George Osborne has been Chancellor for long enough for some of his promises to be tested against reality. As analysts pore over the latest budgetary juggling, one of his older projects is coming under scrutiny.

In 2011 he went to Manchester University to laud Britain’s graphene hub and its Nobel laureates Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselof. On the spot, he pledged £50 million for a graphene institute. Britain was going to back the new technology, create a new industrial revolution and, in Osborne’s words, launch “a March of the Makers”.

The National Graphene Institute officially opened in March 2015 (Osborne, of course, presiding). But a shiny new building does not an industry make. Sir Andre Geim, graphene’s discoverer at Manchester University, has said that the government has invested “in the building industry rather than science”.
What has gone wrong? It seems that the industrial partners the Institute has chosen to develop British research are not likely to be the founders of the new British industrial revolution. In October 2015 it was announced that:

       “The University of Manchester's National Graphene Institute will be showcasing its groundbreaking research to Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday, and in particular the work carried out in partnership with the Chinese company BGT Materials.”

BGT’s lead graphene product is a new LED lightbulb, said to be the most efficient so far. Fine, but BGT is a Chinese company, not a British marching maker. James Baker, director of the NGI , said that his team his team is keen to attract other Chinese businesses to invest in R&D facilities at the National Graphene Institute.
In the EU’s Horizon 2020 Projects: Portal, autumn 2014, I wrote:

       “A graphene industry won’t be created in the UK by providing increasing amounts of funding for to researchers; industry needs to be involved, and companies like Samsung are, of course, already becoming involved elsewhere, which raises the danger that graphene will become another typical British story: we got the Nobel prize but didn’t get the industry.” http://www.horizon2020publications.com/H4/#96

What was needed was for some large UK industrial companies with nanofabrication expertise to link up with the university researchers to develop and commercialise graphene technologies. Most technological innovations come from industry, not from blue skies scientific research. Here’s a list (more or less random and partial) of companies that might once have been candidates for this:

English Electric, Marconi, Ferranti, ICL, Vickers, AEI, Inmos, Mullard, STC, GEC. Some of these are double booked because they were swallowed in the great amalgamations that mostly ended with the rump of what was once a mighty industry (Lord Weinstock’s GEC for example) being sold to foreign companies. What’s left of Britain’s hi-tech manufacturing mostly resides in just two companies: BAE Systems and Rolls Royce. But these are specialised as mostly defence and aerospace manufacturers, with little or no nano expertise.

The industrial companies in which graphene could have found a home were killed off by the wave of financialization ushered in by Mrs Thatcher’s Big Bang of deregulation in 1986, by the associated high pound, by bad management, and by a general lack of vision. But even without such companies, the UK must possess some industrial know-how in nanofabrication? Did it really have to be left to BGT Materials and those other companies the NGI is trying to woo? And it shouldn’t have been Osborne who took graphene under his wing but the Department of Trade and Industry. But of course in 2011we had no such ministry in the UK. Why? Because we were told that “government can’t pick winners”. Strangely, Osborne has been allowed a special exemption from this prohibition: when he’s not cutting he’s busy spending on vanity projects. Graphenegate shows that his megaprojects are likely to unravel like his budgets and his deficit reduction predictions. They just take a little longer.

Since everyone is having their say about George Martin, I thought I’d add my ha’penny worth. There is early footage of the Beatles playing a cover song, Some Other Guy, at the Cavern. It was one of Lennon’s favourite songs. He was always the jealous guy but what it means to me is that it has a hint of what the Beatles might have been without George Martin. Some Other Guy is a truly terrible song. Chugging along with no real rhythm, treading water, running on the spot, it deservedly was never officially recorded by the Beatles. Alexis  Petridis has brilliantly captured the flawed essence of pre-Martin Beatles when he described their Decca audition tape as “reedy and timid and knock-kneed”.

So Martin filled out their sound with English orchestration. What he found at first was plenty of energy, three great harmony voices and a pedestrian rhythm section –  no real instrumental flavour at all. So in the early recordings he made the vocals do most of the work: not just harmony but call-and-response,  vocal fill-ins which other bands would have done instrumentally.

