentieth century, with science emerging not as distinct branch(es) of study but as a protean entity in the writings and interactions of our various figures. The process of governance brings together both the governors and the governed in a way that further serves to combine the study of scientific elites and policy makers with users, stakeholders and those affected by scientific governance – be they soldiers receiving psychological testing or citizens responding to the surveys of social scientists.²³

Previous historiography of twentieth-century British science has tended to focus on the governance of science. Between the 1960s and 1980s, historical accounts of science and politics were dominated by institutions and the theme of science–government relations. A series of important case studies illuminated the formation and function of various national and industrial laboratories, governmental bodies and science lobbies.²⁴ Insights from these studies have served to construct a picture of the state’s relationship with science in the interwar years that can be characterised by the state taking piecemeal interest in specific problems of national importance. These provided new structures and opportunities in which trained scientists could operate, obliterating the nineteenth-century figure of the ‘reluctant patron’ of the sciences.²⁵ All of this marked a new phase in the state’s organisation of – and funding for – the sciences, which had important consequences for scientists. However, as one scholar argued in 1980, central governmental attitudes to science across the twentieth century largely followed ‘traditional principles of British public administration’, with governmental resistance to central co-ordination and little desire to form a ‘deliberate science policy’.²⁶

The study of these institutions and science–government relations continues, but with new concerns and questions. A more nuanced understanding of the politics of science has revealed the importance of the rhetoric of science in the process of legitimating its public funding – and, in the process, setting boundaries for the state’s role in organising research.²⁷ These boundaries were of great importance in the work of the Medical and Agricultural Research Councils that were established in 1919 and 1931, respectively.²⁸ Histories of publicly funded science, and the principle of non-interference from the government, shed light on how science was governed in the first half of the twentieth century – but this was not the only experience of scientific governance in Britain. Studies of science in the imperial context have yielded important insights into the relationship between the sciences, politics and society that reveal the deep connections between research, development, imperial policies and the identity of the British Empire.²⁹ Such studies have broadly enriched the historiography of government organisation of science by bringing together the ideologies of politicians, the development of industries and the experience of researchers across the British world.

Since the 1990s historians have also looked beyond the administration of research funding by civil departments of state, and toward the military services. David Edgerton’s Warfare state (2005) provides an important counterpoint to narratives of British research that predominantly focus on the experience of academic scientists. His study represents a continuation of earlier work rejecting the narrative of decline in British science and industry. Edgerton argues that the histories written since the 1960s have repeatedly missed the point: in failing to distinguish between absolute and relative decline; in tendentiously finding Britain wanting in comparison to the US; and in overlooking British industrial leadership within Europe.³⁰ But, in a surprise move for what might otherwise have sounded like a left-wing defence of Britain’s scientific success in a broadly social-democratic era, he posits that the rude health of techno-science was sustained by a ‘warfare state’ that kept thinking and acting as though it were in active combat right the way through to 1989.³¹ Edgerton is certainly right in his insistence that we stop obsessing about decline and academic science – and in the process he has opened up the study of research in industry and the military to fresh investigation and scrutiny.³² More recently the study of patenting and intellectual property has provided fresh perspective on the governance of scientific research in which commercial concerns, cultures of reward and strategies for managing patents shaped the behaviour of actors.³³

One area in which we do qualify Edgerton’s approach to the study of British science is in his prioritisation of a quantitative treatment of research spending for understanding how science was governed. Edgerton does not treat popular perceptions and cultural constructions of science as being important to the governance of science, which we have made a case for in this introduction, but instead considers them historiographically as a form of anti-history that serves to construct today’s narratives about science. An economic analysis of research spending will never fully reflect the intricacies of decision making in government, as scholars have shown through the reconstruction of the social and cultural contingencies involved in governing Britain. Edgerton’s warfare state arguments, and their implications for the history of twentieth-century science, have been seminal; but we also need to connect them with questions about the implications of state patronage for the moral authority of the sciences; the rise of experts and advisors within the state; the use of what we might loosely call scientific approaches to governing; and a host of other ways in which Britain was governed by science – as the following brief historical sketch of the century highlights.³⁴

