Clear Blue Skies Science Britannica

On New Year's Eve, 1691,

just a few weeks short of his 65th birthday,

the Honourable Robert Boyle died at his home

here on Pall Mall in London.

Now, Boyle is widely regarded as the founding father of modern

chemistry, he's certainly one of Britain's most famous scientists.

He rubbed shoulders with Samuel Pepys, with Isaac Newton

and with Christopher Wren,

and every science student knows him for the law that bears his name,

which relates the pressure and the volume of a gas

that fits temperature.

But there was also another romantic,

visionary side to the man which was revealed on a piece of paper

that was found in his personal effects just after his death.

This artefact is so significant that it's kept here at

the Royal Society, a stone's throw from where Boyle lived and died.

And here it is, it's a list written in Boyle's neat handwriting

at the time the Royal Society was founded.

And although it has no title, it looks like, if not a to-do list

then at least a...a list of things

that Boyle thought could be achieved by science.

Number one is the prolongation of life. The art of flying.

The transmutation of metals.

A practical and certain way of finding longitude.

A ship to sail in all winds, and a perpetual light.

Boyle's list is eclectic and, in places, surreal.

It seems he's interested in attaining gigantic dimensions.

He wants to stop and even turn back the ageing process.

He'd like to find a way of continuing long underwater

and emulating fish,

and feels that varnishes, perfumable by rubbing, would be worth having.

Now, this list would've seemed fantastical

to someone in the 17th century.

It would've seemed like science fiction, but what I find remarkable

about it is that all but two of the 24 things on this list have now been

achieved by science, and I suppose that makes Boyle a visionary.

Robert Boyle recognised that science, indeed British science,

could do much more than just expand our knowledge of the world.

He thought that science could also be used to change our world,

to enrich our lives and create a better future for everyone.

Since Boyle wrote his list, the world has been changed by science

and scientists, and it's here in Britain

where some of the greatest changes have their roots.

This is where James Watts and George Stephenson

harnessed steam power,

where Rutherford and Chadwick unravelled

the architecture of the atom.

Where Edward Jenner worked out

the principles of vaccination, saving millions of lives

in the process.

Robert Watson-Watt's radar has transformed travel,

and Tim Berners-Lee's worldwide web has transformed everything.

There is no doubt that science, much of it British,

has created the modern world, but how that progress should be

achieved has always been contentious.

In this film I want to explore the drivers of that scientific

progress, from the curiosity-led exploration of nature, to

the solutions of practical problems and to financial gain.

I also want to explore our scientific future

and how we can ensure that that future is always going to be

a better place to live than the past.

Throughout history, Britain's scientists have often been

motivated by one thing.

Indeed some argue it's perhaps the greatest driver of scientific

discovery - the simple aspiration to understand how nature works.

In its purest form it is just that, the desire to understand

without any regard at all for how useful the discoveries may be,

or how profitable.

This approach to science is called curiosity-driven research,

sometimes blue-skies research.

And the best example of

a practitioner of this pure form of discovery is probably John Tyndall,

who had a passion, it should be said, for the great outdoors.

John Tyndall was born in 1820 into a working-class family,

but he ended up at the heart of the scientific establishment.

He was appointed a fellow of the Royal Society aged 32 and became

professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution a year later.

But as well as being a scholar, Tyndall was also

something of a romantic.

One of his favourite places to find inspiration was the Alps.

Indeed, the spectacular alpine landscape prompted

one of his greatest discoveries, which in turn inspired

generations of scientists to pursue fundamental research.

Tyndall wrote about the beauty of the mountains in this

wonderful little book, Hours Of Exercise In The Alps.

He writes, "They seemed pyramids of solid fire.

"As the evening advanced,

"the eastern heavens low down assumed a deep

"purple hue above which,

"and blending with it by infinitesimal gradations,

"was a belt of red, and over this again zones of orange and violet."

But Tyndall was also a scientist,

so he understood that whilst there's an aesthetic beauty to nature,

there's a deeper beauty. A beauty that lies below the surface,

a beauty in understanding how and why things happen.

So Tyndall set out to understand the origin of those magnificent colours.

To do that, Tyndall designed an experiment that he hoped

would provide the answers.

