Examination of witnesses
(Questions 1112 - 1119)
MONDAY 1 FEBRUARY 1999
PROFESSOR SIR
ALEC BROERS
and PROFESSOR SIR
KEITH PETERS
Chairman
1112. Order, order. Sir Keith, Sir Alec, welcome
to our Select Committee. You are aware of the investigation we
are doing into innovation based on engineering and physical sciences.
We are very grateful to both of you for coming along this evening
to help us with our inquiry. Sir Alec, although we do know something
about you both—we have read our briefs and we know your
Cvs—it would be helpful for the record if you would introduce
yourself and say a few words about your background and your present
position.
(Professor Sir Alec Broers) I am Vice-Chancellor of
Cambridge University. Prior to holding this position in the university
I was head of the Engineering Department; prior to that head of
the Electrical Engineering Division of Engineering. Before that
I worked for 20 years for IBM in the United States, first in their
research lab for 15-16 years and then in the operating divisions
where my last real job was in charge of advanced development of
semi-conductor chips in the East Fishkill facility and then I
went onto headquarters staff where I was on a committee which
oversaw IBM's worldwide R&D activities.
(Professor Sir Keith Peters) I am the Regius Professor
of Physic in the University of Cambridge, which means in ordinary
speak that I am the head of the medical school. I have been doing
that since 1987. Before that I was Professor and Chairman of the
Department of Medicine at the Royal Post-Graduate Medical School
at Hammersmith Hospital in London. I do research into the causes
and treatment of kidney disease and I have a certain amount of
industrial connection through work on scientific advisory boards
of pharmaceutical and healthcare companies and I am chairman of
the Scientific Advisory Board of an important Cambridge biotech
company, Cantab.
1113. May I ask you whether you can give us
some examples of innovation successes which have come out from
Cambridge into either large organisations or start-up companies
and have been responsible for starting those companies and nurturing
them and going forward with them?
(Professor Sir Alec Broers) Going back a couple of
decades first to set the tone, in my own experience the Engineering
Department in Cambridge was the laboratory in the world which
pioneered the development of the scanning electron microscope,
which was transferred to the Cambridge Instrument Company which
had been there since almost the turn of the century and was one
of the early innovators which took output from the university.
The scanning electron microscope is the most ubiquitous microscope
in the world now and that work led on to the work which I subsequently
did in the United States of America on electron beam lithography[1]
and that is a technique used to write the patterns for chips for
the integrated circuit business. That transfer came directly out
of the Engineering Department in fact by exchanging people. The
first instruments had been developed in the Engineering Department
by Sir Charles Oatley and then went into the Cambridge Instrument
Company. That was one example.
1114. That was an example of innovation going
to a fairly large existing company, was it not?
(Professor Sir Alec Broers) Yes.
1115. Can you think of one which goes almost
to act as an incubation stimulus?
(Professor Sir Alec Broers) Yes, CDT, Cambridge Display
Technology, which was the company which has been exploiting the
light emitting polymers developed by Professor Richard Friend
in the Cavendish and his colleagues in chemistry. They discovered
certain plastic materials which if you put a slow voltage across
them emit light. The possibilities for turning these into computer
screens and other sorts of screens is very exciting indeed. That
went absolutely from scratch. It has gone through a couple of
phases now. The company nearly refinanced recently at £50
million. They have now taken the technology down a route where
they are licensing and they are working with Philips and Seiko
and others. They have linked into big companies which is something
I think is essential. Without that some of these technologies
cannot really take off because it is naive to think that you can
step far from the lab and compete with the likes of AT&T and
Hitachi and Fujitsu and the big American players. That is one
example. Another which has recently taken those steps is Entropic,
a company which used speech recognition technology, which came
out of the Engineering Department. A group there under Professor
Steve Young has had the best speech recogniser in the world and
you can actually say this because a competition has been held
by DARPA, the American Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency,
where they test everybody's speech recogniser. They have a standard
person record five minutes out of an American News and World Report
and then every recogniser tries to put this down on the screen.