But then he built up the guitar sound, fattening the bass and letting the guitars chime and rasp. That was Revolver. But then came the real Revolution in the Head. The Beatles started out thinking they were an American band – the great black R&B girl groups, the great white males, Presley, Holly, Orbison and the Everlys, were their touchstones. But lurking was Englishness: McCartney’s music hall whimsy, Lennon’s Lewis Carol  jabbernonsense  and Goonery.

So we get Martin's orchestral colour flooding into the Beatles arrangements: the Bernard Hermann inspired strings on Eleanor Rigby; the insidious fairground calliope of Mr Kite, the English psychedelic colours of Penny Lane, Lennon’s true Ur-song of alienation (“No one I think is in my tree”) Strawberry Fields, Baby You’re a Rich Man adding a synthesized Indian shenai to the mix,  and of course I am the Walrus, about which more soon.

And the Beatles instrumental contribution was now fat and confident: McCartney’ stomping multitracked piano and vertically spaced bass lines; Harrison’s piercing guitar fills that meshed perfectly with Martin’s use of cello; McCartney’s sometime stinging lead guitar lines.

If there’s one song that perfects the Martin sound it is I am the Walrus. When Lennon sings “Sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun...” orchestrally, we are transported to a Vaughan Williams pastoral amazingly twinned with Lennon’s deadpan acid vocal line: Martin must have been waiting for this moment.

Sadly, the arc of this flowering was cruelly truncated. If I am the Walrus was the apogee of ripeness,  a track recorded a few months earlier shows the rot already taking root. All You Need is Love is a bloated, turgid,  mostly  three-chord song – a Twist and Shout overproduced with all the Martin machinery. Then came the Get Back movement. The Beatles abandoned their rich orchestrations to return to rock and roll, bequeathing their Martin inheritance to the Electra Light Orchestra.

Lennon was now the jealous guy again, a late-Elvis kind of figure, with all the horror and tedium that implies.

There’s more than a touch of false pride and narcissism in the attempt to officially announce a new geological era: the anthropocene. The end of a geological era is marked by a radical discontinuity, with many extinctions. “Civilized” humans are creatures of the Holocene, the era that began when the ice melted. We may have been the agents of the next era but if that it is true we are unlikely to be part of it for very long.

Critics of the UK government attack them on single issues (currently the flooding) on an ad hoc basis. Of course they blame the obsession with reducing the deficit and reducing public spending to 36.5% of GDP (I like that 0.5%).  But it’s worse than that. This government is not even trying to run the country it is nominally in charge of.

It is surely the duty of a government to take note of the actuality: the present, ongoing state of things in the country and the world and to act accordingly. This is why we have a census, to make projections and plan wisely for future need.
We are clearly in an era of large, obvious, and in some cases unprecedented challenges to the status quo.

Climate change, with huge pressure on flood defences, food production, security of power supply  etc, is a problem no government has had to face before. It is a challenge for the state – no private company is going to solve this problem. There are real grounds for believing we need to renew our military defences – with Russia, IS, and perhaps China, the threats. We are witnessing drastic population growth, both from immigration and a higher birth rate, creating a need for new schools, and putting huge pressure on hospitals. Unchecked globalisation has left the country dependent on foreign firms for much of its essential infrastructure. This is particularly apparent in the energy sector, where new investment is needed just to keep the lights on, let alone on to achieve decarbonisation.

All these problems require a strong state, stronger than in recent years, prepared to be bold and to allocate resources wisely.

Bu what we have is a government determined to run a country in which provision by local authorities, and every governmental agency is cut. They are running the country of their dreams – in which the problems mentioned at the head of this piece are irritating blips which they hope to swat away while they get on with their LONG-TERM PLAN.

So what is the Long-Term Plan? We have had almost 30 years of the great financialization experiment in the UK, begun by Mrs Thatcher, designed to free Britain from the dead hand of government inertia and to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit.

