The world needs to change how it does science

What What would you do if you had £60m to play with? Some people would invest it. Many would buy a bigger house. A few would go on a spending spree. Me, I’d try to change the way the world does science. And thanks to the far-sightedness of the British fintech founder and philanthropist, Ben Delo, I may soon have the chance to do just that.

Crazy as it may sound, the dominant global model for doing science is a frozen accident. It has its origins in the innovations of a German intellectual named Wilhelm von Humboldt, who in the climate of nationalism that arose after Prussia’s defeat by Napoleon, pioneered a radically new type of university. Up to that point, professors had been paid to teach. Von Humboldt decreed that they should not only be teachers but also researchers. Thus was born the split-personality university, where academics divide their time between teaching and research. As a model for universities, this proved phenomenally contagious, being adopted throughout Germany, then in America and Britain and elsewhere. But in a way von Humboldt never intended, it also became the de facto model for doing science.

Today nearly all scientific research is done at universities, by researchers who have to spend most of their time on teaching and admin. Pick up a copy of the journal Nature and check the first dozen papers. Chances are, all of them are written by university scientists. This trend is particularly evident in Britain, which gives non-university institutes less than 1 per cent of funding in the physical sciences.

We live in a world in which technology is changing faster than ever, yet the way we make scientific discoveries is stuck in a Prussian rut. Even the handful of independent institutes that exist, where scientists do get to do research full-time, are invariably afflicted by the bureaucratic spirit that plagues university academia—not to mention the ups and downs of government support. Witness the travails of the Alan Turing Institute, where government backing now depends on its switching its research focus to security. More recently, UKRI announced 30 per cent cuts to research in astrophysics and particle physics, prompting fears that physics departments will close. The picture in America is even worse, thanks to heavy cuts by the current administration, which are causing the layoff of thousands of scientists.

This is why, several years ago, I created an institute to explore a better way to do science. At the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences, which focuses on theoretical physics and mathematics, researchers are treated like the intellectual equivalent of world-class athletes, which is what they are. That means they get three things they would struggle to find elsewhere: the chance to do research full-time; expert help with funding, doing and communicating their work; and coaching on how to operate at the height of their abilities.

We received a big boost when the Russian-born philanthropist and businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky gave us several million pounds to recruit world-class Russian scientists looking to build their careers in London. But keeping a physics institute afloat without government support is not an easy task. Which is why Ben Delo’s contribution will be transformative. He is giving us £10m now, and another £10m in matched funding if we can raise a third £10m. This is the lead gift in a fundraising campaign to build ourselves an endowment of £60m, which we are launching today. Why £60m? Endowments are ringfenced so that the interest provides an income in perpetuity. The interest from £30m, along with our research grants and other forms of support, will make us stable at our current size. With £60m, we can hire more world-class scientists and tackle more ambitious projects, immune from the slings and arrows of outrageous science policy.

We are calling our endowment drive “the exceptional campaign”, partly for mathematical reasons. Lie groups, named after the Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie (pronounced “lee”), describe the continuous symmetries of mathematical objects, of which the simplest example is a circle: however you rotate it, it looks the same. Most such groups belong to regular families describing the symmetries of geometric objects. Yet five “exceptional“ groups stand out, including the exceptional Lie group E6, which crops up in geometry, number theory and string theory. E6 has dimension 78. £60m equals $78m. Q.E.D.

For anyone who zoned out at “mathematical objects”, we also have three less recherché reasons why our campaign is exceptional. First, our institute is an exception to the general rule that science is done at universities. Second, we are a rare haven for curiosity-driven research: the kind done without regard for how useful it may be, which invariably leads to the biggest breakthroughs. Third, because our target is unusually ambitious. For a point of comparison, in the league table of British university endowments, a £60m fund would place the London Institute a little behind Aberdeen, which was founded in 1495.

As a boy, our benefactor Ben Delo was diagnosed with autism. He weaponised it to win a place at Oxford, where he studied maths and computer science, after which he made a fortune by setting up the world’s leading platform for trading crypto-currency. We share Delo’s single-mindedness and start-up attitude, just as he shares our passion for fundamental discovery. In short, he believes what we believe: that science worldwide is too important to be left to fly-by-night politicians, and that Britain in particular—the home of Newton and Maxwell, Dirac and Penrose—is too good at it not to care about getting better.

Dr Thomas Fink is director of the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences.