BP Pumps Money Into Unlikely Projects, From Plants To Lasers

Thanks to physicist Don Braben, the oil giant funds Nobeists and little-known scientists when no one will LONDON—Harvard chemist Dudley Herschbach was reading a copy of Physics Today one day in 1981 when he came across an article on quantum chromodynamics. It explained how physicists use dimensional contraction to calculate the energy levels of subatomic particles. Intrigued, the soon-to-be Nobel laureate thought this might make a good exercise for his chemistry students to apply to atomic electron levels. To his astonishment, he found that with a handheld calculator he was getting more accuracy than legions of theoretical chemists could manage with their supercomputers. Having found an “easy” approach to a tough problem, Herschbach couldn’t wait to plunge into subatomic energy levels. But here came a snag to pursue the investigation further, he needed big bucks and a substantial amount of time to devote to the problem, and the classic funding sources wouldn’t help. Three times the National Science Foundation turned down applications for funding from an about-to-be Nobelist! Asked how this could be, Herschbach says that as a Harvard professor who had made his name in gas kinetics, be was not supposed to change horses in midcareer. And if that was the reasoning of his peer reviewers, then their preconceptions could well have stifled first-rate science at its conception. But, while the cham pagne corks were still popping after his Nobel was announced. Herschbach overheard a British executive describe a no-strings scheme to finance basic research ideas. Could he help? Yes, he could. and now Herschbach is happily extending dimensional contraction methods toward molecules of industrial significance—something that quantum chemists have never managed The latter-day Medici who supported this leap in the dark was Don Braben, and the surprising thing is that he works for British Petroleum, a hard-nosed oil company that belongs to an industry usually not noted for philanthropy. In an era when industry seems increasingly interested in short-term payoffs, BP’s Venture Research Unit—headed by Braben— isn’t interested in rushing a new widget onto the market. Instead, it is spending about $4 million each year on blue sky research that offers no hint of a product for BP These projects are carried out by a handful of talented, independent scientists like plant biologists Mike Bennett and Pat Heslop-Harrison, who needed funds to follow up on the enticing hint of a previously unrecognized arrangement of genes in cells, or Edsger Dijkstra, who is attempting nothing less than to streamline the process of mathematical argument. At first, these scientists couldn’t believe their ears. Braben’s willingness to fund innovative, untargeted science, with no strings attached, seemed too good to be true. ‘The news we are giving out comes so unexpectedly from an industrial source that we have the greatest difficulty getting it understood,” says Braben. “But here we are, offering tremendous freedom, and there really isn’t a catch!” That’s why Braben conceived the notion of a “venture research” unit. A Ph.D. in particle physics and a member of the Science and Engineering Research Council (which administers approximately half of the U.K.’s pure science budget), Braben perceived that “the bureaucratization of the scientific enterprise was becoming a real problem.” Through work at the Research Council he met Jack Birks, BP’s managing director for research and technology It was Birks who, in 1979, agreed to hire Braben and to foot the bill for his brainchild. According to Venture Research Unit policy Braben will only look at projects that meet the criteria of being “new, exploratory, open-ended research leading to new understanding.” Moreover, the Venture Research Unit will not take the initiative in approaching scientists. “If we go out and look for scientists to support, we will automatically go to the famous and the well-connected,” Braben says with his characteristic frankness. To the iconoclastic physicist, science's rich and famous are not necessarily the people who will be the most scientifically productive in the future. A case in point is Steve Davies of Oxford University’s Dyson Perrins Laboratory. A highly regarded and intensely ambitious young researcher, Davies wanted to investigate the basic mechanisms by which chiral compounds (those that display left- or right-handedness) can be synthesized. Although potentially important in pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals where synthetic compounds have to interact with left-handed nature, the project was primarily speculative. The Venture Research Unit helped him set up a research group of the appropriate size, and, surprisingly, Davies soon had a patentable product. Today his group has grown in number to 20, but the Venture Research Unit, which funds four positions, is still the largest single source of support. “I’ve a lot of time for BP,” Davies says. “They let me get on with the work I want to do.” Ironically, the iron acetyl “artificial enzyme” compound that Da- vies discovered is now marketed by BP—which causes Braben some difficulty, since it seems to contradict his assertion that BP is not looking for a product. Still, the Venture Research Unit assiduously abides by Braben’s second rule: that there be no mention of products. Says the unit leader “They automatically distort the science.” Venture researcher Edsger Dijkstra, a mathematician at the University of Texas, Austin, will certainly second that. Dijkstra’s desire is to come to the aid of science and engineering students the world over who are struggling under the weight of complex formulas and cumbersome mathematical argument. Though a noble quest, there is certainly little prospect of getting a product out of Dijkstra’s project. Nevertheless, Braben enthusiastically authorized a grant, and Dijkstra was brought into the fold. Having a “noble” idea isn’t enough to get BP bucks, though. Herschbach, Davies, and Dijkstra are members