They have won this competition for the last four years, beating
Bell labs and IBM and everyone. They formed a small company in
liaison with a small Washington company but it went along quite
slowly. They have recently been refinanced[2]
by Amadeus and now they are cross-linking with some of the large
American companies. It then enters a very tricky phase: to hold
on to this technology. They, CDT and Entropic, are a couple of
examples.
1116. Sir Keith, can you think of any from your
discipline?
(Professor Sir Keith Peters) Yes, Cantab to which
I referred already was started by Dr Alan Munro, who had been
Reader in Pathology in the university. This was in the mid-1980s.
His intention was to exploit the potential of monoclonal antibodies
which you know of course were invented by Dr Cesar Milstein in
the Laboratory of Natural Biology. Dr Munro started Cantab which
is now one of the country's most successful biotech companies
and has a variety of interests in vaccine development and like
most such companies has realised the importance of links with,
in this case, major pharmaceutical companies which forms the basis
of important R&D.
1117. The "Cambridge Phenomenon",
as it has become known, is clearly something which is associated
with a high quality academic institution. Cambridge is not the
only high quality academic institution in this country. What do
you think is special or unique about the Cambridge phenomenon?
(Professor Sir Alec Broers) It is a culmination of
things over the years. First of all a concentration of excellence
is essential. There is very much a critical mass in a lot of these
things but there are many other universities which have also been
very excellent in this area; the history of various companies,
Pye and Philips and the Cambridge Instrument Company and others,
but it has been as much as anything a critical mass and an innovative
spirit which may be tied to the fact that we place very few constraints
upon our academics. Academics own their own intellectual property.
This is something we may modify slightly to help people develop
things professionally but they have owned their own intellectual
property and are relatively free to work with others. There is
no doubt that it is a concentration of very bright and innovative
people which is perhaps central and a long history which some
people attribute back to Prince Albert in the middle of the last
century who encouraged the Duke of Devonshire to put up the money
to found the Cavendish Laboratory which generated the interest
in industry which had not been in British universities.
1118. Would you agree that even given the excellence
which is in Cambridge University, the critical mass to which you
refer, the money which may be available, the ownership of the
intellectual property, none of that of itself could produce the
"Cambridge Phenomenon" if there were not a pioneering
spirit or a can-do spirit as well within the university?
(Professor Sir Keith Peters) One point which deserves
mention is the role of John Bradfield and Trinity College in setting
up the science park which provided a place for people to do these
things. It is one thing to have an idea, it is another to do it
without disadvantaging your academic activities or your academic
colleagues' activities. The science park itself was initially
created without too careful an eye on the financial bottom line.
It was an act of trust and now its success is obvious but it was
not obvious at the time.
(Professor Sir Alec Broers) I agree with Sir Keith
completely on that and then of course there have been other science
parks. We are very concerned at the moment however for the growth
to go beyond where it is at the moment. We have this great innovative
spirit and this large number of people in a large number of small
companies. In some ways we are still in the situation where we
have not produced some of the largest enterprises which more naturally
would have come from communities of similar talent in the United
States for example. We are very keen to encourage more of the
large players into our region. We feel that is very important
at this stage. We cannot do it immediately in Cambridge but it
is very important in the region. You can look at these things
and realise that Silicon Valley has been there the same time as
Cambridge has been there and yet we have not created a Hewlett
Packard or an Intel or the other major players. We have the same
innovation and the same talent as the universities there, perhaps
exceeding them, so we have further to go.
Mrs Curtis-Thomas
1119. Would you describe the role and the activities
of the Wolfson Industrial Liaison Office and the associated liaison
officer?
(Professor Sir Alec Broers) That is a very small unit
which is over-stretched at the moment which works with academics
to help them patent ideas and draw up industrial liaisons and
help them with the subsequent contracts which are drawn up. It
is an office about which we had a meeting this afternoon, which
is successful but very much under-resourced and we want to resource
it more, to put more additional resources into it.
1 Note by witness: This work was, in fact, started
in Cambridge. Back
2 Note by witness: They gain finance, rather than were re-financed. Back
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