A brief history of scientific governance in the twentieth century

Wells’s benign vision for scientific governance was an expression of Victorian middle-class aspiration, set amidst imperial and evolutionary unease. In the first decade of the twentieth century this vision was institutionalised in the form of organisations like the British Science Guild, founded in 1905 to ‘foster public appreciation of the role of science and the advantage of applying the methods of scientific enquiry … in affairs of every kind’, but most substantively in matters of national, and imperial, efficiency.³⁵

Like a great many cultural presumptions, this vision did not survive the cataclysmic events of 1914–18 unaltered.³⁶ The Great War, famously, was known at the time (and after) as ‘the chemists’ war’, this description referring not just to the infamous poison gases but to the vast industrial machinery of production for fabrics, metals, medicines and so on. Science was put on a footing of state patronage and steerage through the formation of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research to co-ordinate and promote research for the benefit of industry.³⁷ By the end of the Great War scientists had begun to sense their worth to the nation, and some of them were beginning to take up the Wellsian baton in the name of peace. The journal Science Progress, for instance, argued in 1918 that there was little difference between German and British governance, only in the silliness of their respective leaders, and that the options for the future were either more radical democracy or else a frank commitment to rule by the ‘very best qualified persons available’ – scientists.³⁸

An increased focus on governance raised questions about autonomy in science and the position of pure science. In wartime Cambridge a group of scientists insisted on the importance of science, in particular ‘pure science’, for British interests. Science and the nation (1917), a volume conceived by A.C. Seward, contained chapters that directly linked the work of the scientist to national matters: ‘The national importance of chemistry’, ‘The science of botany and the art of intensive cultivation’, ‘An agricultural war problem’ and ‘Geology as an economic science’. As Seward wrote in his introduction, the volume aimed to demonstrate ‘the supreme importance of a sympathetic and intelligent attitude towards the natural sciences on the part of those entrusted with the direction of national affairs’.³⁹ In a chapter on ‘The government of subject peoples’, the psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers made these connections explicit when he explained that the ‘object of this essay is to inquire how far science may be useful in the work of government itself’.⁴⁰

Scientists’ realisation of their national value coincided with their professional – or perhaps one should say socioeconomic – ambitions. They wished to be well regarded, and well paid. Hyman Levy put it succinctly: ‘The war of 1914–18 was the occasion for the birth of the scientific profession.’⁴¹ Late on in the war, scientists at Cambridge and the National Physical Laboratory – mostly left of centre and war workers – agreed to emphasise the identity of their emerging profession through the establishment of a trade union.⁴² This was an awkwardly hybrid entity, carrying echoes of both guilds (skilled trade bodies) and clubs (gentlemanly organisations, Royal Colleges) as well as a political position. Arthur Tansley, for example, although he supported the National Union of Scientific Workers (NUSW), felt at first that a focus on the ‘economic interests of its members’ was too politically divisive for its potential members, distracting attention from the union’s other aim, namely, to give the scientific worker ‘a status commensurate with [his] importance … in national life’.⁴³ Tansley’s fears proved correct, and the NUSW limped along until, off the back of the General Strike of 1926, it was cynically eviscerated from within by Alfred Mond (president of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI)). It was reformed as the British Association of Scientific Workers, in which guise it remained the natural home for left-wing scientists, even if diminished as a political-economic force.⁴⁴

By the time of the Great Depression, and a looming second world war, the notion of something like Wells’s conspiracy took on fresh plausibility and appeal; surely there must be a better way to run things than by ordinary politics. Werskey’s ground-breaking study, The visible college (1978), details the socialist ambitions of prominent scientists during the 1920s and, especially, the 1930s, connecting them to their vision of science.⁴⁵ For the crystallographer J.D. Bernal, Marxism was nothing less than ‘the science of science’.⁴⁶