of a very select group. Only one in five of the researchers who approach the Venture Research Unit are asked to meet Braben’s team. The 10% or so of those who are visibly “consumed” by their idea, and who can formulate a convincing research program, will be signed on for an initial three-year period to the tune, on average, of $180,000 per year. Surprisingly, researchers don’t have to be university academics to be eligible. Mike Bennett and Pat Heslop-Harrison, both plant geneticists, came across their idea while working for the Plant Breeding Institute in Cambridge. They discovered that the chromosomes in plant cell nuclei were not the random “genetic spaghetti” that everyone supposed—the disarray came from the cells being squashed flat in the microscope. But to extend their hypothesis of a higher order of genetic arrangement to animal and human cells meant stepping outside the realm of the Plant Breeding Institute. So, with the full permission of their profit-making employer, they approached BP’s Venture Research Unit, which now funds the work that their company cannot support. It is just such unusual, risky research, Braben contends, that is being strangled by the current funding process. ‘The science that will take us by surprise, like warm superconductors did, can’t be predicted—however hard you try, however clever your advisers are,” be says. “At the margin of science, where new discoveries come, there are 5% or 10% of scientists who want to do something new, whose starting point is that our present understanding is wrong. Such people are ambitious, courageous, and they need one commodity above all the freedom to follow their heretical line.” And they need to be encouraged, he says, because in today’s climate everyone encourages cautious, “next-step” science. “Peer review works—after a fashion—in mainstream science. It’s as good as anything for selecting evolutionary science. But for revolutionary research that starts off by saying ‘received wisdom is wrong,’ you don’t get approval from a peer-review system.” And it is not just young researchers without track records who have problems starting new fields even the eminent, as Dudley Herschbach will testify, find that peer-review committees look with disfavor on new ideas. John Polanyi, a colleague of Herschbach’s with whom he shared the 1986 Nobel Prize, had cause to seek Venture Research funding, as well. He too had spent much of a career working on gas kinetics—in fact, his 30 years in the Lash Miller Chemical Laboratories at Toronto University led to the invention of the chemical laser. But in the early 1980s Polanyi went through what he describes as “scientific midlife crisis.” He felt that his vein of research had been mined out. Then an observation that reactions can be initiated between molecules absorbed on crystal surfaces led his group to develop the Surface-Aligned Photoreaction technique. “We called it SAP because we’d been turned down so often and laughed at so thoroughly!” says Polanyi. Partial funding for SAP came from the Venture Research Unit, which Polanyi describes as “a far-sighted sponsor of quite farfetched research.” Shouldn’t governments be supporting this sort of science? Braben doesn’t think so. “Industrialists are the only people who could be involved in this sort of thing he says. “If you’re spending public money you expect to be publicly accountable—and that means peer review. Industry is only accountable to shareholders, and BP is prepared to take risks.” Of course, with risk comes a certain amount of failure, but because the Venture Research Unit is looking for new science, not results, failures can be difficult to pinpoint, One eminent metallurgist, Sir Peter Hirsch of Oxford University, a former chairman of the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority, changed tracks to study brittle-ductile transisition temperatures in ceramics. Physicists knew that small amounts of doping compounds radically altered the ductility of gernianium. Did this happen in other semiconductors such as silicon? Hirsch eventually found that it did—but the change in ductile transition temperature was so small (some 150 C. in 6000) that it was of no industrial significance. Braben was not disappointed. Hirsch had found out how the dopants changed the ductility. “That may be a failure in industrial terms, but it’s not a scientific failure, and we could never have known it in advance,” Braben says. Obviously, BP is not the only British company supporting academic science. Imperial Chemical Industries has a respected funding program which currently grants $10.6 million per year to British universities in the form of 250 Ph.D. studentships and 60 research collaborations. Nonetheless, the amount of hard cash available from industry for blue sky research is so tiny that the British government has issued formal complaints that industry doesn’t spend enough on research. In 1986, for example, British industry as a whole spent $10 billion on R&D—only 1% of which went to higher education. And most of this 1%, British scientists point out, went to projects of direct interest to the companies. By comparison, during the same period U.S. companies spent over $50 billion on R&D—and many of these companies are increasing the proportion of their R&D budget that is spent on basic research. Under the “Rothschild arrangements” British government departments are supposed to spend 10% of their research money on basic research (few do so). One or two enlightened companies have similar arrangements for their in-house research teams. But with increasing sums being given to the arts in sponsorship, British scientists suggest, could not research directors persuade their boards that a little Medici-like patronage of the sciences would not go amiss? As Braben’s unit has shown, a tiny slice of a major corporation’s budget can be made to go a long way in fundamental science. Richard Stevenson is deputy editor of Chemistry in Britain.

BP Pumps Money Into Unlikely Projects, From Plants To Lasers

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