Obviously a tank full of water,

and into that water I'm just going to put a few drops of milk.

Now that basically just introduces some particles into the liquid.

Now what Tyndall then did was shine a white light into the tank,

and you immediately see

that the tank lights up with different colours.

Tyndall loved this.

In his typically poetic fashion, he described it as "sky in a box".

You see that at this side of the tank, then the solution is blue

and as you move through the tank,

then it becomes more and more yellow

and, actually to us, this end, it's even beginning to become orange.

So this is the alpine sky in a box,

and Tyndall had an explanation for why this happens.

So there's the tank and here's a source of white light, which

as Tyndall well knew, is made up of all the colours of the rainbow.

Now what Tyndall proposed is that the blue light has a higher

probability of bouncing around a scattering of the particles

of milk in the water.

We now know that this is

because blue light has a shorter wavelength than the other

colours of visible light, making it more likely to scatter.

So that means that the blue light will be the first to scatter

and get dispersed throughout the liquid,

and so the first piece of the tank will look blue.

This is essentially what happens in the sky.

Instead of droplets of milk, Tyndall believed that

blue light from the sun was more likely

to scatter off particles of dust

and water floating in the atmosphere,

and so colour the sky blue.

But the tank also explains the sunset colours.

As the light penetrates deeper into the milky water, eventually

all of the shorter wavelengths of blue light are scattered away,

leaving just the longer wavelengths of orange and red, so the water

looks progressively more orange and, if the tank were long enough, red.

So, too, the sky.

As the sun gets lower, its light has to travel through more atmosphere,

so the shorter blue wavelengths scatter away completely, leaving

just the orange and red light, making the sky appear red at sunset.

Now Tyndall's explanation was right in principle but wrong in detail.

See, Tyndall thought that the light was

scattering off particles of dust in the air. In fact, it isn't.

It's scattering off the air molecules themselves,

but Tyndall couldn't have known that

because the existence of molecules wasn't known at the time.

But it didn't matter and, in fact, it was the misinterpretation

of his results that led Tyndall to make his most important

discovery of all, and it had nothing to do with the colour of the sky.

Being a curious scientist, Tyndall decided to proceed

and carry out more experiments, so he took a box of air

filled with dust...

..and he let the dust settle for days and days and days.

He called his sample with all the dust settled out

"optically pure air".

And then he started putting things in the box to see what happened.

So he put some meat in it and he put some fish in it, and he even put

samples of his own urine in it, and what he noticed was something very

interesting - the meat didn't decay, the fish didn't decay, and his

urine didn't cloud. He said that it remained as clear as "fresh sherry".

Now by allowing the dust to settle out, Tyndall had also

inadvertently allowed bacteria to settle out.

He hadn't just created dust-free, or optically pure air.

Without realising it, Tyndall had sterilised it.

He'd let all of the bacteria settle out

and stick to the bottom of the box. The air inside was now germ-free.

It may not have been his original intention, but Tyndall had

provided decisive evidence for a controversial theory of the time,

and that is that decay and disease are caused by microbes in the air.

John Tyndall was a man who followed his curiosity for its own sake,

not for where it might lead.

He didn't set out to discover the origins of airborne disease when he

began exploring the colours of the sky, but that's exactly what he did.

It's appropriate then that curiosity-led

investigation like this is often called blue-skies research.

Scientists have continued to follow in Tyndall's footsteps,

expanding our horizons way beyond his blue skies,

to explore the great questions above our heads beyond the skies.

In the 150 years since Tyndall, scientists have built

increasingly sophisticated telescopes in a quest

to answer the most fundamental questions about our universe.

Indeed, today it's even possible to place sophisticated

technology beyond our atmosphere to peer into the depths of space.

One such satellite is gazing at the star that first inspired

Tyndall to investigate the colour of the sky.

Our sun is just one of over 200 billion stars that

make up our galaxy.

It's 1.4 million miles in diameter and burns at a temperature

of 5,500 degrees Celsius at its surface.

But despite being our nearest neighbouring star, much is

still unknown about the sun.

Helen Mason is working to change that.

How could you not be fascinated by the sun

when you see images like this?

Look at these, they look like computer graphics

from a film. This is from...

Sci-fi film. This is real.

