The right man for the moment?

Given the amount of flak the Medical Research Council has attracted recently, the appointment of a skilled communicator to its top job seems a good move.Geoff Watts talks to Colin Blakemore

During one of the many animal rights demonstrations outside his house, Professor Colin Blakemore recalls a woman armed with a megaphone shouting, “Come on out, Blakemore. We know you developed thalidomide.” In some quarters, it seems, Colin Blakemore is viewed as scientifically omnipotent. As the Medical Research Council's new chief executive, a dash of omnipotence—scientific or otherwise—would no doubt come in handy over the next few years. But Blakemore's own assessment is more modest. When the post fell vacant he sent a note to the headhunting agency, saying, “I suppose there's no possibility that I could be a suitable candidate, is there?” To his surprise he got a call saying, “Why not?”

Colin Blakemore: “We suffer so much from suspicions about science, it's important that the public see and hear from jobbing scientists”

Credit:MEDICAL RESEARCH COUNCIL

Why not indeed? Waynflete professor of physiology at Oxford, skilful science communicator, staunch defender of the use of animals in medical research… good choice, you might think. There are, though, backwaters of academia where some of Blakemore's strengths might be seen as question marks. That combative stance in relation to animal testing, for one thing. The mark of someone willing to take on the opposition—but also a bit high profile, a bit risky. And all that media stuff, getting up for the Today programme, appearing in television science documentaries: a bit… populist, perhaps?

Wisely, in view of its current difficulties, the MRC chose to treat his strengths as just that. At a time when science attracts only modest public sympathy, when the MRC is still bruised from the mauling dished out by the parliamentary science and technology committee, and when some medical researchers are less than enchanted with the council, the new chief executive will need all his communication skills—and determination.

Now, as ever, Blakemore talks of science with the enthusiasm of someone who always knew where he was heading. But in fact he didn't. He didn't even intend to be a scientist. From a working class background, he embarked on medicine; it was the one profession he knew about.

He read natural sciences at Cambridge and planned to do his clinical training at St Thomas's in London. But he went to the University of California in Berkeley to do a year's research. The project went well. He stayed for more than two years and did a PhD. He returned to Britain as an academic scientist, first at Cambridge and later at Oxford, specialising in brain research.

Director since 1996 of the MRC's Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, he delights in having been in on the birth of that subject. When he began work, he recalls, researchers still thought of the mammalian brain as largely hard wired: like invertebrates but more elaborate. That naive view has been replaced by a dawning awareness of the extent of the brain's plasticity—an awareness to which Blakemore himself contributed through his early work on the visual cortex, and the clinical significance of visual disturbances in early life.

Much of that work was on cats—the origin of Blakemore's longstanding troubles with the animal rights lobby—if “troubles” isn't too mild a word to describe physical threats that include letter bombs and arson attempts on the family home. He became a target because, exceptionally, he was prepared to defend what he did publicly. But the past three years have been peaceful; he hopes the worst is over.

Another and happier thread has been the communication of science. His first experience—in the days when BBC Radio 3 viewed science as a part of culture—was contributing to John Maddox's regular programme Scientifically Speaking. Within months he'd been invited to deliver the 1976 Reith lectures. He's been one of the public faces of science ever since.

He sees it as part pleasure, part obligation. “We suffer so much from suspicions about science, it's important that the public see and hear from jobbing scientists, and realise they're ordinary people.”

MPs' recent critical assessment of the MRC claimed to be voicing the complaints of anonymous medical scientists. “That they should be afraid to declare their identity is a bad sign in itself,” says Blakemore. “But I know from talking to people [he pauses, choosing his words carefully]… I know there have been various forms of dissatisfaction with the MRC in the past year or two. Basically they have to do with a lack of money.”

Under Major's Conservative government, and in the early period of “new” Labour, the MRC's income declined in real terms. That's been reversed— although, as Blakemore remarks, even now the total MRC budget is about a 40th of that of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), or about a fifth of last year's increase in the NIH budget. “If people are expecting me to wave a magic wand and provide for everybody's needs, it can't happen.”

He does accept the case for more transparency in MRC spending. And he'll be at open meetings in a dozen universities, finding out what scientists themselves are thinking. But on the issue of doing more for researchers who don't work in big interdisciplinary groups, all he'll say is that he wants the MRC to be “as flexible and responsive as it can be within its budgetary restraints”—a form of words designed, reasonably enough, to close the questioning.

Many scientists I've spoken to think that the MRC has picked the man for the times. But why did the job appeal to him? “I sometimes begin to wonder,” he jokes. “But after 25 years at Oxford [he's 59] I felt there might be something else I could do with the rest of my working life. I'm very happy doing research and would no doubt push out a few more Nature papers and despatch a few more graduate students into the fray. But the evidence is that people do their best work when they're younger.”

Best research work, that is. As Colin Blakemore no doubt hopes to demonstrate, other skills improve with age.