Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin
by Francis Spufford
250pp, Faber, £14.99
Boffin: slang: 1. An elderly naval officer; 2. One engaged in scientific or technical research, 1945. Thus the OED. The very word is redolent of pipe-smoking, bespectacled men creating improbable weapons out of old tin cans, who populate those black and white movies endlessly recycled on daytime TV. And backroom boys, with their echoes of Nigel Balchin's surly but heroic wartime bomb-disposal expert? Surely they all disappeared with Star Trek and intergalactic superheroes? It's no surprise to find Francis Spufford's chapters interspersed with scenes from Dan Dare, clean-cut hero of the Eagle, that great comic of my youth. Boffins surely only survive in would-be funny headlines to tabloid accounts of the latest piece of scientific foolery, such as finding out what makes biscuits go soggy. Anyhow, judging by his photo, Spufford is far too young for this to be anything other than retro chic. So I very nearly didn't review the book. I knew I was going to hate it.
How wrong could I be? You wouldn't think that a book describing the fall and rise of British technologies since 1945 could be unputdownable, but Spufford shows it can be done. For starters, the man writes like a dream - informed, fresh, racy prose even when immersed in the dire depths of trying to explain how millions of subscribers can use mobile phones simultaneously across narrow frequency ranges. For a while even this somewhat technophobic biologist thought he could understand. Similes flow from his pen, as when at the height of the telecom boom he describes how barrow-boys turned City speculators looking out of their high-rise windows were able to "practically see the vapour trails of money forming out there" every time someone used their mobile.
Six case studies epitomise what Spufford sees as the fall and now rise of British boffinry. Each story provides a mix of dedicated researchers, technological ingenuity, financial manipulation and political manoeuvring. Each is meticulously researched through archive and interview. The first is the classic failure story of post-war rocketry in an impoverished country still believing it could punch above its weight by creating giant fireworks whose names speak hubris - Blue Streak, Black Arrow, Black Knight. Each in turn, deprived of the necessary financial and political Viagra, sadly detumesces. An ambiguous success comes next, the rescuing of the absurdly impracticable Concorde by ingenious accounting showing that it need not be the loss leader everyone assumed.
Then comes a switch. If the country could not sustain ambitious projects involving expensive hardware, perhaps the answer lay in software. It may be ironic that Britain, which saw the birth of the industrial revolution in the bitter facticity of Gradgrind's Coketown, should now rely on those ingenious timewasters, computer games, as major export earners, but Spufford is entranced by the smell of success. Then in quick succession come the unexpected transition of mobile phones from rich man's toy to adolescent necessity, which made Vodafone a major world player; the British role in the Human Genome Project (HGP); and finally the as-yet incomplete saga of Beagle 2, due to land on Mars this Christmas to investigate the (unlikely) possibility of detecting recognisable life.
To me these tales of failure and success carry somewhat different messages than those Spufford enthuses over. It's not the technology, stupid, it's the political economy. The aeronautical winner is not Concorde, but Airbus, a European collaborative project offering relatively cheap mass transport, not superspeed for the rich. Mobile phones took off in Europe rather than the US, as he makes clear, because the uniform standards imposed by the European agencies provided continent-wide connectivity and markets. As for the genome project, sure, Britain, and particularly the Wellcome Trust, played an important role in keeping the international public sequencing effort alive in the face of private competition - but 70% of the work and most of the instrumentation involved was American rather than British. And despite the PR of its designers and builders and the enthusiastic support of Britain's minister for science, the major funding for Beagle comes from the European Space Agency, to which Britain is a minor contributor.
Truth to tell, these new boffins bear little resemblance to those of the past - and small back rooms are the last place you are likely to find them. John Sulston, the British hero of the HGP, combined the running of a vast factory churning out the As, Cs, Gs and Ts of the DNA sequence with shrewd political footwork, and together with Michael Morgan of Wellcome he acquired the public relations skills to prevent being upstaged by the arch-privateer Craig Venter.
Colin Pillinger, Beagle's driving force, has spent much of the past five years touring TV studios and dreaming up publicity wheezes, such as recruiting Damien Hirst and Blur for the visual and sound signals Beagle will be sending, in his efforts to raise the wind. Science and technology have changed irreversibly, from the craft skills of lonely pioneers to vast enterprises involving thousands. Today's backroom boys and girls are more likely to be found sequestered in the factory-like labs of the pharmaceutical industry, waiting for the moment when they can move up and out into sales or management. Despite Spufford's passionate advocacy, the romantics had better stick to science fiction.
· A new edition of Steven Rose's The Making of Memory has just been published by Cape.