This is from the Solar Dynamics Observatory,

and what you can see here is a huge eruption on the sun.

If you imagine the size of the earth

is almost the size of the tip of my finger. Yeah.

What are the big, outstanding questions about our star?

Well, there's been an outstanding question which we're tackling.

When you have an eclipse you see the atmosphere of the sun, the corona,

and although the surface of the sun is about 6,000 degrees, the corona

is a million degrees, and that's intuitively something quite bizarre.

Cos the heat's coming from the core, so it's...

The heat's coming up from the core, but you don't naturally

expect something cool, about 6,000 and then a million degrees.

So one of the real questions is why. What heats that corona?

It's a very difficult problem. We're making some progress

although we haven't absolutely cracked it yet.

Helen's pursuit of knowledge may be noble, but there are those

who question the validity of fundamental research like hers.

From rockets to particle accelerators,

blue-skies research costs billions of pounds,

and to some this is an utter waste of taxpayers' money.

If I was to ask the question, "Well, what use is this knowledge?"

How would you answer that?

All knowledge is useful,

so scientific endeavour in itself is useful.

Understanding why something behaves in the way it is.

I think there's an inspirational element there

when people want to know about where they are, who they are,

what's happening up in the heavens, what's happening with the sun.

Civilised society is about why, you know, why does it work like that?

What happens? And I think if you take that away then you just say,

"Well, how do I make this particular device?

"How do I build a better car? How do I do that?"

Those are different questions. I just don't think

they should squeeze out the curiosity-driven science altogether.

Blue-skies research is important because knowledge has its

own worth, but its value also comes from the benefits it brings.

It's responsible for all manner of progress,

from cancer treatments to nuclear power,

so when it comes to allocating funds,

do you try to anticipate the benefits

the work MIGHT bring, or simply finance research for its own sake?

Now, this dilemma is something that John Tyndall was

well aware of as far back as 1873.

He said that, "Scientific discovery may not only put dollars

"in the pockets of individuals, but millions into the exchequers

"of nations, the history of science amply proves, but the hope of doing

"so never was, and never can be, the motive power of investigations."

In other words the acquisition of money,

the generation of profit, or even solving a particular goal,

cannot be the only reason for funding a particular piece

of research, because the acquisition of knowledge is priceless.

You might think that persuading society to support

the pursuit of knowledge through blue-skies research

is a modern phenomenon, but you'd be wrong.

It's a fight that has existed at the heart of science

from the very beginning.

Founded in 1660, to recognise, promote

and support excellence in science, the Royal Society

is a fellowship of the world's most eminent scientists, all of whom

have in some way contributed towards our understanding of the world.

So at first glance it can appear that this place was founded

solely for the blue-skies dreamers.

But a book written just a few years after the society was founded

shows that things aren't always what they seem.

The title is, The History of the Royal Society of London

For the Improving of Natural Knowledge.

This is an idealistic view of science,

the curiosity-led exploration of nature.

But things, of course, are always more complicated.

And you can see that even here, in this picture,

at the side of the title page.

There are four figures in the picture.

Central is King Charles II,

who'd given the society its royal charter five years before.

And there's this figure here, this angelic figure.

It's thought that this is a Greek representation of fame.

You see it's placing a wreath on Kind Charles' head.

So this is saying, "To Charles, if you give us money,

"if you fund us, then you will become famous."

Why?

Well, you can see that by looking into the background of the picture.

The figures are surrounded by the instruments of science,

the achievements of science.

So there's a telescope here and clocks, and there's a gun here.

There are things that would enrich the country industrially

and economically, as well as enriching knowledge.

So this picture is saying, "If you invest in science, then, yes,

"you will become famous, you will advance knowledge,

"but also, you will advance the economic interests of the country."

The natural philosophers of the Royal Society had realised

that to pursue knowledge, to understand the world,

you need money.

And so the Royal Society went into overdrive.

It kept its promise to deliver wealth

and innovation to the country.

This was no place for airy-fairy ideas, like emulating fish.

Instead, they put science to work on immediate practical problems,

both abroad and on home soil.

They worked on everything from clocks to guns, even brewing.

All things that would contribute to the economy, create wealth

and, of course, for the king, fame.

