Far from being restricted to ¡®blue-skies¡¯ research, Sir Leszek Borysiewicz said, ¡°today¡¯s Thomas Edisons, Niels Bohrs and Louis Pasteurs are equally welcome¡± at Cambridge.

The former chief executive of the Medical Research Council made the remarks in a lecture entitled ¡°Putting research back at the heart of the system¡± at the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities last night.

The event was part of a 10th-anniversary lecture series on ¡°The Idea of the University¡±.

Sir Leszek said: ¡°Our contribution to global society goes far beyond the mere economic and far beyond the short term: so, as we make that contribution, we should insist that it is valued appropriately¡­I find the silence of current government policy towards the postgraduate and postdoctoral community that are so vital to the life and being of a university deafening.¡±

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In assessing the ¡°impact¡± of research, continued Sir Leszek, it was essential to take account of differences between disciplines and relevant timescales.

¡°Humanised monoclonal antibodies were invented in Cambridge research laboratories,¡± he pointed out, ¡°and 30 per cent of the pharmaceutical drugs now under development rely on that technology¡±.

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Yet it was equally important to value the work of the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics in ¡°bringing the latest linguistic research into the classroom to help parents and teachers nurture the gift of bilingualism¡±.

It was partly through trying to compare such different things that the Higher Education Funding Council for England had ¡°invented a complicated, counter-intuitive, and in some ways contradictory concept of ¡®impact¡¯¡±.

Yet a big part of the problem, he suggested, was linguistic, since ¡°Hefce does not mean ¡®impact¡¯ in the same way that the rest of the English-speaking world does.

¡°The frustration of [the research excellence framework] is that it requires distinguished intellectuals ¨C people whose job and passion is language and how it is used ¨C to comprehend phrases like ¡®expert research user¡¯ and ¡®impact sub-profile¡¯¡­If official guidelines are written in such opaque terms, guaranteed to provoke antibodies in the academics affected by them, then I am not surprised that explaining Hefce¡¯s meaning of terms proved ¡®non-trivial¡¯.

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¡°But if Hefce¡¯s promises come to fruition, then ¡®socio-economic impact¡¯, rather than ¡®economic impact¡¯, comes much closer to my idea of the utility of the arts and humanities research ¨C that is, what real human beings would consider the ¡®impact¡¯ of such research on the generality of humankind.¡±

matthew.reisz@tsleducation.com