Turning science into profit

Sir Richard Sykes of Imperial College tells Martin Vander Weyer that Britain’s world-class scientists hold the key to future economic success

Approaching Imperial College through the long tunnel from South Kensington station, I recalled that the last time I met the College’s rector, Sir Richard Sykes, he was chief executive of Glaxo, the drugs group, and we were lunch guests of the industrialist Lord Hanson. Our fellow guest (forgive the name-dropping) was the broadcaster Selina Scott, and it would be fair to say that glamorous Selina was served a rather larger portion of Hanson’s charm and attention than Sir Richard or me. There was a particularly sticky moment when Sir Richard started talking about Retrovir, Glaxo’s Aids treatment, only to be cut off by Hanson with a remark about not wanting ‘to talk about queers’.

The point of the story is that it highlights a contrast between two very different types of British business leader. On one side, the charismatic deal-maker that was the late James Hanson; on the other, the science-driven manager of complex processes that was and is Richard Sykes, in a career which took him to the chairmanship of the multinational GlaxoSmithKline.

Both these plain-speaking Yorkshiremen have rightly been admired for their business achievements. But there is no doubt that the Hanson formula — generating high returns by buying low-tech companies cheap and ripping costs out of them — has long gone out of fashion. Sykes’s vision of science-based entrepreneurship, by contrast, belongs by definition to the future. Arguably, one reason why British industry lost competitive advantage in recent decades is that we gave too much kudos and reward to cost-slashing deal-makers like Hanson, while investing too little in the pure science and product research espoused by Sykes.