But it also had an unexpected consequence.

By actively going out and asking for money,

the Royal Society had introduced a new concept into science.

Because science was now no longer just about curiosity.

It was about targeted research for economic gain.

And that's a tension that has been acutely felt ever since.

Some people believe that targeted science,

as done by the Royal Society,

has less intellectual merit than the pure pursuit of knowledge.

One such thinker was the blue-skies man himself, John Tyndall.

In the 1870s, to an audience in America,

he said that behind all our practical applications,

there exists a region of intellectual action

to which practical men have rarely contributed,

but from which they draw all their supplies.

In other words, he knew

there is a distinction between blue-skies research

and applied research,

and he also knew which one had more intellectual merit.

As Tyndall saw it, his blue-skies science was far superior.

But this simple experiment demonstrates

the value of targeted science.

This is what's called a bimetallic strip.

Actually, it's two of them in parallel.

They're called bimetallic strips because one side is brass

and the other side is steel.

So you've got steel, brass, brass, steel.

As you can see, they're set up parallel to each other.

Simple enough.

But the value of this device only becomes clear

when the temperature changes.

If I drop this into some boiling water...

..then immediately...

..those strips separate.

The reason for that is that brass expands more than steel

when you heat it to a given temperature.

Now, if you were a pure blue-skies scientist, as Tyndall meant,

then what you'd do is you'd say,

"Well, that's interesting. I wonder why that is?"

And you'd start investigating

things like the atomic structure of the metals

to work out why they behave in that way.

And that would be all you cared about.

Whereas, if you were one of those lesser-applied people,

as Tyndall would have it,

then you might ask questions such as, "How useful could this be?"

That's technology, that's engineering.

Well, the answer turns out to be this is very useful indeed.

So useful, in fact, that the inventor who came up with

the bimetallic strip believed it could change the world.

He was a man called John Harrison.

A man on a quest to solve a highly-specific problem.

One that caused a terrible accident

in the waters surrounding a small archipelago

just off the south-western tip of the Cornish peninsular.

These are the Isles of Scilly.

On a calm day, they're a haven for tourists

and locals who seek out the peace and tranquillity of the waters here.

But it's a different story when the weather is stormy.

The Scillies are a complex mixture of jagged rocks in the water

and perilous rock-fringed islands.

If you get lost here, it's a graveyard.

On 22nd October, 1707, there was a tremendous storm,

just at the time when Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell

was sailing his fleet back from a glorious naval defeat

in the south of France.

He wanted to turn east into the English Channel

to take the fleet home to Portsmouth.

But he was out of position.

And what he did was he turned east into the Scilly Isles.

His flagship, HMS Association, hit the rocks here at Gillstone.

This is an engraving of what it might have looked like.

There were 800 men on HMS Association.

All of them lost their lives.

You can imagine what it would have been like.

They would have been smashed against rocks like this.

Sir Cloudesley went down with his men.

And three other of the ships also were wrecked.

They were swept north by the waves.

All in all, somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 lives

were lost on that night.

It was the second worst peacetime disaster in British naval history.

And all because the fleet had no idea where they were.

Shovell and his men had no precise method, storm or not,

to calculate the fleet's longitude,

their position east or west around the Earth.

They didn't stand a chance.

But they were by no means the first.

For centuries, ocean navigators had struggled to find their longitude

and repeatedly, voyages ended in tragedy.

So in 1714, shocked by the loss of Shovell's men,

Parliament demanded a method to find longitude be produced.

£20,000 would be paid for the most accurate solution.

The Board of Longitude was set up to adjudicate.

They were inundated with responses from mathematicians

and natural philosophers.

But amongst the ideas was a surprising proposal.

And it came from Yorkshire-born carpenter John Harrison.

What the board were anticipating

was some kind of fundamental geometrical method

for measuring longitude,

perhaps by looking at the positions of the stars

or the phases of the moon.

But Harrison had a more practical idea in mind.

He knew that if you knew the time in Greenwich from your ship,

wherever it was in the world,

you could calculate the longitude

just by measuring the position of the sun in the sky.

The problem was that in the 1700s

nobody had built a clock accurately enough

to keep time on a long sea voyage.

So Harrison decided to build such a clock and thereby claim the prize.

