The value of the alternative view

One-time Birmingham University biology student, Sir Paul Nurse is now President of Rockefeller University, and a Nobel Prize winner. Of his time in the city, Sir Paul writes in his Nobel autobiography he [a tutor] was hugely stimulating and entertaining, and although frequently wrong was always wrong in an interesting way. He taught me the value of the alternative view and also was the first to introduce me to the cell cycle with a project on the respiration rate of dividing fish eggs, a project which ended in complete disaster . . .

For those of you who don't know, his Nobel Prize was awarded for breakthroughs in our understanding of the cell cycle, stuff that has revolutionised cancer research and treatment. Many people, perhaps you, owe their lives to Paul's realisation as a young man to "the value of the alternative view", and to that piece of work that ended in "complete disaster".

Research, being about experiment, is also about failure, sometimes frequent failure. It's about evidence that challenges what's gone before, so overturns previous successes. This tradition of enquiry and dissent, of the value of the alternative view, is a thread through Paul Nurse's career. It was, too, very much part of Birmingham's early history. Our Victorian civic leaders were non-conformist almost to a man.

But this tradition of dissent has been thwarted in the city's more recent history perhaps because the churn of thousands of workshops and small factories in the 19th century gave way, or were held sway to the big automakers in the latter half of the 20th.

Michigan's Emeritus Professor Bolling described the automaking industry in his Foreword to Maxton & Wormald's Time for Model Change as populated by self-importance, lack of trust in partners, compulsive command-and-control behaviours, reluctance to relinquish territory, contempt for legal authority, squandering of resources and on, and on . . .

Perhaps it shouldn't surprise us that the alternative view isn't valued here in the early 21st century, but silenced or marginalised or just ignored.

Here are some alternative views:

• The future of the West Midlands economy is not in manufacturing.


• We have been increasingly marginalised in the global automotive industry over last 40 years to the point that we have but a tiny runt-end of it now.


• Possibly a major driver of our economic recovery if it happens, and for sure a major beneficial influence on all our lives regardless of the regional GDP, is the work of our scientists. A current indicator of the value of science here is the Med School, one of the biggest and best in the world. It has 2100 medical students, 400 trainee nurses, 360 dentists, 240 physios and 240 biomedical undergrads -- and that, of course, doesn't include the pure science students, the Paul Nurses of the future here and in our other universities, nor the all the tutors and researchers we have in our hospitals and clinics as well as in academia.

I'm reminded of a scene in the Birmingham-made film 1 Day. Flash, the hero, is at a family meal, his mind taut with fear because Angel, the baddie, is out for money or his blood. At the table are his younger brother, still innocent, his mother and sister, Angel's lover, and Granma, big-hearted, devoted, wonderful Granma . . . who lets slip her creationist beliefs. Flash, a young man awake to the value of the alternative view, starts to speak with tetchy exasperation, it's the Big Bang . . . but his explanation tails off. For Granma is, implacably, Granma.

* In the light of the comments below, I have amended the original blog post in which I mentioned 30% unemployment. My apologies for confusing the terms "unemployed" and "workless" in the original, unamended blog post, and very many thanks to Oliver Nicholls of WMRO for the clarity of his explanation below.