Bernal’s own reading of the Great War and the economic crisis of the 1930s provided the impetus for examining how the work of scientists was connected with social, economic, political and military developments. In The social function of science (1939) he reflected on the organisational shifts in science during the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, insisting that science ‘has become an industry supported by large industrial monopolies and by the State’. His commentary raised a number of issues about how science was both governed and used in the governance of society. It stressed the collective nature of scientific work, the importance of administration, the efficient co-ordination of research and its application to social problems.⁴⁷

After detailing the social function of science in the first four decades of the twentieth century, Bernal turned to his personal and political hopes for what science could do for humanity if its internal and external relations with other social institutions were reorganised. The relationship between the extent of organisation, freedom of researchers and support for science formed a complex dynamic in which Bernal worked out his concerns about scientific governance.⁴⁸ He was sceptical about the role of the state in co-ordinating science – ‘Science can never be administrated as part of a civil service’ – but had faith in the self-governance of scientific organisations. Science had a large contribution to make to society, and Bernal was not alone in explicitly identifying its capacity for governance. For another Marxist, the biochemist J.B.S. Haldane, writing in 1940, the need for science was greater in the present day than ever before: ‘we must think scientifically, not only about weapons and health, but about politics and philosophy’.⁴⁹ He believed that science was deeply connected to a variety of public spheres in society, from the research conducted in large universities to the everyday concerns of Britons.⁵⁰

If the First World War was a matter of evolution for science and scientific governance, the Second World War was revolution. It was the historical fulcrum for the sons of Wells and their meritocratic, socialist or socially democratic ambitions. There is still much to learn about the precise aims and ambitions of these – and lesser-known – scientists: their notions of architecture, design, health, industry and much more. Werskey’s subjects, though Oxbridge outsiders, were nevertheless Oxbridge; but what of those on the academic periphery, in industry? What were their connections with business, with government? What of those whose idealism was refracted through lenses other than socialism? Although many socialist scientists and doctors initially focused their energies on a critique of governmental care for its people (vide Bernal’s study of the inadequacy of air-raid precautions) they inevitably became involved in the war effort. By 1942 the Association of Scientific Workers had 16,000 members, and these were not on the whole pacifists with regard to this conflict.

Whereas ‘planning’, that shibboleth of socialist scientists before the war, sounded horribly soviet, wartime operational research was simply force majeure; no one in their right mind objected to it. Ultimately it paved the way to the post of Chief Scientific Adviser that is enshrined in government to the present.⁵¹ As national discussion turned to reconstruction, a broadly socially democratic consensus politics prevailed. This was fertile soil for the ambitions of the public scientists who had dominated immediately before and during the war. They could have written Attlee’s 1946 manifesto for him, with its election-winning promise of rule by experts:

The Labour Party intends to link the skill of British craftsmen and designers to the skill of British scientists in the service of our fellow men. The genius of British scientists and technicians who have produced radio-location, jet propulsion, penicillin, and the Mulberry Harbours in wartime, must be given full rein in peacetime too.⁵²

While research sponsored by the British government did not reach the scale of ‘Big Science’ in the US, there were some large-scale projects, notably the military/civil projects at Windscale/Calder Hall (Sellafield).⁵³ Not the least of the scientists’ successes was the establishment of a National Health Service, albeit not quite such a total one as the socialist doctors had hoped. Meanwhile, a nexus of scientists and designers, film-makers and officials produced films directing the people how to live in this reconstructed society: how to be healthy, where to live (in rational new cities). One should add at this point that architects were extremely significant contributors to these visions made (literally) concrete, and historians of science need to find ways of incorporating road makers, building makers, town planners and other designers into a proper history of the neo-Elizabethan scientific era. But if architecture was the most visible of all the sciences that hoped for preferment in the scientifically and socially enlightened peace, it may be argued that the social-psychological sciences were the most successful – and the most invisible. Their reach extended into education policy, industry, management, family, gender and childhood and adolescence.⁵⁴

