In the mid-1950s, Cyprus, a British colony since 1878, was convulsed by the campaign of bombings, sabotage, and attacks on British police, soldiers and buildings waged by EOKA guerillas who sought union, ‘enosis’, with Greece. The guerillas, based in the Troodos mountains, operated at night, and moved seemingly at will between a network of hiding places, including artificial caves carved into hillsides and some well-disguised rooms in villages. Tracking the guerillas was the urgent problem for the British. In 1957, the colonial governor of Cyprus, a senior army man, Field Marshal John Harding, sought help from science. Specifically the assistance came from Porton Down, the UK’s chemical warfare laboratory.

Frederick Brundrett, the lead coordinator of British defence research in the mid-1950s¹, replied to Harding’s call in May 1957. It is clear that he had already explored the possibilities and the ethical constraints, such as they were:

I have now talked to all the people who ought to be able to have some ideas … and we all agreed that this is an exceedingly difficult kind of problem and that the only possible feasible type of solution is a chemical warfare one. What I have in mind is the use of persistent tear gas. This should be possible without contravention of the Geneva Convention since no permanent damage would be done to individuals…²

Brundrett envisioned either covering cordoned-off areas with the persistent tear gas, or ‘alternatively, if you know of any hiding places in caves which are used from time to time, going round and fillling all these up with the material’. It was a proposal for denial of land by chemical warfare.

Nevertheless, Brundrett, writing from London, realised that ‘really sensible advice’ was ‘very difficult indeed, without detailed knowledge of the conditions’. he suggested to Harding that he should ‘send somebody out to see the conditions on the spot’, ‘one of our principal chemical experts who really knows his stuff’.

The chemical expert was Mr Titt.

R.A. Titt worked at the Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment, Porton Down. His boss considered him a ‘pretty fertile fellow’.³ He spent six days in Cyprus, being briefed in Nicosia, flying low over the Paiphos Forest valleys, and accompanied into the mountains by British security forces personnel.

Titt’s report began with a detailed description of the terrain stressing the difficulties it presented to the British counter-insurgency operations:

The problem of hunting terrorists in mountain country such as the Paiphos Forest is exceedingly complex…

The Paiphos Forest region is one of steep mountains some 4000 ft. high, sparsely covered with conifers and with a substantial cover of evergreen shrubs. This vegetative cover is maintained from the valley bottoms (where it is dense) to the summits. There are extensive areas of scree and slides of shale ranging for many hundreds of feet. Valley bottoms are exceedingly narrow while ridges and spurs are steep and sharp. …

The area is very sparsely populated, roads are few and bad but footpaths and trails occur widely. Perennial streams are infrequent, but small sources of water are very widespread at all altitudes.

The basic rock formations appear to be limestone though formations have been much disturbed by earthquakes.

There is virtually no flat land ground in the whole region and satisfactory landing sites for helicopters are infrequent.⁴

For the troops of the British No. 3 Brigade Group, deployed as platoons in bivouac conditions, searching the one hundred square miles by day and conducting ambushes at night, the object was ‘to find probably one or two men who may be in an exceedingly well concealed hide’. Such mountain hides were typically excavated from the rock face, roofed with corrugated iron, covered with brush wood and scree, just below a good observation point but often far from water. Camouflage was so good it was ‘possible to walk over a hide without detecting its presence’. Village hides were ‘usually in the form of concealed cellars, or extra rooms built into mountain sides’.

Titt ruled out the initial suggestion, of using persistent tear gas: the ‘use of aggressive chemicals to force evacuation of hides, not previously located by other means, is not recommended. The probable siting of the hides, the great area to be engaged, and problems of troop training and security all initiate [sic. indicate] strongly against undertaking what would be a most uncertain operation’.

Instead, Titt, being a pretty fertile fellow, offered many other ways science could assist the British in the three issues of detection of hides, detection of movement across the landscape, and supporting ambushes and ‘chance contacts’. The method to detect hides included:

• using ‘search coils’ mounted on helicopters to detect the corrugated iron roofs of hides
• using infra-red detection of hides in a similar manner (this idea had come from discussion with John Carroll, a leading Admiralty defence scientist)
• using defoliants such as 2-4.D, once the first two methods had narrowed down areas of interest, ‘to strip the leaves of the evergreen Golden Oak’
• sampling streams for the presence of E.coli, which might indicate human excreta disposal
• in the villages, acoustic methods might reveal hidden cavities.

Regarding methods to detect movement, Titt suggested:

• by day, continuously staffed observation points, with troops equipped with binoculars
• spraying belts across suspected routes with ‘material such as castoreum, and using tracker dogs to follow trails of the substance
• doing similar, but with ‘colourless florescent material … which could be detected by inspection under ultra-violet illumination’

Ambushes, meanwhile could be made more effective by using “Sniperscope” (an infra-red sight), smoke grenades to ‘throw the enemy into noisy confusion’, and acoustic techniques (microphones and amplifiers).

The scientific methods proposed, therefore, were drawn from across the range of physics, chemistry and biology. Experience in such methods could be sourced from other UK government branches, not only Porton Down (for the chemical tracker, the defoliants), but also the Admiralty (infra-red), Ministry of Defence (infra-red, optics, acoustic techniques) and Air Ministry (helicopters).

Experience (such as with the Sniperscope and with defoliation) was transferred from British military operations in Malaya, where anti-colonial resistance had ignited. Inspiration also came from civil scientific and imperial fields: the idea of acoustic detection of hidden rooms, for example, came from archaeology, drawing from the means deployed to locate Etruscan tombs in Italy.

While the suggestions were mostly welcomed, this response was not universal. At least one defence official, speaking from experience, notably from Malaya, complained:

Most of the proposals contained in this report must be classed as “bright ideas” rather than serious suggestions. I am afraid the writer has in many cases strayed too far from the bounds of his own knowledge, and as he is a professional scientist there is a danger of too much weight being attached to what he says.

