high tech

In the early 1800s, the Leicestershireman Ned Ludd became the leader, whether spiritual or real is impossible to tell, of a group of workers in the nascent industrial age who were dissatisfied with their working and living conditions, the relentlessly declining wages, and the amount of work that was performed by machines. Hoisting effigies of Ned Ludd and stamping their heavy clogs in anger, these disgruntled workers turned their fury into revolt and attacked the machines they saw as the cause of their poor situation. Stop technology lest it makes people obsolete was their creed.

Over the decades, Luddism has come to mean a near-pathological aversion to technological progress, and in that sense, England is full of Luddites. Rural areas revel in authentic historic looks, rickety sash windows are beloved because they look cute, and there is no high-speed rail because constructing a line where there isn’t one would cut through areas of seemingly unspoiled nature, never mind that this nature is already suffering heavily from the partially road traffic-related effects of global warming.

If the first two manifestations of Luddism as enumerated above are understandable from an esthetic point of view, the lack of a modern railroad is utterly incomprehensible. England is, after all, the country that not only invented the steam engine but also had the first public steam railway in operation. George Stephenson built that first commercial engine and followed it four years later with another, an improved version that has since come to be regarded, erroneously, as the first stream locomotive. It combined innovations and design ideas that were adopted as standard by all subsequent manufacturers. It was the year 1829, and the machine was called The Rocket.

The Rocket served for a few short years only; it was more a trailblazer than anything else. But it heralded the advent of fast and affordable transportation and became world-famous for that, a fame that it enjoys to this day. The Rocket now sits, much like a buddha calmly receiving veneration, on a squat pedestal in the main hall of the Science Museum, just down the road from Imperial. It’s a fitting place of rest for an early champion of science and technology, of industry and development.

What is less fitting is that a miserable replica of The Rocket which pitilessly belittles its historical significance has been set up in Kensington Gardens. This full-size toy train, painted bright yellow like Thomas the Tank Engine's friend Molly, runs on tracks not more than 50 meters long, pathetically bouncing back and forth between the buffer stops at either end at speeds that even the most leisurely jogger exceeds. People are invited to go for a ride, and are excited.

And while a yellow stream train is treated as a novelty and admired for its anachronistic cuteness, there is still no high-speed railroad in the entire United Kingdom. 180 years after The Rocket, rail hasn't developed much, and hardly any progress has been made in the entire last century. The Eurostar to Paris and Brussels, a fast train even by European standards, stands out as an oddity. It is wildly successful but hasn't sparked a renaissance of rail transport on the island, however long overdue. The country that gave railroads to the world is criminally blind to their potential.

The emergence of Luddism relied on a surplus of workers slogging on depressed wages, conditions familiar to those working in academia. Tons of students enter graduate programs each year to gain Ph.D.s; the supply of willing applicants from China seems inexhaustible. Many of these students remain in academia after gaining their degree and picking up trimly bounded qualifications, and toil towards a clearly defined goal that is nevertheless unlikely to be achieved: a prestigious faculty position.

Setting my tubes down to do some minipreps, I realized the other day that I was working in a Luddite environment. We have centrifuges, PCR machines, computer-controlled chromatography stations and even a robot to set up crystal trays, but many recurring tasks are manual and painfully brainless. I spent an hour and a half doing 24 minipreps, juggling dozens of miniature tubes and maxing out the benchtop centrifuge in the process. A robot and a qualified technician could have done hundreds of these preps and returned the purified material without much effort in a microtiter plate. This would make the whole department happy, day in, day out.

I got my Ph.D. more than five years ago and I know for a fact that there is no gain of knowledge in minipreps (getting and interpreting the results is another matter altogether). I can do the procedure with my eyes shut. Why am I still wasting my time on them? Is this part of the fascination with science? Not for me. I would like to think about difficult questions or test my dexterity against protein purification or crystal growing protocols. And I would like to give Ned Ludd the boot.