Producing a clock that remains accurate

on a rolling ship is not straightforward.

Changing temperatures at sea play havoc with the mechanism,

causing the metal components of the clock to expand or contract,

varying the speed at which the wheels turn

and making the clock either lose or gain time.

So Harrison invented his bimetallic strip to compensate.

As the strip curves to varying degrees,

depending on the temperature,

it adjusts the time keepers accordingly

and ensures that the clock's accuracy is maintained,

whatever the temperature.

Bristling with other Harrison inventions, like ball bearings

which produced friction, the clocks worked brilliantly.

25 years after he began, Harrison eventually presented the board

with what was essentially a large pocket watch.

13 centimetres in diameter, he called it the H4.

Now, the principle of finding longitude is very simple.

All you need to know is the difference in time

between noon where you are and noon in Greenwich.

What I have to do is watch the sun as it tracks across the sky

and look for the time when it reaches its highest point,

zenith, that's noon here.

And then I read off that time

on a clock that's been set to Greenwich Mean Time,

and that time here in the Isles of Scilly

is...about...

..now.

Which is 12:39 and 20 seconds.

I can feed that number, 39 minutes and 20 seconds,

into a few equations, they're called the equation of time values,

they take account of things like the Earth's orbit,

and out will come my longitude.

So my longitude here in the Scilly Isles

is 6.29 degrees west of Greenwich.

For its maiden voyage to Jamaica,

Harrison's clock was at sea for two months.

Thanks partly to its bimetallic strip,

it lost just 5.1 seconds.

It was a triumph for Harrison.

However, Harrison was quick to learn the real price

of financial assistance from the Board of Longitude.

The Board were made up of astronomers

and they were very much in Tyndall's camp.

They expected that the longitude problem would be solved

by some kind of advance in our fundamental understanding

of the universe, a pure solution.

So every time Harrison came along

with his rather more applied idea, they rejected it.

And it wasn't until Harrison presented his fifth timepiece

that the board almost reluctantly

accepted that the problem had been solved,

and even then, they didn't pay him the full prize money.

But the longitude problem had been solved

by the British government funding applied science.

And, in fact, so accurate is Harrison's solution

that this method was still used

for finding the position of ships until the 1970s.

What Harrison and the longitude story shows

is that it isn't only Tyndall's blue-skies science

that can lead to profoundly important results.

If you have a specific problem

and you focus time and effort and money on it,

then applied science can be equally successful.

Harrison's clock marked the beginning

of a string of important problems

that would be solved by science.

Already, agriculturists like Jethro Tull

had transformed the efficiency of Britain's food production.

Now it was the turn of other practical men

to improve things still further.

Electricity, once just an interesting sideshow,

was moved centre stage.

Joseph Swan produced the electric light bulb,

transforming life by extending the useful day.

In 1837, Wheatstone and Cooke's electric telegraph

shrank the world almost overnight.

And 40 years later, Alexander Graham Bell's telephone

shrank it still further.

Britons designed steam turbines,

commercialised steel production

produced vacuum cleaners

and made artificial hips.

This was science at its crowd-pleasing best.

Progress made, lives transformed, wealth generated.

It's what the Royal Society promised to do all those years ago.

Fulfilment of the dreams expressed in Boyle's rather bizarre list.

I mean, we've even been able to emulate fish

through the invention of the aqualung and submarines.

But let's not forget item one on Boyle's list,

the prolongation of life.

This is the area of targeted science

that we surely care about most of all -

the extension of our lives

through the development of new drugs and new treatments.

THIS is an area in which Britain has always excelled.

Companies like Glaxo, Beecham and Wellcome

were at the forefront of drug discovery and manufacture

in Britain for most of the 20th century.

The British pharmaceutical industry

has produced drugs from penicillin to Zantac.

They have pioneered antibiotic medicine,

enabled mass vaccination

and made many previously-fatal conditions treatable.

Today, those companies in Britain exist

as the fourth-largest pharmaceutical company in the world -

GlaxoSmithKline.

A part of an industry worth an estimated £200 billion a year.

And it's not a business that hangs around waiting for happy accidents.

What I'm amazed about is the level of sort of work here

compared to a university. There's so many people actually doing things.