Experience has shown that attempts to exploit bright ideas, unless they are first subjected to critical examination, can lead to a lot of wasted effort with no result…⁵

Thus began ‘Operation DEMENTIA’, a plan to first test and then put into practice science-assisted modes of detecting EOKA activity in Cyprus.⁶ E.C. Williams, with Neville Gadsby, a Deputy Scientific Adviser to the Army Council at the War office, took executive lead. The Air Ministry and Ministry of Supply worked together to send ‘to Cyprus for an experiment … Hastings aircraft fitted with the infra-red thermal mapping equipment’⁷  Porton Down sourced castoreum and defoliants, while the Ministry of Supply sorted the helicopters⁸  Even the Road Research Laboratory was approached for help with acoustic measurement. It was a mobilisation of both military and civilian expertise.

Many of the suggestions fell by the wayside. A party sent out to Cyprus from the Royal Radar Establishment, Malvern, quickly determined that thermal mapping of hides failed. (Infra-red film had also been of limited use in Malaya.) Flourescent contamination needed a further round of experiment in which soldiers bivouaced at Lulworth, on the Dorset coast, for several nights, were then surveilled to see how far flourescent material has spread by contact. Nevertheless, other innovations, such as use of the Sniperscope were deemed ‘most useful’⁹. Sycamore helicopters and Land Rovers were equipped with the means to spray castoreum, and staff trained in their use, as was witnessed by Titt on a return visit to Cyprus in May 1958¹⁰. A trial on the southern slopes of the Kyrenian range demonstrated that dogs could follow a new trail (although the dog handler erroneously called the dogs off and it was subsequently found the animals were on track), although it was also realised that false trails of “Titt’s Perfume” (as the soldiers named castoreum) created by the ubiquitous goats, sheep, donkeys and feral dogs on the island were a serious problem¹¹

Operation Dementia was a case of the deployment of Cold War defence research expertise in support on colonial control. Its timing is curious. The immediate cycle of violence in Cyprus had started in 1954-5. On the night of the 31 March 1955, EOKA detonated the broadcasting station above Nicosia, and simultaneously attacked police stations and army camps. In the following months schoolchildren rioted and stoned soldiers, EOKA bombed post offices, the British Institute in Nicosia was burned to the ground in September 1955, and a state of emergency declared in November. The British had cancelled the annual and traditional summer retreat to Mount Troodos, which was now in EOKA control. Greek-Turkish tensions intensified. In March 1956, in a grave mistake that forestalled chances of negotiation, the Greek Cypriot leader and ethnarch Archbishop Makarios was deported to the Seychelles. In May, Michael Karaolis, convicted of the murder of a police officer, was hanged, and brutal reprisals, on both British and Greek Cypriot sides, followed. Field Marshal Harding launched two operations, one of which, Operation LUCKY ALPHONSE, targeted finding the leader of EOKA, Colonel Grivas, in the Troodos mountains ¹². But spring 1957 saw an relative easing of the conflict. Grivas declared a truce (which lasted until August). Makarios returned to Cyprus, to Greek Cypriot jubilation, in March. It is in this period of calm that the request for ‘scientific assistance’ was issued.

While the immediate source of expertise for Operation DEMENTIA was Porton Down, a wide range of UK research establishments and military organisation was mobilised. The problem of locating Grivas’s EOKA terrorists/freedom fighters even prompted members of the British general public, and military veterans, to write to the War Office offering their own “bright ideas” (one Dr Davison of Dunfermline, for example, suggested traceable radioactive isotopes spread on ‘something the terrorist is certain to steal – ammunition or explosives’, while another came across an American idea to deny territory to a ‘potential aggressor by sowing the frontier with atomic waste products’¹³. The usual assumption is that 1957 was turning point, post-Suez, wihen the Sandys defence white paper articulated the policy of reducing military commitments overseas. But Operation DEMENTIA, with its turn to science and technology is,perhaps, also, in a small way, a reminder that decreasing the size of human military forces was accompanied by a doubling-down on the appeal to science and technology.

 

==

 

Figure 1: Antonio Reynoso. Untitled, Texcoco, 1966.

 

This is the story of an astonishing proposal, a 1960s technological fix that, it was said, save Mexico City from collapse, provide fresh water to its inhabitants, and all through the implementation of nuclear power. It became the subject of intense and competitive diplomacy.

The scheme, known as the Texcoco project, was pitched to the UK Atomic Energy Authority in February 1965. Dr Arnulfo Morales-Amado, of the Mexican Comision Nacional Energia Nuclear (CNEN) introduced the issues:

Mexico City stood in a valley surrounded by mountains which was geologically an independent basin. Approximately 160 million gallons of water per day were being pumped out of the water lying beneath the city to supply its needs and as a consequence the city had been sinking about one foot a year for thirty years. In these circumstances the cost of maintaining the sewers and other plant and equipment was considerable.

