Paul Nurse was one (briefly). Robert Hooke acted as one, by another name. Michael Faraday started off – once he’d left the bookbinding trade – as one. Martin Poliakoff talks about how his career was built by them, and can frequently be seen flaunting a badge celebrating them. Who are they? Technicians, a vital resource in science whatever name they go under (and they go under a wide variety of job titles today, as in the past), but too often invisible and their importance denied. A light hidden under a bushel.
The work of the Institute for Technical Skills and Strategy (ITSS), which hosts the Technician Commitment, aims to change all this. The Institute itself grew out of the TALENT Commission, which first created the Technician Commitment, with its aim of increasing the visibility of technicians, of enabling their career progression, of supporting individuals to gain recognition through formal pathways, and ensuring the future sustainability of technical skills. The Royal Society is a proud signatory to this, and has put in place a number of actions to allow it to fulfil this commitment. This year it will have received an award from the ITSS in recognition of its past work and future plans.
The Royal Society has not always been so welcoming to technicians, and in the works of early Fellows, such as Robert Boyle, the crucial work of his ‘assistants’ in building and maintaining the famous air-pump, is barely mentioned. By and large, these assistants were anonymous, simply regarded as paid servants, although Robert Hooke’s name is recognized, both for his work with Boyle and for all he did thereafter with the Royal Society itself. Michael Faraday, perhaps more obviously associated with the Royal Institution, was appointed by the RI to work with Humphry Davy (in the years before Davy became President of the Royal Society) in a post described as ‘fire-lighter, sweeper, apparatus-cleaner and washer’. In practice Faraday was far more than that, but a job as a bottle washer set him on course for his illustrious career in science.
Paul Nurse, the Society’s current president, only had a brief career as a technician, working with Guinness on brewer’s yeast while he was waiting to be accepted by a university. But that seems to have helped him choose the yeast as a model organism later in his career. Carol Robinson, the first woman to hold a chair in Chemistry, first at Cambridge and subsequently at Oxford, left school at 16 without a university application in mind. She went to work at Pfizer, looking after their mass spectrometer, and essentially fell in love with the technique, which she has been pursuing ever since.
These are all success stories of people whose early induction into research science through a technical route, has set them on their stellar career paths. But many others, equally vital in that technical role, stay as a technician throughout their career, and too often their contributions are overlooked. Very often, their contributions are overlooked even by their bosses. Not so in the case of Jean Purdy. Like too many other women, her contributions to the bigger picture were ignored by the Nobel Prize Committee when they awarded the 2010 Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Robert Edwards. Although, like Edwards’ other collaborator, Patrick Steptoe, she had died before the award was made and so would not have been eligible, whereas Steptoe’s name is all over the citation, hers is not. Purdy was a trained nurse but working with the team as a technician. Edwards himself was clear how much she contributed, writing ‘Indeed, I regard her as an equal contributor to Patrick Steptoe and myself’, but his ongoing battle to get her fully recognized had no impact at the time. The release of his papers in 2019 demonstrated his lengthy if unsuccessful battle to give Purdy her due.
The fact she was a female technician probably made the battle the harder for Edwards, but too often the technician is the invisible hero(ine) behind the scenes. With formal policies now in place at the Royal Society that encourage the names of technicians to be listed as authors and contributors in all Royal Society journals, alongside the creation of the Hauksbee Award to celebrates the outstanding achievements in science by those working mostly ‘behind the scenes’, there is a clear drive towards recognition of the technical workforce. This is coupled with a push towards ensuring the community interacting with the Royal Society play their part in formal recognition of this crucial part of the scientific workforce.