What has happened in that time is that we have lost the ability to make trains, nuclear power stations, computers, even the white goods of the home and consumer electronics. We can make wings and engines but not whole planes. Well, to be charitable, perhaps it was best to leave some of these to the Japanese and the Germans but where then are the new industries to replace them? We are not major designers of software or indeed major players in any of the new industries such as renewable energy. In the current industrial wilderness a few islands stand out. ARM Holdings design chips for most of the world’s mobiles;  we still have Rolls Royce, although currently in the kind of trouble that sounds familiar; there’s Dyson and JCB. But these few do not an economy make.

Typical of the degraded state of UK industry is the transition from ICI to Ineos  ICI was a real northern powerhouse of innovation, inventing and/or developing polythene, perspex,  terylene, the beta blocker drugs and countless other chemical innovations. Ineos bought some of the rump of ICI after the pharmaceuticals department was spun off as Zeneca (Now AstraZeneca) and sweats it; Ineos is not a research-based  organization.

Thirty years of financialization has resulted not in buzzing entrepreneurship but in hedge funds and private equity companies, sweating assets with no thought for investing in the future. Financialization has created world safe for financiers and an industrial wasteland.  This is the extractive economy as described by Robison and Acemoglu in Why Nations Fail, familiar from many third- world dictatorships. This is the kind of economy we are forging; although forging is the wrong word for this lame collapse into a rich-men-beggar-the-rest economy.

There used to be the notion of strategic industries. I read that the government still has a golden share  in Rolls Royce, our only aero engine maker, but we have ceded control of strategic industries such as steel and aluminium to foreign companies. Aluminium is no longer smelted in England, only in Scotland (which might of course become an independent country not supportive of England’s military ventures). In WW2, household saucepans were smelted down to make spitfires. In an emergency in which a war disrupted world trade, how would Britain fare?
Despite all this, the old Imperial interventionist instinct is still there but Britain can now hardly put 6 planes in the air. The first thing the Coalition government did in 2010 was to sell all our Harriers, 72 of them, to America, seriously degrading our ability to mount air-support operations. The US is not sentimental about other countries’ defence equipment but still operates Harriers and wanted ours for spares;  we can be sure this was useful kit. Joined up government?

No, this government is ruling the wrong country: a figment of its own deluded, incoherent imagination.  

I have always jibbed against one of Dr Johnson’s thundering paragraphs:
"The truth is, that the knowledge of external nature, and the sciences which that knowledge requires or includes, are not the great or frequent business of the human mind. Whether we provide for action or conversation, whether we wish to be useful or pleasing,  the first requisite is the religious and moral knowledge of right and wrong; the next is an acquaintance with the history of mankind, and with those examples which may be said to embody truth, and prove by events the reasonableness of opinions...We are perpetually moralists but we are geometricians only by chances. Our intercourse with intellectual nature is necessary; our speculations upon matter are voluntary and at leisure.”

The pomposity and complacency of this pronunciamento has always outraged me. Now I know that this isn’t just a matter of personal irritation. Johnson lived before the industrial revolution, when scientists were seen as harmless amateurs, making curious discoveries  “at leisure”. Most of the population are still Johnsonians but we are not living in the 18th century. Then, the world was taken to have a natural order which we puny human could hardly interfere with.

The problems the world faces in not-the-18th-century require some understanding of scientific principles that are deeply counter-intuitive. Nature works on a tiny scale. If we only know the world we can see we will never understand how it works. This is why such a large part of modern humanity scoffs at evolution and global warming. The world as we see it and what we know of history doesn’t offer much support for these ideas. But the world as we see it doesn’t offer much support to the notions that a few pounds of a certain element, uranium, can destroy a city; that complex text, images, indeed whole moving films, can be projected unseen across thousands of miles to be received by anyone one with personal device anywhere in the world; that a human disease might be caused by a single wrong genetic letter out of the 3 billion stored inside a human cell that is far too small to be seen by the eye.