There was, however, a second basin formation some 30 kilometres from Mexico City at Texcoco which, in view of the sinking of the Mexico City basin was now higher than the latter. There was therefore a danger that if an earthquake were to result in the two basins becoming joined, Mexico City would be flooded. For this reason the Texcoco basin had been dried out which, in view of the prevailing winds, had led to dust storms blowing over Mexico City. Moreover, the development of industry from the city towards Texcoco basin had had to be stopped.[1]

The inhabitants and industry of Mexico City used 320 million gallons per day, about half of which was purified and used again for agriculture, so usage was about 160 million gallons per day. This water was extracted from under the inhabitants’ feet. In Mexico City £10 million a year was spent on work necessitated by subsidence. The sinking of wells had been prohibited, and industrial development ‘was held up by reason of water shortage…. If the water problems could be solved, industrial development near Mexico City need no longer be held up’[2]

The CNEN’s proposal was

to meet these problems by the construction of a 500 MW(E) reactor which would provide power but would be primarily designed to enable water from the Texcoco basin to be desalted and piped to Mexico City. …. If successfully completed this operation would result in the sinking of the Texcoco basin as the water was drawn away and would enable water to be pumped back into the sub-strata of Mexico City. The later would therefore stop sinking, with a saving in maintenance costs, and the flood danger be obviated’[3] To put this in perspective, the total generating capacity of Mexico was 5,000MW(E), of which 2,000 MW(E) connected to the grid around the capital. [4]

This was the astonishing technocratic Mexican vision of hydrological, geological and environmental engineering through nuclear power and desalination.  While presented in London by Morales-Amado, it was largely the work of Dr Nabor Carrillo Flores. Carrillo is a fascinating figure. The brief biography, sent by telegram to the leading scientist of the UK nuclear weapons programme, and passed around Whitehall, captures his character succinctly:

Dr Nabor Carillo

Is the main driving force in the Commission. He is a man of great energy and enthusiasm. He won international fame as a soil scientist. Following his pioneering work in saving buildings, and designing foundations for new buildings in Mexico City, where the ground is sinking up to 1 ft/year, he is now consulted on similar problems around the world.

He comes from a remarkable family. He is of true Indian descent. His father is a well known composer who used a 16 tone scale many years before Schoenberg; his brother is the Mexican ambassador to Washington; his sister is a concern pianist, and he himself was rector of Mexico university for six years. He is a man of great charm, wide interests and very cultured. His outside interests are painting (he is a creditable painter himself, and was a personal friend of the late Diego Riviera), and music.

The revival (after a false start) of plans to establish atomic energy in Mexico is due to him.[5]

Carillo was a modernist and a technocrat.[6] The alternative to the Texcoco project, to pipe fresh water 150 kilometers from a river supply, would also, of course, have required energy, but it did not possess the sheen of atomic modernity; it lacked, in Gabrielle Hecht’s term, “nuclearity”.[7]

 

Figure 2: Dr Nabor Carrillo Flores by Juan O’Gorman, 1960s (Source: Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Nucleares). Figure 3: detail of painting, Carrillo is described at the ‘Autor del Proyecto Texcoco’)

Context

The context was a Mexican political system that had been under the firm grip of the Institutional Revolutionary Party since its foundation, under a different name, in 1929. At its head was the dictatorial President of the Republic. Under Miguel Alemán (1946-1952), policies shifted rightwards, state-guided industrialization accelerated, financed largely through US capital.[8] Through into the 1960s, multiple initiatives for massive infrastructure span out from the political centre: new railways, new superhighways, enormous hydroelectric dams, a Metro for Mexico City, and tourist resorts (first Acapulco, later Cancun) with airports. The economy of the “Mexican miracle” grew at up to 6% per year. But prosperity was by no means evenly shared. Rural poverty was devastating, and Mexicans who chose to move to the sprawling capital city, driving its population from 3 million in 1950 to nearly 9 million in 1970, struggled to find work and adequate housing.

Nuclear power appealed to this large-scale, infrastructural, technocratic, state-led style of industrial modernization. In 1955-6, under President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines (1952-1958), as civil nuclear power stations opened in the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, Mexico’s Comision Nacional Energia Nuclear (CNEN) was established.  The commission’s activities were at an appropriate scale: encouraging education and training in nuclear physics and engineering, uranium prospecting, researching applications for radioisotopes, and so on. An institute for nuclear research was announced in 1963, near Salazar, west of Mexico City, and it housed an accelerator and planned to run a small Geneal Atomics Triga Mark III research and training reactor, with uranium fuel sourced from the United States via the International Atomic Energy Agency.[9]  American nuclear feet were already on the ground.

Small-scale research reactors were one thing. Large scale nuclear power stations were another thing entirely. Both the United States and the United Kingdom had built power stations, on the back of military programmes, and foresaw an emerging and lucrative global market opening up as the world chose the modern and mighty atom for its electrical power.

Between 1957 and 1960 tantalising rumours of Mexico entering the marketplace as a purchaser of nuclear power stations circulated.[10]  Then, in 1960, ‘all these phantoms were swept away’:

The Commission [CNEN] in a discussion with members of the [British] Embassy staff … said that there was absolutely no chance then of the Mexicans purchasing a nuclear power station. Their sources of cheap power were still largely unexploited, generation of electricity by hydro-electric means could be multiplied seven times, and production of oil almost as much … Mexico’s real need was for scientists trained in nuclear techniques to enable the Government to undertake an unpretentious but solidly based nuclear programme some time in the next decade.[11]

The UK responds to the Texcoco project pitch

Despite this sweeping away of phantoms, atomic relations between the UK and Mexico grew. In 1959 a visit by Licenciado José Ortiz Tirado, who had moved from being once President of the Supreme Court of Mexico to be President of CNEN, to the Calder Hall power station in September 1959, had been covered approvingly by the Mexican press. Mexican scientists had attended UKAEA schools for nuclear education, and the Morales-Amado visit, at which the Texcoco project pitch had first been made, was in the context of CNEN wanting to send more staff on attachment for training on the commercially sensitive methods of isotope production at Amersham, Wantage and Harwell, just as they did to Canada, Karlsruhe and Oak Ridge. Mexican scientists at CNEN and those at universities received and read the UKAEA publication Atom. Carrillo had visited in autumn 1964, and established, it was noted in the Foreign Office, ‘good relationships’. UKAEA scientists travelled to Mexico on fact-finding missions.[12] When the nuclear centre at Salazar was being kitted out, British companies, such as Fairey Engineering and Nuclear Chemical Plant Limited, touted their wares.[13]  There seems ‘little doubt’, reported the British Embassy in Mexico City, ‘that the Mexican Government is determined to build up a nuclear industry as rapidly as they can [and[ there should be very good opportunities for British firms in this country’.[14]

But the scale and vision of the Texcoco project were something else altogether. There were also time constraints, caused by the political character of big infrastructural projects in Mexico. The project would have to be completed ‘in the present Mexican President [Gustavo Diaz Ordaz]’s six year term of office’, in other words by December 1970. This short timescale meant that off-the-peg reactor designs were the only ones the UK could offer. However, if the project was financed by international assistance, probably by borrowing from the World Bank, this in turn would create delays, since it was likely that a lengthy tendering process would be imposed. [15]  So there was room, opportunity even, for financial alternatives.