GSK is behind many of the pharmaceuticals

that are commonplace in today's market,

from painkillers to asthma inhalers.

One of their biggest research and development hubs is here,

on home soil, 20 miles north of London in Stevenage.

I love that. Philadelphia, Shanghai, Stevenage(!)

So this lab, in general, this is the early discovery within biopharm...

Dr Tom Webb joined GSK three years ago

and has been working to develop new drugs ever since.

How do you do it?

I mean, if somebody comes along from management to GSK and said,

"Right, we need a drug to treat arthritis. A new one."

Um...what do you do? Do you say, "OK. Um..."

Run around screaming(!) Yes! Here's a test tube(!)

So...it's an incredibly complex process.

Drug discovery takes ten to 15 years.

It starts off with a target in mind for treating that disease

and then we start off with huge libraries.

Those might be libraries of small molecules,

so containing tens of thousands of different chemical compounds,

and it's starting with all of these potential medicines

and really whittling them down to one candidate, one medicine.

So that sounds very, very... A targeted approach. Absolutely.

You have a specific example, a specific challenge in mind.

It's a beautiful example, isn't it, of a...a...

Almost like an industrial-scale search. Absolutely.

For useful antibodies or useful drugs. Sure.

And we're getting better and better at doing it

as we gain more experience.

The screenings done at pharmaceutical companies such as GSK

allow researchers to test millions of different compounds,

antibodies or genes to see if they'll work

as part of a new drug or treatment.

The scale of the work means the chance of success

over conventional research methods is dramatically increased.

One of GSK's medicines is a treatment for lupus.

Lupus is a disease which hasn't seen any new treatments for 50 years.

And as a result of this really sort of strategic way of working,

having a target in mind

and developing a medicine for that target using a library,

has enabled us to market this medicine in lupus.

Sufferers of lupus are often plagued with tiredness,

skin rashes, joint pain and swelling

as their immune system attacks the body's own healthy cells.

Symptoms this new drug has helped to relieve.

And other treatments are emerging as a product of this strategic

and focused method of developing medicines.

In your view, are the great advances of the future

going to come from that targeted approach

because you can apply a great amount of brain power on it,

or is somewhere, Pasteur sat in his shed with a Petri dish...

Yeah, yeah! ..who's going to say, "No, it's here!"

It's a great question. If we were just playing around in the lab,

I think the likelihood of us stumbling across a discovery

that enables us to make a medicine is probably unlikely.

So we have to commit to making medicines for patients,

and that doesn't happen by complete serendipity.

The pharmaceutical industry in Britain

is a triumph for home-grown science,

providing cures for previously-untreatable diseases

and changing the lives of millions of patients around the world.

This is an impressive place and it's science on an industrial scale.

And you see these vast research labs.

And that's what you need, because you have to do hundreds of thousands

or even millions of individual experiments

to bring a new drug to market.

It also costs billions of pounds.

So this is targeted science.

There are particular problems that need solutions.

There's a particular disease that needs treating.

And I suppose for medical science as a whole,

if you can state its goal in one simple sentence,

it's to make people better.

It's undeniable that targeted research delivers,

but, and it's a big but,

there is a catch. And it's this.

In any commercial environment,

specific targeting brings with it a possibility

that during the process of discovery, any kind of result

that doesn't positively enhance the chance of success may be ignored.

Now, on the face of it, that seems fair enough.

But in fact, it's extremely worrying indeed.

See, if you look through the History of Science,

through any scientific journal,

then you'll find that the negative results are recorded,

as well as the positive ones.

And that's important because all knowledge is valuable.

But in a commercial setting where you're asking a question,

"Can we find a drug to cure this particular disease,

"to do this particular job?"

Then the temptation is to ignore the negative results.

This is almost anti-knowledge.

It goes against the ethos of science.

And, more importantly, it closes the doors

to some magnificent, serendipitous discoveries.

One such discovery came from a young scientist

who began his career earlier than most.

A career that heralded a new dawn for modern chemistry.

At first sight, this is a fairly unremarkable photograph.

You can see it's of a young boy in Victorian clothes,

it's framed quite nicely.

It's only when you start to understand the story behind the photograph

that it becomes very interesting indeed.