Dr Johnson would probably retort that all these well attested demonstrations were very impressive but not the “great and frequent business of the human mind”. Leave it to the experts. But politicians are empowered to make crucial decisions about the planet’s destiny on the basis of the mass support they have. They quite happily disdain the advice of the experts if it interferes with their agenda or with keeping the electorate short-term happy. That an increase in the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration from 280 to 550 plus parts per MILLION should spell doom for the world is indeed outrageously counter-intuitive. Dr Johnson would have dismissed it out of hand.  And if the great mass of humanity consists of Johnsonians scoffing at the counter-intuitions of science, what kind of decisions are going to result?  Nostrums such as “Cut the green crap”, guaranteed to go down well in every public bar. So we reach the point where days after signing a global agreement to curb carbon emissions, the UK government cut solar panel subsidies by 65%.

Richard Feynman, nanoscience pioneer, made it clear right from the start that nature did all her best work at the nano level. Nature uses huge molecular complexes (huge on a molecular scale means nano to us) to process small molecules with an efficiency man-made chemistry cannot approach. Photosystem II, for example, which splits water to produce the hydrogen to reduce carbon dioxide, involves two almost identical halves, each of which has 19 protein subunits with around 99 cofactors, including 35 chlorophyll molecules. All that to split water, a molecule containing three atoms! But that is what it takes: we would dearly love to replicate the work of Photosystem II in our search for solar fuels, but so far nature has us beat.  Human-engineered catalysts are crude affairs by comparison. So can we mimic nature’s supramolecular catalytic complexes?

A recent paper in Science reports just that. By trapping a transition metal catalyst in a tetrahedral  supramolecular cage, researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have been able to create a functional enzyme mimic, dramatically increasing reaction rates for production of ethane from dialkyl-metal complexes, in some cases by 80,000 times. This is the kind of catalytic efficiency associated with nature’s enzymes. The authors point out that nature’s catalysts have a scope limited by the requirements of living creatures. Applying this principle to purely technical reactions ought to open up new areas unexplored by nature. As the authors write “This wedding of biomimetic and anthropogenic chemistry opens the door for a paradigmatic shift in strategic approaches to catalysis”.

The tetrahedral  complex that achieves this feat is a gallium complex with N,N’-bis(2,3-dihydroxybezoyl)-1,5-diamino naphthalene. It self-assembles, as nature's enzyme complexes do, and within its hydrophobic interior it encapsulates cationic transition metal complexes.

This work is a great leap forward in matching nature’s catalytic virtuosity using self-assembled supramolecular structures. Richard Feynman would have been delighted to witness it.
 
Science, 4 December 2015, pp. 1235-38.
 

In the Great Leap Forward 1958-1961, Mao decided that steel production was the index of world power. China would surpass Britain’s steel production in 15 years thanks to backyard furnaces: every peasant should have not a cow but a blast furnace in the back hard. This was one crazy measure in a catastrophe that cost an estimated 18-45 million lives. Steel production might be an indicator of industrial power but it cannot be the driver in this fashion. Western commentators were appalled and contemptuous.

But what to say now when China’s steel production is top of the pile and about 8 times bigger than its nearest rival, Japan and half the global output.  In 2014 China produced 822 million metric tonnes of the stuff. Britain? 12 million.
And now, to celebrate the Golden Era in relations between Britain and China (a phrase that sounds Orwellian in its rank dishonesty), Chinese steel dumping is destroying what is left of the UK steel industry.

No steel in Britain. Well let them make bronze. Or perhaps it’s back to the Stone Age for us?

If the greatest unsolved problem in biology is the origin of life, the detailed understanding of how all the natural forms are created runs it pretty close. At various points chemistry has to meet, to respond to, and to create geometry, in order to sculpt the shape of life forms. The science of evo deco has made great strides in understanding shape creation in multicellular creatures but what about the geometry of single-celled creatures? The cells of animals and plants have many compartments which enable particular chemical reactions to be localized but bacteria have none of these internal membranes yet everything within a bacterium seems to know its place.

The most important “place” within a bacterium is the mid-point, the place where it divides in order to create two identical daughter cells. It is known that this midpoint is located by proteins, known as Min proteins that oscillate from side to side within the cells.

In work at Delft University, Cees  Dekker’s team have managed to tweak E. coli in dramatically geometrical ways to illuminate the mode of action of these proteins. They treated the cells chemically to disable cell division and elongation and then confined them within micro-compartments shaped as circles, triangles, squares and rectangles. Like gourds constrained by ligatures, the cells grew into the shapes defined by their containers. The oscillating proteins were then observed by means of fluorescent markers.

