Open science
I’ve nearly finished the book The Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin by Francis Spufford1. It’s a very involving book, and beautifully written. Francis Spufford manages to explain some rather complex concepts in a simple and engaging way, without ‘dumbing down’, and he captures the characters of the people involved very well.
The chapter on the British Rocket programme (‘Flying Spitfires to Other Planets’) was very interesting, and I won’t quickly get rid of the image of Ray Dommettâone of the main people involved in Britain’s nuclear defence programmeâtaking part in Morris dancing in his spare time:
Another of the rocketmen I talked to spotted him by chance in Bristol. ‘These Morris men came dancing up the street, led by this big fat bloke in a kind of Andy Pandy outfit who was bopping people on the head with a pig’s bladderâand I said to my wife, “Sweetheart, you won’t believe me, but that man is one of the brains behind Britain’s nuclear defence.”’
I also liked the chapter on the Human Genome Project, ‘The Gift’. It’s also an important story. For those who don’t know the background, in 1998, a consortium in the US (later to be called Celera) fronted by Craig Venter announced that they would be forming a private company to take over the sequencing of the whole of the human genomeâa task that had been started by various labs funded by the National Institute of Health in the States and by the Medical Research Council and The Wellcome Trust in the UK. They were going to throw huge resources at it, and aimed to finish the sequence two years or so earlier than the projected public effort completion date. The real stinger was that they weren’t going to make the results freely available to scientists, but to charge a subscription fee for access to the database.