The UK suggest going in stages, starting with a Magnox, which could provide 300 MW(E) costing £30m and between £9-30million for the desalination plant. A larger 500MW(E) reactor  would cost about £45m, and could be either a larger Magnox or the new AGR design. Magnox was the first generation of UK reactors for power stations, based on the Calder Hall model opened in 1956. They were proven but already looking relatively primitive. Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors (AGRs) were the new, expensive design touted by the UK. The announcement of Dungeness B, the first AGR, was made and trumpeted in 1965, perhaps not least with a view for possible export sales. ‘Like you we were greatly impressed by the announcement about the Dungeness B Station and its implications for elsewhere’, wrote a Ministry of Overseas Development civil servant, adding ‘I have no doubt that the Mexicans will be made aware of the news and the reasons for the decision’.[16]

The desalination plant would be provided by Weir Westgarth, an innovative Glasgow firm that had built a business around Heriot-Watt university professor Robert Silver’s invention of the multi-stage flash desalination method.[17] Weir Westgarth had built the largest desalination in operation anywhere in the world in 1964 (in the Dutch East Indies, producing one and a half million gallons of fresh water per day).[18] Weir Westgarth also pitched for a desalination scheme in Tijuana, which used thermal energy power.[19] It’s main competitor was the American firm Westinghouse.[20]

The next steps suggested by the UK was a team visit by members of the UKAEA Reactor Group plus industry representatives, and to do a feasibility study. Weir Westgarth, would also need 6 months for a feasibility study for the desalination plant. There should also be a survey of Texcoco. When the question of whether an International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) survey would be acceptable was answered in the negative in London, since it would be done by Americans, and however ‘unbiased they pretend to be their report would be unlikely to favour the UK’.[21]

Nuclear diplomacy

On the face of it, Mexico would seem remote from UK diplomatic interests, or as a country that might look to Britain for technical assistance. But, in the long memory of the Foreign Office it was recalled that in the 1890s, when Mexico City was expanding, the lake receding, and the city was already liable to very severe flooding, the English engineer Weetman Dickinson Pearson had built the Grand Canal ‘which … afforded relief for decades’. Pearson, later ennobled as Lord Cowdray had been the Liberal MP for Colchester (known as the ‘Member for Mexico’) and had been invited by President Porfirio Diaz to build a Mexican railway, and, while doing so, had discovered Mexican oil (the Mexican Eagle Petroleum Company was later merged into Royal Dutch-Shell) [22] Perhaps Mexican memories were also long.

‘The Mexicans appear genuinely interested in close nuclear collaboration with us & I assume it wd be v. profitable to us to encourage this interest’, noted the Foreign Office, adding a warning: ‘I also assume that the Mexicans are under constant US pressure to adopt American reactor systems & desalination plant’.[23] ‘The Mexicans are, no doubt, turning to us’, he thought, because:

(i) they recognize that we have some expertise to offer and

(ii) they welcome the opportunity, when it presents itself, of dealing with someone other than the Americans.

Whether this will turn out to be very profitable for us it is difficult to say, but if the President puts his shoulder behind the project … we could conceivably find ourselves in on the ground floor’.[24]

Notes circulated between the UKAEA, the Foreign Office, the Overseas Development Ministry, and the British Embassy in Mexico City.

Aware that the Americans had ‘embarked on an intensive sales campaign to obtain responsibility for the survey and eventual contract’, Carrillo asked the British Embassy in confidence for ‘a UK team to go out before March 22^nd [1965] for some other ostensible reason but in fact to provide realistic and convincing background information on a possible UK imported reactor and desalination plant for [the Mexican] Minister of Finance’.[25] Two UKAEA scientists, Dr Hans Kronberger and F.M. Greenless were dispatched.

In April 1965 Dr Nabor Carrillo and his CNEN team visited London, meeting with the leading politician Barbara Castle. (the Parliamentary Secretary of the Overseas Development Ministry), as well as civil servants; Castle also had a private conversation with Edmund de Rothschild.[26]

De Rothschild’s presence marked the entry of French interests into the diplomatic competition over Texcoco. The suggestion of UK-France cooperation originated from Dr Bertrand Goldschmidt of the French atomic agency[27], and was brokered, via the Paris-based Baron Guy de Rothschild, by Goldschmidt’s brother-in-law Edmund de Rothschild, who worked at N M Rothschild & Sons in London.[28] Guy de Rothschild thought that the project ‘could only be financed by an international consortium’, and proposed a meeting of ‘British and French industrial and financial interests to explore the desirability of co-operation’.[29] Edmund relayed this message.