An explosion of educational and structural governmental changes made way for more scientists, technicians and scientific citizens than ever before. Most famously, the Barlow Report of 1945 made provision for reorganisation and expansion of the scientific civil service as a pillar of post-war reconstruction. Its numbers, as historians have discovered, mushroomed.⁵⁵ Meanwhile the Robbins Report (1963) promised higher education to all who were capable of it. It made a point of showing how pulling up the ordinary man or woman pulled up science, and vice versa, in its recommendation to give university status to pre-existing Colleges of Advanced Technology. C.P. Snow, with all his tentacles in government and academia, was a node connecting the government as employer of technical staff and as patron of the new, scientifically educated middle class. As Guy Ortolano has revealed, Snow’s liberal-technocratic ideal was both influential amongst, and galling to, his peers.⁵⁶ If one had to pick a peak for scientific governance in the twentieth century, it might be 1963, with an expanded scientific civil service, a brace of new universities poised to open and both political parties making their manifesto stands on science.

The post-war period is now beginning to receive the historical attention it deserves in relation to science, but there are still extraordinary gaps in our knowledge. The new universities, for example, are generally understood to be a response to the government reports calling for more scientists – but we do not even know what proportion of science students they took, or what they taught them. Nor have we questioned the seemingly natural fit, almost too good to be true, between science touted as a subject, as a discipline of democratic epistemology, and the production of scientists as desideratum of the national economy.

Our book ends in the year that finally saw a scientist ascend to the highest office of the land. Had Wells’s dream come true? No. Paradoxically, Thatcher’s regime marked the end of the consensus era in which science, or at least certain ideas of science, had flourished. Under her watch as Secretary of State for Education and Science, the Rothschild reforms devastated – or so scientists agreed – their intellectual autonomy.⁵⁷ Herein there lies a paradox; for Rothschild the economic libertarian was supporting the notion of the taxpayer as client to science: a most Bernalist principle, on the face of it. But the marketisation of knowledge is an undisputed legacy of Thatcher, and the destruction of technical industry nearly so; and latterly, Thatcher’s most important cabinet colleague, Nigel Lawson, has been revealed as a despiser of science, a climate-change denier. This leaves some tricky historical questions. Should we discount Thatcher’s education and professional shaping as irrelevant to her political career and economic ideology? Or does she, as at least one of us suspects, represent a view of science from the interwar period that has yet to receive full historical attention? We leave these and many other questions for a future history.

Chapter outlines

Although governance of and by science are inevitably interrelated, we have separated the two themes in this volume. The first section of this book collects essays that have to do with the governance of science: the second, governance by science. Scientific governance is not intended as a single designation: it is manifold in both its senses.

Leggett’s essay (Chapter 1) on the short-lived Board of Invention and Research (BIR) opens the section on the government of science, and in so doing contributes to emerging scholarship on invention and cultures of managing research in science. It grapples with the conflicting interests of researchers and the state during the crucial period of the Great War. The BIR was essentially a social experiment: a trial ‘hub in the organisation of government, academic and … commercial laboratories’. Leggett’s story is an important and subtle corrective to the cliché that war is a driver of scientific ‘progress’.

Warfare may not provide any simple stimulus for scientific research, but it has certainly provided stimulus for scientific governance, as the next two chapters in this section also explore. During the Second World War the British military services established new scientific advisory posts in response to the needs of combat – posts which went on to exert a powerful effect in the post-war environment. As the services saw it, Thomas explains in Chapter 2, engineers offered not only concretely useful equipment, but an apparently ‘scientific’ method of planning combat operations more generally. The reforms associated with these interactions, argues Thomas, ‘subsequently took an unusually prominent place in the annals of British science policy’; operational research opened up the alley to scientific advice at the heart of government. It also opened up a rhetorical touch-point for subsequent critiques of government in its supposed failure to recognise the virtues of organised science policy, and the ‘decline’ which this allegedly occasioned. operational research was thus arguably the ur-discipline of socially embedded science during the Second World War and beyond.