The behaviour of the oscillations showed that the protein system senses the symmetry of the cell: in a triangle it moves between the apex and the centre of the opposite side; in a square it moves side to side but also transversally; the moment a square becomes slightly rectangular, breaking the symmetry, the transverse oscillations disappear. Beside symmetry, the system can sense size – obviously necessary to detect the mid-point of cells of differing sizes.

Not only was Dekker’s team able to demonstrate the geometrical savvy of these proteins, they showed that a Turing reaction-diffusion system can explain the patterns demonstrated by the system. In 1953 Alan Turing predicted that many patterns in nature could be modelled by a simple system of activation and inhibition between two proteins. In Cees’ system, one protein binds to the cell membrane, is unbound by the action of a second protein, thus freeing the protein to travel across the cell to receptors on the opposite side.

Galileo once famously wrote that book of nature “is written in the mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures”. He could hardly have imagined such a literal vindication.

Nature Nanotechnology, August 2015, pp. 655-6; 719-26.

 Self assembly is the trick the nature uses to create the complex nanomachines that power life. For decades now, materials scientists have been trying to copy nature to create new materials with novel properties such as super water-repellency, optical computing powers, great structural strength. Self assembly, mimicking nature, is the overriding theme of the book I wrote with Tom Grimsey: Nanoscience: Giants of the Infinitesimal.

But in all of these techniques there’s a big difference between nature and human engineering. The synthetic techniques may mimic nature but the result is a finished artefact: once assembled that’s all you’re going to get. But some of nature’s self-assembled nanostructures are in constant flux, adjusting to new conditions. The most striking is the intricate scaffolding of the cell, composed of two kinds of filaments: slim actin strands and thicker microtubules. These are always growing and shrinking in a constant churn of activity to maintain the shape and powers of the cell. It is as if the scaffolding round a house was always in parts going up whilst other parts were dismantling themselves. This process in the cell  is fed by energy. So long as energy is being provided the dynamic structure of the cell is maintained. Ordinary materials assembly reaches equilibrium with the final product but the cell is always out of equilibrium, needing a constant influx of energy. For the cell, equilibrium = death.

Now, a research team based at at Delft and Munich have created a purely chemical system in which fibres form from  a gel which lengthen and contract as the reaction goes on – so long as energy is supplied. This work takes us a great step forward in the quest to create self-maintaining cellular systems based entirely on synthetic ingredients and systems. The metabolism of living cells is not the only possible self-maintaining cell. The artificial cell fibre systems have the ability to regenerate after perturbation: a key characteristic of living cells. As the authors state: the fibres show “dynamics reminiscent of microtubule behaviour”.

Science, 4 September, 2015, pp. 1075-79

Peter Forbes and Tom Grimsey, Nanoscience: Giants of the Infinitesimal, Papadakis, 2014.

Silicene might sound like a kind of playdough but in fact it’s an analogue of graphene, an atomically thin layer of silicon, Unlike graphene, silicene does not exist in nature but it came into focus when researchers, extrapolating from graphene,  suggested that silicon, carbon’s closest relative, might have similar properties to graphene if it could be prepared in single layer sheets.

 The calculations were made and were promising but making silicene was a harder nut to crack than graphene. It is unstable in air so new techniques had to be developed. A US/Italian team have come up not just with a manufacturing technique but have already managed to construct a working transistor from silicene. This is something that has eluded graphene because it doesn’t have the magic property of an electronic band gap (almost the only thing it doesn’t posses). Silicene does have a bandgap.

The first silicene transistor is not a quantum leap above existing solid-state silicon transistors  – its electronic carrier mobility is much slower than graphene but this is early days and first devices are often lumbering beasts compared to the mature version. But there are always many hurdles before the promise is realised. At the very least, this is a space worth watching. It would be rather neat if the replacement for silicon in computing turned out to be silicon again, in its monatomic layer form.

Nature Nanotechnology, March 2015, pp 202-3; 227-31.