The Ministry of Technology, the UKAEA and the Board of Trade were unanimous that the UK ‘should firmly decline this offer’, for several reasons.[30] Unlike the supersonic Concord aircraft project, which was a development package in which both countries would learn from cooperation to mutual advantage, Texcoco presented the possibility of a ‘straight off-the-peg sale’. Second, these UK bodies thought ‘cooperation was technically nonsensical’ since the choice was either a British design (AGR being favoured) or French. It was thought the Mexicans, and Carrillo specifically, preferred the more advanced British design. Finally, a lot more than the initial sale income was at stake, indeed it might be strategically critical for an industrial commercial sector that was expected to grow in the atomic age:

the chance of securing the contract for this reactor (which would bring us in about £15 million) gave us the chance of beating the Americans to the first large reactor in a developing country. This would be a major breakthrough for our nuclear industry and could well lead to further orders in this vast potential market

Nevertheless, privately, the Foreign Office took a different view of cooperation with the French, one based on a perhaps more realistic, long-term assessment of the nation’s strengths in an emerging international market for nuclear power: ‘if you believe – as I do, but fear that [UK]AEA do not – that we shall only be able to hold our own in the long term against US competition in these fields if we broaden our base by cooperating with Europe in them, then it is at least arguable that the time to do so is now, when our acknowledged lead over other European countries should enable us to devise a system in which we retained the lion’s share’.[31]

President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz had confirmed that nuclear matters were the responsibility of the Mexican Ministry of Finance. The Mexican view was clearly that having an alternative to any American offer was useful for their negotiations with their northern neighbour. It mattered less whether it was British or French. Or indeed it could be both. The Foreign Office explained to Rothschild that the UK saw no advantage in cooperation, but might pursue it if the ‘Mexicans wish to “internationalise” their project’.[32] However, from the Mexican perspective there was no overriding reason to involve the French, since any non-US alternative sufficed.

Carrillo initially expressed clear preference for the UK option. But the Mexican decision was certainly not Carrillo’s alone. The Ministry of Finance had responsibility and, ultimately, nothing big happened in the Mexican political system without presidential approval. Some of these worries were aired within the Foreign Office:

if Presidential approval for it is forthcoming, then Carrillo would be happy enough to award the major contract to the United Kingdom. There are however many ifs. We are by no means convinced that an independent survey will support Carrillo’s solution, particularly since no one knows to what extent [the waters of] Texcoco Basin really are saline. We still do not know whether Carrillo will succeed in persuading other and more influential members of the Mexican Government of the necessity of a nuclear solution; and we fear that if a nuclear solution is adopted the US offer a reactor on gift terms will prove impossible to resist.[33]

Small nuclear research reactors had been part of US diplomacy since Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace. Large reactors for nuclear power might too be “gifted” if long-term interests, not least commercial interests, were served.

The Mexican government engaged a team of Mexican and American experts for a hydrological survey of Texcoco, including within it the leading Harvard soil mechanician Arthur Casagrande, and his brother Leo. Carrillo was allocated US$1 million for the survey.[34] The inclusion of the US experts was concerning for London, not least because the hydrological survey might ‘prove to be the first link in the chain of any project finally agreed for a reactor and desalination plant’.[35] But it was also noted that Carrillo had completed his PhD at Harvard and knew the Casagrandes well.

In the UK, Mexican ministers, government civil engineers and officials were wined, dined and given presentations through 1965, including a lunch given by Lord Snow (C.P. Snow, a minister in Harold Wilson’s Ministry of Technology) to discuss desalination. Meanwhile, UK atomic scientists, representatives of UK nuclear power station consortia, visited Mexico.[36]

Nevertheless, by September it was becoming clear to London that there were reasons to be worried. The Mexico City newspaper Excelsior reported an interview with Stewart Udall, the US Secretary of the Interior, in Tokyo. Udall, said the IAEA, at the request of the Mexican government had completed studies of a joint US-Mexican nuclear and desalination project. While not identifying the location explicitly, Udall was reported ‘to have mentioned that the US Government were informed about the problem of soil subsidence in Mexico City… [and] that a project to increase Mexico City’s water supplies could be subject of co-operation between the US and Mexico’.[37] While it seems Udall was talking about the Tijuana desalination – which actually increased Europeans’ chances, since European involvement in Texcoco would offset the American deal[38] – the scheme officials were right to worried.

A week of discussions in the fringes of a Desalination Symposium allowed time for an extensive conversation with the Mexican team. Present alongside the Mexicans and the Whitehall civil servants were Edmund de Rothschild, UKAEA scientists, Professor Silver, representatives of Weir Westgarth, and UK diplomats. As was reported by a British Embassy in Washington diplomat to a counterpart in the British Embassy in Mexico City, this conversation caused alarm bells to ring. It is worth quoting at length for what it reveals about different cultural expectations, the scale of the project, and the high stakes involved:

Our main object has been to try and discover whether this enormous project is only a pipe-dream of Carrillo’s or if there really is a likelihood that it will come off; and if so whether there is a role for the United Kingdom. I am not entirely confident of the answer to either question. Nothing is more difficult to read than the Mexican mind when not only technical considerations but foreign and internal politics are also involved. …

From our discussions on all this it was clear that Carrillo has until now greatly underestimated the immense complexity of a scheme of this kind, which would, if undertaken in its entirety, be the biggest in the world, and would pose problems that would tax the ingenuity of the world’s most sophisticated experts with experience in this field; this without even touching on the extraneous factors such as the need to rehouse anything up to ½ million people and perhaps eventually to move Mexico City International Airport. If we were talking about virtually any other developing country we could only conclude that the scheme is so huge and so little thought out that we could forget about it for the foreseeable future.

However all Mexican schemes seem to start in this muddled, haphazard and indeed exasperating manner, yet time and time again we have seen the pieces fall suddenly into place, a firm decision taken by the President, top priority given and unless one is very careful a contract lost before one ever fully realized that a possibility of one existed.[39]

In contrast, British ears would have pricked up hearing Diaz Ordaz’s Message to the Nation of 1 September 1965, as the President of Mexico, significantly, chose to address nuclear matters, starting with the role of CNEN and moving to hints at grand projects:

The work of the National Commission of Nuclear Energy is based on the will to favour and promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy.