In Chapter 3, Goodchild expands the story further, exploring the evolving nature of governmental scientific advice during the successive incumbencies of Frederick Lindemann, Henry Tizard and Solly Zuckerman as Chief Scientific Adviser. Lindemann’s personal relationship with Winston Churchill compares with Tizard’s unofficial service to Labour; Zuckerman occupied an official role of Government Chief Scientific Adviser to both Labour and Conservative governments, establishing a ‘necessary facet of scientific governance that now heads an extensive network of scientific advice’. The evolution of this role is an instructive account of the changing nature of government science according to context and contingency: of personality, need and ambition.

As Hughes’s Chapter 4 reveals, the Royal Society – traditional governor of elite science and socially close to the higher echelons of politics – was left high and dry by the changed climate of the post-war period, uncertain as to its role in this altered and expanded world of science. It struggled to respond to exactly those governmental trends which emerged through the shorter twentieth century, and which are covered by the chapters constituting this part of the book. In Hughes’s words:

With government, the military, industry and universities pulling it in different directions, how should science be organised, and what were the implications for individual scientists? Should science be socially and economically planned, or must scientists be allowed complete freedom in their research? Could scientific knowledge be kept secret, or was openness a precondition for scientific work? How should ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ research be approached in the context of debates about economic productivity? And how should British science properly be related to work in the Empire, the Commonwealth, Europe, the United States and indeed the Soviet Union, in the post-war geopolitical context?

While the Royal Society dithered, the government’s demand for scientific military advice intensified along with the Cold War. Aspects of the ongoing relations between science, government and defence are covered in this volume by Agar, and in the chapter jointly authored by Agar and Balmer. Agar’s account in Chapter 5 of the Defence Research Committee (DRC f.1963) forms a useful counterpart to Goodchild’s account of personal relationships, showing how science and government were negotiated in that unavoidable twentieth-century entity, the committee. The DRC ‘kept a critical watch on defence research, greenlighting some major projects and closing others, drawing in external advice while expressing internal interests, [and] compared British programmes with those of allies and enemies’. As both Agar and Goodchild note en passant, the pathways of advice created strange dead-ends in the maze of scientific governance, places where the democratic spirit of science (and of science in democracy) broke down and where the left hands were hidden from the right.

As has been explored elsewhere, the era of the military-industrial-academic complex redefined the nature of science itself; in the terms of this book, it brought science into political governance – even if it was not inherently military in its nature.⁵⁸ In Chapter 6 Agar and Balmer provide a nuanced, close-up account of such a process in action, examining ‘military dimensions of, and reactions to, early genetic engineering’ – a story that is of value both to the history of genetics as well as military science. They argue that ‘decoupling’ was a crucial part of this governance: although there is no evidence that the British government sought to develop new weapons via the new technologies, nevertheless scientists and civil servants, in conjunction with the wider public, reconfigured the science by actively decoupling it from its military potential. The intersection and dissociation to which they point undoubtedly has relevance to later twentieth-century events.

Veneer’s Chapter 7, on North Sea geology, provides another insight into governmental negotiations of science during the Cold War. It concerns the efforts of the Institute of Geological Sciences to survey the North Sea on behalf of the Ministry of Power during the 1960s. Veneer argues that the relationship between these two entities evolved from one of state patronage of science to ‘a model based upon both planned science and scientific planning’. Moreover, her work highlights the labile nature of expertise in such rearrangements: ‘how and when [administrators] come to realise what expertise they require; how crucial … expertise really is; how (and whether) this expertise can be fitted into existing administrative structures; and, finally,