Advanced Research and Invention

At the time of writing, a Government Bill to establish the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) as a statutory corporation is passing through parliament.  The Bill sets out ARIA’s functions – ‘focused on conducting “ambitious” scientific research with a tolerance to failure, and on developing, exploiting and sharing scientific knowledge, such as translating basic scientific research into more commercial technologies. It enables the Secretary of State to provide ARIA with funding.’

Modelled in part on the US DARPA scheme, this agency will sit outside the structures of UKRI and be given a greater degree of independence from government in its decision-making than other government-backed funders. The idea behind ARIA is largely attributed to Dominic Cummings, and perhaps this acronym was chosen to reflect the meaning in opera, where ‘Arias mostly appear during a pause in dramatic action when a character is reflecting on their emotions.’ 

But what kind of activity will this new agency seek to fund and how will it help the UK to become, in the Government’s words, a ‘scientific superpower’? It doesn’t actually have all that much to spend - a mere £ 800M is promised in total over 4 years with only £ 50M in 2021-22 (which is initially even less than the Arts and Humanities Research Council annual budget of £ 110M!) The published information is vague, and it is not yet known who will be its first Chief Executive or Chair of the Board. It is likely that this funding will be distributed to a very small number of programme managers who will commission projects that are directed towards a target invention. The Government’s recent Innovation Strategy states however: ‘We do not know what ARIA will create – that is the point’.

Given the lack of published implementation detail, it is timely to offer some advice about how the ARIA should best spend its money. From the Agency’s title, the spend surely has to be on Advanced (or dare I say ‘Excellent’) Research that will lead to Invention.

Thinking about some important ‘inventions’ of the 20^th and 21^st centuries – such as the Laser, the World Wide Web, the Cavity Magnetron (developed by Randall and Boot on our Edgbaston campus in the 1940s) or the Nanopore Sequencer – these and many more inventions had certain characteristics in common. 

First, the invention of these devices led to a genuine step change in capability – these weren’t inventions that merely improved on what had existed before by a factor of 1.5 – but rather, they led to completely new capabilities and properties that no other technology could match.

Second the inventors did not even begin to anticipate how wide ranging the applications of their invention would be.  Since the creation of the first practical device in the early 1960s, the Laser has subsequently been used in applications including corrective eye surgery, boring holes in walls, optical fibre and satellite communications, supermarket checkouts, pollutant detection, optical disk readers (CDs), and tattoo removal, as well as countless scientific applications. In his autobiographical account ‘How the Laser Happened’ (originally a ‘Maser’ 70 years ago, where the ‘M’ stands for ‘Microwave’ rather than L for ‘Light’), Charles Townes recalled:  ’Colleagues used to tease me “That’s a great idea, but it’s a solution looking for a problem”.  The truth is none of us imagined how many uses there might be’. At the time they wanted to create a more intense source of millimetre-wave radiation (short wavelength microwaves) in order to do spectroscopic experiments that would reveal chemical structures and enhance chemical reactivity. The inventors also did not anticipate how further rounds of inventions would be spawned from the original invention. The quantum sensor technologies that are being developed here on our campus by Kai Bongs and colleagues today, have their origins in the field of cold-atom science that developed as a scientific application of the Laser (the 1997 Physics Nobel prize was awarded for Laser Cooling).  Likewise, the UoB-invented Cavity Magnetron led to a transformation of radar capabilities almost immediately, but ultimately to the microwave oven, with over a billion magnetrons sold to date.

Third, basic science played a key role in such developments, and often within a university or academic environment.  The nanopore sequencer has been employed at the heart of identifying and tracking new variants of the COVID-19, as exemplified by the leading work of Nick Loman and colleagues at Birmingham. The Oxford Nanopore sequencer was originally developed following curiosity-driven experiments in US universities in the 1990s, and then at Oxford University in 2001 - where in the Chemistry Department, Bayley and co-workers demonstrated that strands of DNA could be sequenced by observing the electrical signals generated as single molecules passed through a nanopore in a protein membrane.  Different bases of the DNA sequence gave distinctive signals as they passed through the nanopore (Nature 2001) – hence the nanopore sequencer was born. In that case, and for many other inventions, it was the iterative and interactive development of the underpinning science in close contact with the creation of the working device that led to the sequencer in use today.

And finally the inventions came about because funders backed brilliant people who had the creative and imaginative ideas that led to inventions, the deep-seated instinct that what they were doing could be really important (without necessarily pinpointing why), the resilience and tenacity to see through their invention to a degree of viability where it could be developed further, the foresight (or maybe good fortune) to collaborate with the right partners who could help to move the project forward, and the self-confidence to know that high quality (‘advanced’) research matters to society, even when we don’t know exactly where it is leading.

Thus, the new Chief Executive of ARIA should learn the lessons from history - and the advice I offer them is: (1)  Reject immediately any proposed programme that looks incremental; (2) the most transformative impact in new technologies comes from the highest quality of underpinning science; (3) don’t take on the job if you suspect government will interfere or change the agency’s objectives in mid-course; (4) back talented, creative individuals and teams, wherever they are to be found;  (5) if ‘high-risk, high-gain’ is what you want - don’t be afraid to put all your (limited number of) eggs in one basket - and remember to be very patient in waiting for the outcomes; and finally, (6) spare a thought for the social sciences and humanities – they have much to contribute to the adoption of inventions.