We desire that the development of our nuclear industry should rest on self-sufficiency in the supply of raw materials; that increasingly large groups of Mexicans should be trained for the direction and control of future installations; that the people should experience the benefits of this activity through agriculture, industry and medicine, and that we should be prepared from now on to use nuclear reactors to remedy the shortage of electric power and water.[40]

Ultimately though the project had little support in Mexico outside the CNEN, a fact that UKAEA gradually recognized. ‘the Texcoco pot will probably remain simmering for some time but without coming to the boil’.[41] For the choice of desalination plant, first in Tijuana but then for Texcoco, the second factor was immense American political lobbying, at the highest levels, and how it split the influencers at the top of the Mexican one-party political system. For example, it was the Foreign Office’s ‘information’ that

very great pressure us being put on the Mexicans – at President to President level – to ensure that all desalination business in Mexico – including the possible plant at Texcoco – should go to the US. This has reached the point at which politicians close to President Diaz Ordaz assume that the US will get its way. The technicians on the other hand look to the UK and would seek to frustrate this pressure if they can.[42]

Other alternatives to a nuclear reactor/desalination plant combination were available. Piping river water from a distance has already been mentioned; later oil-fired power station for desalination and biochemical treatment of sewage effluent were also possible.[43]

The third factor was the death of Dr Nabor Carrillo in February 1967.[44] This man, who had witnessed a nuclear detonation at Bikini atoll in 1946[45], and who had subsequently promoted the application of nuclear power to save Mexico City from collapse, was, at least as far as UK diplomats and scientists heard and saw, the firmest supporter in Mexico of choosing UK over North American suppliers of reactors and desalination plant.

Many years later, the remnants of Lake Texcoco were eventually memorialized as  Lake Nabor Carrillo, and Mexico’s nuclear institute is also named after him. In the 2010s Lake Nabor Carrillo was first drained to start building Mexico City’s new international airport, and then, as this project was cancelled, refilled to form an ecological park.[46]

Nuclear power never saved Mexico City, and the Carrillo’s Texcoco Project was never realised. In the late 1960s, the UK were still pitching an Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor as Mexico considered its nuclear options elsewhere. In 1972 the Mexican government decided to accept US designs, and in 1976 construction began at Laguna Verde, on the Gulf coast, on two 654 MW(E) General Electric boiling-water reactors.[47] They are the only large nuclear power reactors in Mexico.

This has been a story of a grand hydraulic engineering vision conceived during the pinnacle years of nuclear optimism.  I found it because I was wondering about what links there might be between Mexico and the UK in the areas of scientific and technological collaboration and diplomacy. To be honest I had not expected to find much. Mexico is Spanish-speaking, a central American Republic, with little reason to prioritise relations with the UK. Yet because of its post-war strengths in nuclear power and desalination, and precisely because the United Kingdom was NOT the Unted States then a window for commerce opened.

There is still much we do not know. How seriously was the UK offer considered? How important were the exchanges between Mexican and US presidents? What would the public response have been to a large nuclear reactor built on the edge of Mexico City? It would be fascinating to see the view from other archives.

References

[1] TNA FO 371/183321. ‘Note of a meeting held at the UKAEA’s London office, 11 Charles II Street, at 3.30 pm on Tuesday, 2^nd February 1965’

[2] TNA FO 371/183321. Carrillo, from ‘Note of a meeting held at the Board Room of the UKAEA London Office at 11am on Wednesday 21^st April 1965’.

[3] TNA FO 371/183321. ‘Note of a meeting held at the UKAEA’s London office, 11 Charles II Street, at 3.30 pm on Tuesday, 2^nd February 1965’

[4] TNA FO 371/183321. ‘Note of a meeting held at the Board Room of the UKAEA London Office at 11am on Wednesday 21^st April 1965’. The Texcoco Project was described in a 1966 essay by one of Carrillo’s fellow engineers: Carlos Graef Fernandez, ‘The Texcoco Project’, in Post and Steele (eds.), Water Production Using Nuclear Energy, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1966. Graef Fernandez’s essay has been noticed by present day promoters of nuclear solutions:  https://www.ans.org/news/article-2170/more-nuclear-for-mexico/ . See also: Natalia Verónica Soto-Coloballes, ‘Proyectos y obras para el use deo los terrenos desecados del antiguo Lago de Texcoco, 1912-1998’ (‘Projects abd construction work for using the dried lands of the former Lake Texcoco’, Estudios de Historia Moderna y Contemporánea de México (2019) 58, pp. 259-288.

[5] TNA AB 65/160. Telegram Kronberger to Sir Willliam Penney, 13 July 1964.

[6] ‘Technocrat’ is a politically-charged term in Mexico, see: Roderi Ai Camp, ‘The time of the technocrats and deconstruction of the revolution’, in William Beezley and Michael C. Meyer (eds.), The Oxford History of Mexico, 2010: ‘Few political themes in Mexico since the early 1970s have attracted more attention and provoked more discussion than the increasing role of technocrats and their influence on government policy and leadership trends, The rise of the technocratic politician is not, however – media interpretations to the contrary – a recent phenomenon. Its antecedents can be traced as far back as the 1940s…’. Carrillo is one such figure, I would suggest.

[7] Gabrielle Hecht, ‘Nuclear ontologies’, Constellations (13), No 3, 2006, pp. 320-331.

[8] John W. Sherman, ‘The Mexican “miracle” and its collapse’, in William Beezley and Michael C. Meyer (eds.), The Oxford History of Mexico, 2010.

[9] TNA AB 65/160. UKAEA, Brief for the visit to Mexico of Mr C. Buck, 1964.

