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As the threat to the Nuclear Structure Facility at the Daresbury Laboratory
in Cheshire grew this year some physicists protested by writing to their
MPs. Some tried quiet, private meetings with the facility’s paymaster, the
Science and Engineering Research Council. But only one got really angry
in public.

Like a one-man band, John Sharpey-Shafer has sometimes single-handedly
banged the drum for the NSF in the media. This week at the BA, this professor
at the University of Liverpool said what he thought of the science establishment
that is closing down the machine he loves.

‘The decision to close the NSF was not made on scientific grounds,’
he said. ‘And it is carelessly wasting the taxpayers’ investment in British
science.

‘In circles in which the study of science policy is a respectable academic
activity, the mention of ‘UK science’ and ‘policy’ in the same sentence
causes ribald laughter. The consequence of squeezed and then further squeezed
budgets, especially over the past 10 years, has been to reduce most basic
science to its core programme. There are few or no funds available for speculative
projects. Soon we will achieve the scientific status of Poland – lots of
talent but economically second-rate.’

For the past six months, Sharpey-Shafer has bombarded the media with
colourful press releases lampooning the science establishment. Kenneth Clarke,
the cabinet minister responsible for science, was ‘idiotic’, Mark Richmond,
chairman of the SERC, ‘a bully’. But the most celebrated ambush was reserved
for David Phillips, chairman of the Advisory Board for the Research Councils,
which oversees science spending. When Sharpey-Shafer relayed an unguarded
comment by Phillips that ‘physicists are useless’, it became one of the
most quoted phrases about science.

Dickensian is how colleagues describe Sharpey-Shafer, not because of
his views but because of the bombastic way he delivers them. ‘You can imagine
him giving lectures to Victorian medical students,’ said a friend.

Sharpey-Shafer puts his success with the media down to journalists’
need for interesting stories. ‘And some of us are just less inhibited than
others,’ he said.

He finds all this politicking a distraction. ‘It is a total pain for
us,’ he says. ‘It takes 50 per cent of our time.’ But most of his lecture
at the BA consisted of an overview of the progress made by nuclear structure
physicists in the past couple of years. Only at the end came a plea for
the Prime Minister to intervene and ‘rapidly sort out the present mess that
UK research is in’.