Better to Be British?

ANOTHER ONE DOWN THE BRAIN DRAIN, screamed a headline in London's Evening News. Within four days, 16 leading scientists suddenly announced they were leaving Britain for the U.S., thus joining an alarming flight of key talent, which last year cost Britain 17% of its new crop of scientific Ph.D.s. Of these, about half settled in the U.S.

Although higher salaries (up to four times as much) are part of the inducement for emigration, the underlying reason is that Britain today does not give its scientists the prestige, the independence, or the research facilities offered by the U.S. And right now, Britain is in the midst of a crash program of university expansion (TIME, Oct. 11), which has further reduced the funds, space and time for research that the nation's top brains demand. Said Professor Ian Bush, 35, a brilliant physiologist who is taking a nine-man team from the University of Birmingham to new quarters in the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in Shrewsbury, Mass.: "Most of us feel extremely cramped and frustrated."

His Own Typist. Bush, for example, is forced to teach medical students with equipment that is 20 to 40 years out of date. He could have received a grant to buy a new electron microscope, he said, but he could not get the money to remodel a room with soundproofing and wiring for the delicate instrument. Lesser irritations are also common. Owing to a shortage of secretaries and typewriters, Bush often had to type his own letters.

Bush's switch stunned the Medical Research Council, which complained that after financing his work for years, "the benefit will be felt in the U.S." When such eminent scientists as the University of Bristol's Maurice Pryce, chief of the theoretical physics division at the government atomic energy center at Harwell, and Anthony Pople, head of the basic physics research at the Teddington National Laboratory, also said they were leaving for the U.S., the exodus touched off a political uproar.

When Kant Had a Cold. Labor Party Leader Harold Wilson, who has made education a chief issue for the forthcoming election, demanded an investigation by a Royal Commission and went on the radio to decry the "miserably inadequate" research facilities provided by the government. Liberal Party Chief Jo Grimond pointed to the low prestige that Britain grants its intellectuals. "The citizens of Konigsberg rang church bells when Immanuel Kant recovered from a cold," he said. "Here nobody even gave one cheer for our scientists until they started to leave the country."

It was all very embarrassing for the Tories. In desperation, Quintin Hogg, Minister for Science, mustered a patriotic appeal: "It is better to be British than anything else," said Hogg, whose mother was the daughter of a Nashville, Tenn., judge. "No other conviction will serve in a time of discomfort."

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