[10] TNA AB 65/160. UKAEA, Brief for the visit to Mexico of Mr C. Buck, 1964. In 1957, it was reported that the Mexican Federal Electricity Commission wanted a 30 MW(E) atomic plant for the city of Chihuahua. In 1959 CNEN floated the idea of a 100 MW(E) station for Baja California. Others were even more speculative. One approach to UKAEA un 1959 by a Senor Geza Szekely of the Mexican firm PMEI, was assessed as “one of the growing pack of coyotes who thought they would obtain a handsome profit by acting as intermediaries in the purchase of an atomic power station”.

[11] TNA AB 65/160. UKAEA, Brief for the visit to Mexico of Mr C. Buck, 1964.

[12] Sir John Cockcroft, director of Harwell, gave a series of three lectures in Mexico City too.

[13] TNA AB 65/160 contains correspondence discussing UK firms’ atomic supplies business in Mexico.

[14] TNA AB 65/160. Hildyard (British Embassy, Mexico City) to Thomas (UKAEA), 18 November 1963.

[15] TNA FO 371/183321. Carrillo, from ‘Note of a meeting held at the Board Room of the UKAEA London Office at 11am on Wednesday 21^st April 1965’.

[16] TNA FO 371/183321. Hayes to Edmund de Rothschild, 28 May 1965.

[17] Silver visited Texcoco by helicopter in 1966, and provided a vivid description of landing ‘in a deserted portion of the lake … We dug a hole of about 4 feet diameter, and encountered water at 2 feet depth… The helicopter flight also revealed clearly the whole basin area, and the hill range which lies between it and Mexico City. It is presumed that the underground base of this range forms the impermeable curtain sealing off the two lakes from each other… I also made a tour of Mexico City and studied at first hand the very marked evidence of sinking, Again this is consistent completely with all the hypotheses on which Dr Carrillo’s theory is based. …The problem of subsidence is near disaster proportions and could become so any time. Hence not necessarily cheapest but the earliest possible solution must be found. For this reason I believe the balance will be on favour of nuclear desalination, even if the source waters are fresh’ TNA FO 371/189484. R.S. Silver, ‘Texcoco Project’, August 1966.

[18] TNA AB 65/160. Notes of a meeting at Weir Westgarth Ltd, 27 January 1965.

[19] There was also a smaller scheme in the Yucatan: a desalination plant to produce 40 tons of water a day for a naval station on the Isla de las Mujeres, near Cozumel, Quintana Roo. This was a few years before the immense tourist development began of Cancun.

[20] TNA 371/189484. Powell to Sir Nicholas Cheetham (UK Ambassador, Mexico City), 6 June 1966, records Weir Westgarth losing out to Westinghouse for a major contract in Kuwait, and the pressure and actions needed to influence Mexican desalination plant decisions

[21] TNA FO 371/183321. McLean (FO, Overseas Relations Branch) to Frost (Ministry of Overseas Development), 12 March 1965

[22] TNA FO 371/183321. Milward to MacKenzie, 24 September 1965 for grand canal information. For rest of Pearson’s biography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weetman_Pearson,_1st_Viscount_Cowdray . Also: ‘Pearson’s first major contract in Mexico involved the construction of a 30 mile Drainage Canal (Gran Canal del Desagüe) to the north of Mexico City to relieve the persistent (and perennial) problem of flooding in Mexico City. On the back of this notable success, in 1895, Pearson won the contract for the reconstruction and refurbishment of Veracruz, which since the beginning of the colonial era had been Mexico’s most important Atlantic port. Three years later, in 1898, Pearson won the most important, and certainly the most expensive contract ever awarded by a Mexican government since independence: the re-construction of the inter-oceanic railway across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico.’ https://hispanic-anglosphere.com/individuals/pearson-weetman-dickson-first-viscount-cowdray-1856-1927/ referencing Paul Garner, British Lions and Mexican Eagles: Business, Politics and Empire in the Career of Weetman Pearson in Mexico 1889-1919 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011)

[23] TNA FO 371/183321. Covering note on file, 16 February 1965.

[24] TNA FO 371/183321. Note by Rogers, 23 February 1965.

[25] TNA FO 371/183321. Telegram, McLean to Stephenson (scientific attaché,  British Embassy, Washington DC), undated (March 1965)

[26] TNA FO 371/183321. ‘Record of a meeting with Dr Nabor Carrillo, of the Mexican Nuclear Energy Commission (CNEN) April 21, 1965’. In Carrillo’s CNEN team were Tomas Gurza and Graes Fernandez.

[27] Commissariat à l’énergie atomique (CEA). According to notes by Avnar Cohen for his oral history interview kept at the Wilson Center, ‘Goldschmidt headed the agency’s chemistry division for a decade, and later became a scientist-diplomat as head of the CEA’s “External Affairs” division’. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/bertrand-goldschmidt. French Who’s Who, gives 1959 as the start of his responsibility at CEA for ‘relations extérieures et des programmes’, and also adds that he was Représentant permanent de la France (1957-80) and then Président (1980) du conseil des gouverneurs at the l’Agence internationale de l’énergie atomique (the IAEA).

[28] The Foreign Office knew Bertrand Goldschmidt to be Edmund de Rothschild’s brother-in-law. Goldschmidt, who had been the only Frenchman employed on the Manhattan Project, was born 2 November 1912 and died aged 89 on 11 June 2002. He married Naomi de Rothschild (Edmund’s sister) in 1947. The London-based Edmund de Rothschild should not be confused with the French-Swiss banker Baron Edmond Adolphe de Rothschild. See: https://www.rothschildarchive.org/genealogy/

[29] TNA FO 371/183321. Frost to Strachan, 6 May 1965. Guy de Rothschild, ‘Projet de construction a Mexico d’une installation de dessalement’, and ‘Note annexe’, undated, prepared by Guy for the banque Nationale pour la Commerce et l’Industrie

[30] TNA FO 371/183321. B.L. Strachan, ‘Nuclear reactor for Mexico’, 21 April 1965.

