What would a 19th-century science hero make of today's policy world?

John Tyndall – the 19th-century Irish scientist (c. 1822–93), not the 20th-century neo-Nazi – was the man who measured the absorption of heat by gases in the atmosphere, underpinning our modern understanding of climate change, meteorology and weather, and explained why the sky is blue (among much else). He was also scientific adviser to the Board of Trade from 1867 to 1883, so he knew a bit about the policy world. I have just completed his biography, the first substantive profile of him for more than 70 years. It has struck me how similar today’s big questions about the direction and funding of scientific research are to those of 150 years ago.

When Tyndall started his career, and became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1852, government expenditure on “basic science” was small. The Royal Society administered a government grant of £1,000 per annum, which could only be spent on apparatus. Even allowing for a factor of a hundred to give a modern equivalent, and the relatively simple and low-cost apparatus of the time, it is a negligible sum. When this grant was suddenly increased to £4,000 in 1876 there was a flurry of concern in the higher echelons of the Royal Society as to how they were going to manage the increase. Tyndall was a member of the government grant committee for many years. He received several hundred pounds from the fund over the years, at a time when the concept of a conflict of interest would not have occurred to anyone.

Throughout his career, Tyndall argued that the scientific researcher should be allowed complete freedom of choice of his (necessarily male) research agenda. But that did not mean that he had no time for the application and commercialisation of scientific discoveries. Tyndall objected to patents, and never took one out himself, despite several opportunities. Nevertheless, he wrote: “There exists no category of science to which the name applied science could be given. We have science and the applications of science, which are united as the fruit is to the tree.” Tyndall was perhaps an early believer in the “linear model”, the idea that discoveries come first and are then applied or commercialised.

Though Tyndall’s early work — on magnetism, glacier motion and heat — seems to have been driven solely by scientific curiosity and the desire to understand the observed phenomena in structural and molecular terms, his later researches have more diverse stimuli. That is particularly true of his work on germ theory (supporting the idea of germs as infectious agents and arguing against the spontaneous generation of life) and on the transmission of sound in the atmosphere. Tyndall believed it was vital for improving human health that the germ theory, championed by people like Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister, be shown to be true. He worked over many years to break down scientific and medical resistance to the theory. Tyndall’s work on the transmission of sound through the atmosphere came from his role as scientific adviser to the Board of Trade on lighthouse matters. In conducting research on foghorns, he came to an understanding that the state of water vapour in the atmosphere affected the transmission of sound.

Despite this, Tyndall would have been the first to argue that it was he who had chosen the research focus, and that he was not to be directed by anyone else. He had no time for bureaucrats. In a lecture on the electric light in 1879, a novelty at the time, he declared:

So what would Tyndall have thought of United Kingdom Research and Innovation, or UKRI, the new national funding agency for science and research? Is it a hierarchy with wisdom?

In a recent talk at the Institute for Government, Sir Mark Walport, chief executive of UKRI, outlined the strategy of the new organisation, which has been entrusted with public funds that Tyndall could only dream of. Walport set out the management agenda on such matters as challenge funds, roadmaps, talent development, commercialisation and collaboration. The peer-review process within UKRI, for selecting which research proposals to fund within allocated budgets, remains sacrosanct. But he also stressed the need to bring “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches together, involving and responding to the scientific community, and highlighted the importance of wider societal engagement.

Tyndall would have vigorously objected to any hint of the control of research directions by non-scientists, and would have demanded that only his scientific peers could make judgments about what research to fund. He would have been strongly opposed to the idea of “challenge” funding directed by politicians, but would have supported the peer review process that decides funding decisions at the individual level, within the constituent parts of UKRI. He might well have accepted the current system as a political compromise (not that he was normally one to compromise), but he would have been outspoken about anything he deemed an interference by politicians or other non-scientists. In that sense, his views are perhaps not so far from the views of many scientists now.

The one dimension that is different today is the emphasis on public engagement and involvement. In Tyndall’s time, public engagement was a purely one-way process, from the expert scientist to the layperson (and Tyndall was one of the best communicators of his generation). Today, we recognise the importance of a wider social licence for science to operate. We also see the value of reasoned public input into policymaking around controversial issues involving science and technology, so that public values, views and expertise, can be understood and incorporated. The Sciencewise programme, which has supported this process over many years, gives UKRI a useful means of informing research trajectories, for example around “grand challenges”, where societal assumptions and implications may be particularly evident. It also continues to offer opportunities to government departments, grappling with the policy implications of scientific and technological developments, and public priorities and responses to them.

Tyndall was no democrat, and certainly no supporter of female emancipation. At a time when only a proportion of men, and no women, had the vote, he would have been baffled by the idea of democratic discussion of the direction of research and innovation. That is perhaps the biggest change between the discourse of today and that of the Victorian era.