This is a self-portrait of a 14-year-old boy.

He took it in 1852,

which is only just over ten years after the invention of photography.

So photography was still experimental at this time.

And he would've had to have an array

of quite complex chemicals in his house.

So given the quality of this photograph,

then that makes him a very precocious individual indeed.

His name is William Perkin. He was the son of an East End carpenter.

And his father must've recognised his talent,

or at least valued education,

because just one year later, at the age of 15,

he was sent to the Royal College of Chemistry to learn chemistry.

To become what we'd now call a scientist.

We know he had an inquiring mind,

not because he took the picture,

but because of what he did just four years later.

When he started his career, Perkin was living in exciting times.

This was the age of empire.

A world where in time,

the sun really would never set on British Imperial assets.

But as the empire expanded,

so, too, did the risk to Britain's colonialists

as they were exposed to deadly tropical diseases such as malaria.

Fortunately, there was relief available for malaria

in the form of a drug called quinine.

But it could only be extracted from the bark of the cinchona tree,

which grows on the remote eastern slopes of the Andes,

making it expensive and difficult to get hold of.

What was needed was a more reliable and cheaper source.

So the young William Perkin was set to work

to find a way to make synthetic quinine in the lab.

This is a mock-up of what Perkin did.

Not using the real chemicals because they're dangerous,

but the idea is simple and the logic is impeccable.

So this is quinine, the white powder that Perkin wanted to make.

Now, he knew this was made of carbon,

nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen,

and he also knew the proportions.

So he reasoned like this.

Why don't I take something simpler, an amine,

actually an amine called aniline,

which is a ring of carbons

with a nitrogen and a couple of hydrogens stuck on the end.

So it's everything you need, apart from the oxygen.

He then took this, potassium dichromate,

which is a strong oxidising agent.

Now, today, we know that this rips electrons off things,

but Perkin thought that it added oxygen.

And so, you see what he wanted to do?

He wanted to take a simple compound

with carbons, nitrogens and hydrogens,

mix them together with something that stuck oxygens on

and produce quinine.

So...he just dissolved this potassium dichromate in solution,

dissolved some amines in dilute sulphuric acid,

turned the tap, mixed them together...

..heated them up, and waited.

And at the end of the experiment, what he got was a muddy, black mess.

In other words, apparently, the experiment had failed.

Had Perkin been working in a modern commercial environment,

he might well have stopped here.

But what happened next is a prime example

of why the inquiring mind must be given the freedom to explore

and knowledge should never be lost.

What it's thought is that Perkin just decided to go back,

cleaning up the apparatus after making this dark sludge,

but what he noticed is that the residue

seemed to colour whatever it touched purple.

So being a good experimental chemist,

he decided to investigate further.

So he took that residue,

and this is actually a real sample of that chemical,

and he started trying to purify it

to investigate it, to understand its properties.

So he mixed it with petroleum

and then he mixed it with ethanol.

And if I just dab a bit of cloth into this...

..then it dyes it bright purple.

So Perkin had discovered a dye which he called mauveine.

Perkin's dye was far superior to anything created by nature,

and one that could be mass produced at a fraction of the cost.

It quickly gained popularity

after Queen Victoria appeared at her daughter's wedding

in a silk gown dyed with mauveine.

Thanks to Perkin, the 1890s

are now affectionately known as the Mauve Decade.

But it didn't stop there.

Synthetic dyes have been brightening our lives ever since.

Perkin helped usher in the dawn of organic chemistry.

A new age of products, from plastics to perfumes and medicines.

The interesting thing about William Perkin

is that if he'd set out with the aim of discovering a new purple dye,

then he probably would've failed.

And if he hadn't been a curious scientist

wanting to understand why his experiment didn't seem to work,

then again, he would've probably failed to discover that dye.

Perkin's story is a warning

of the potential perils of targeted research.

Had he been working in a commercial environment,

it's likely that because the purple dye wasn't quinine,

his further investigations

would've been thought to be an expensive waste of time.

So though targeted science appears to give us what we want,

there is the very real chance

that it can mean we miss out on unexpected discoveries.

There have always been arguments about the purpose of science.

Whether its primary role should be the pure pursuit of knowledge,

or whether its main value is in the application of science

to solving problems that improve our lot, serving society.

It's a balancing act

and one that hasn't always been easy to get right.

But here, on a piece of land behind St Pancras Station in London,

a fresh attempt at the perfect mix is under way.

This is no ordinary building site.

This is what will become the Francis Crick Institute.

A groundbreaking new scientific institution.

At the helm of this new project is the president of the Royal Society,

Professor Sir Paul Nurse.

And he's determined that this will be the best of both worlds.

A place that will give the public what they want from science,

whilst also giving unprecedented freedom to the inquiring mind.

Well, the scale of this building is a thing that surprises me.

It's immense. It really is immense.

Cavernous, actually. Yeah.

So up here, we're going to have offices, seminar rooms, laboratories.

As you go up, we've got about three floors

of laboratories on this side, four on the other.

But you can spot everybody because of the atrium in the middle.

And this will be the cafeteria for up to 1,500 researchers.

When completed in 2015,

this will be the largest biomedical research centre in Britain.

And uniquely, engineers, physicists, chemists and biologists

will all work together under one roof.

I want to produce something like a sort of creative anarchy.

I'm not going to divide all these up into different departments.

They're all going to be mixing together.

And I'm hoping that will spark off something new.

So that the architecture reflects not only the philosophy,

but the way that you think science should be done?

It really does that.

We wanted many different scientists to work together.

The building's designed to produce exactly that.

By allowing all disciplines to mix together,

this building will offer immense creative freedom

for those blue-skies thinkers.

But everyone will also share the targeted goal

of delivering useful science to the British public.

It's a biomedical research institute

and it will do discovery science to work out how living organisms,

living things, work,

but always with the objective

of what relevance will that be to medical problems.

I think this idea of undirected creativity,

but with a purpose in mind,

which, as you say, is to understand life, living things,

that's important, isn't it?

Look, good science is done by great individuals

with a creative vision about what they're trying to do.

If you direct them too much top-down,

you never get that creativity.

You know, you can't tell a Picasso what to paint.

Picasso will have a creative idea and want to do it himself.

It's the same for a scientist.

The Francis Crick Institute

will give space for scientists to make serendipitous discoveries,

whilst also giving society medical research that will change the world.

The story of Science Britannica is, in many respects,

the story of science itself.

This collection of rocks in the North Atlantic has produced

far more than its fair share of world-class scientists.

And has been the scene of more discoveries

and inventions than any nation could reasonably expect.

That it happened here is partly serendipitous.

The fact that the likes of Robert Boyle, Humphry Davy

and Isaac Newton were born here is down to chance.

That they were able to thrive here is not.

The establishment of our ancient universities,

where all these great scientists were educated,

together with the formation of the great institutions of science,

the Royal Society and the Royal Institution,

have all ensured that Britain is a place where science

and scientists continue to be celebrated.

Whaa-hah!

And that purple vapour there is iodine.

The relative freedom that scientists enjoy in Britain

has meant that cutting-edge research has always been done here.

And while that research is sometimes controversial,

the benefits it has brought have been immeasurable.

Now, in the 21st century,

Britain is still pre-eminent in many areas of science and engineering.

But it's vitally important we don't take this position for granted.

It seems to me that means making sure

we don't constrain the next Boyle, Davy or Newton

by forcing them to deliver only what it's thought society needs.

We must also ensure that they are encouraged to be free thinkers

like John Tyndall,

who pursued his blue-skies research,

or William Perkin,

who saw the practical potential in his discoveries.

William Perkin is not one of our country's most famous scientists,

but I believe he should be better known because his career encompasses

all the necessary facets of modern science.

I mean, here was a man who was not afraid to pursue targeted research.

In his case, the hunt for a way to prevent malaria.

But when that research threw up

an interesting and unexpected result,

he was curious enough to follow that through.

And he discovered a strange purple dye

which he then turned into a successful business, made money,

and reinvested that money in future research.

Today, more than ever, science is expensive.

And more often than not, the public pay for it.

So scientists have a responsibility to ensure that their knowledge

is used for the good of society

and, where appropriate, for commercial gain.

BUT science is based on curiosity.

So society also has a responsibility to science,

which is to always ensure

that there's space for the dreamers to dream.

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