[31] TNA FO 371/183321. Note on file by Strachan, 7 May 1965.

[32] TNA FO 371/183321. Oram to E. de Rothschild, 22 April 1965. Later in the year it was hinted that an international option might be for the UK to supply the reactor and desalination plant and for the French to supply electrical generation equipment, as well as help, via the Rothschilds, arrange finance. TNA FO 371/183321. Robin Johnstone (First Secretary, British Embassy, Mexico) to Robert McAlpine (Counsellor, British Embassy, Mexico City), 11 October 1965.

[33] TNA FO 371/183321. J. McAdam Clark (Scientific Relations Department, Foreign Office) to  R.D.C. McAlpine (British Embassy, Mexico City), 14 June 1965. TNA AB 65/160. Telegram to Ministry of Overseas Development, 17 May 1965: : ‘CARILLO considers it quite likely Americans will offer to provide at least a nuclear reactor at their own expense for prestige purposes and Mexican Government would find such an offer difficult to refuse’

[34] The sum was allocated in a “non-accountable” way, ‘that is to say he has been told to get on with the job without having to seek the authorization of any governmental body for the expenditure involved’. TNA FO 371/183321. Johnstone to McAlpine, 11 October 1965. Carrillo’s survey is mentioned (on p. 14) in a good longue durée study of the political ecology of Lake Texcoco, but does not mention its nuclear dimensions: Carolina Montero-Rosado, Enrique Ojeda-Trejo, Vicente Espinosa-Hernández, Demetrio Fernández-Reynoso,Miguel Caballero Deloya and Gerardo Sergio Benedicto Valdés, Historical Political Ecology in the Former Lake Texcoco: Hydrological Regulation’, Land (2023), 12(5), 1113, https://doi.org/10.3390/land12051113

[35] TNA FO 371/183321. MacLean to Hobbs, 2 August 1965.

[36] The consortia firms with an interest were The Nuclear Power Group, APC, English Electric, and B & W.

[37] TNA FO 371/183321. McAlpine to McAdam Clark, 28 September 1965.

[38] ‘the signature last week of the agreement between the United States and Mexico to undertake a joint survey in the North-West will almost certainly make it easier for Europeans to participate in Texcoco. Carrillo told us in confidence thar Sr. Gorostiza [President, CNEN] was not at all enthusiastic about co-opertaing with the Americans in frontier areas and Carrillo maintains that there will be stormy protests in political circles against the US/Mexico deal. In such a situation it would be true to form for the Mexican Government to seek a counter-weight and Carrillo thinks they may well choose Texcoco for this purpose’. TNA FO 371/183321. Johnstone to McAlpine, 11 October 1965.

[39] TNA FO 371/183321. Johnstone to McAlpine, 11 October 1965.

[40] TNA FO 371/183321. ‘Translation of passage on nuclear energy in the Message to the Nation delivered by the President of Mexico on 1 September 1965’. Diaz Ordaz also mentioned discoveries of reserves of uranium, and the pursuit of the construction of a ‘Nuclear Centre of Mexico in the woods near the village of Salazar’.

[41] TNA FO 371/183321. MacLean (UKAEA) to McAdam Clark, 31 December 1965.

[42] TNA FO 371/183321. Note on file, 22 December 1985

[43] TNA AB 65/160. Cock, ‘Notes of a meeting at Weir Westgarth Ltd…’, 29 January 1965

[44] His role was taken up by Ing. Hiriart. TNA AB 65/555. Chicj to Kronberger, 28 July 1967.

[45] https://www.gob.mx/inin/es/articulos/dr-nabor-carrillo-flores-el-sabio-mexicano

[46] https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/13/1067854/lake-texcoco-ancient-lake-unfinished-airport-mexico-city/

[47] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-g-n/mexico

(I am sharing my possible research ideas, see my tweet here. Most of them remain only 1/2 or 1/4 ideas, so if any of them seem particularly promising or interesting let me know @jon_agar or jonathan.agar@ucl.ac.uk!)

Like many, I am a great admirer of William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, published in 1991. It is a history of the growth of the city, and the transformation of the regions around, as natural resources were brought to the centre and processed. It’s a story of grain, lumber, pigs and cows. It is a story of the past, but also the future. Literally, indeed, ‘futures’: how organic life became systematically processed, standardised, commodified, and, eventually, dematerialised, sold as  promises of future delivery. It draws the line between the technology of grain elevators and modern finance. It is extraordinary.

In terms of historical method, Nature’s Metropolis shows what an integrated environmental, urban and technological history can do if the historian follows material flows. The grain from the hinterlands that arrives in standardised sacks to be sold in central markets, or the livestock herded from afar to the central slaughterhouses, to be sent out again as commodified products, are the materials of interest.

In 2006-2007 I was lucky enough to spend a year in Boston. This research idea comes from time spent in that city, which then was very much in its biotech boom phase. I compiled a detailed list of Boston biotech companies, and I still have the 49-page Word document. Here are just some of the biotech ‘B’s of Boston: Biogen, Biomeasure Inc., Biopure Corp., Biotricity, Biotrofic Inc, BioVentures, Biovest, BioVex and Biovolutions Inc. I wonder how many still exist.

Reading Cronon in Boston gave me an idea. What would we find out if we followed the material flows into and out of the biotechnology centres? Does biotech transform nature in any even vaguely comparable way to the ways that Chicago’s lumberyards, stockyards and grain elevators transformed wood, meat and grain? What are the regional effects? How might it reach into the past and future?

Biotech is usually analysed from the perspective of innovation studies (does it return on investment?), or as the vehicle that carried commercial, entrepreneurial culture into the life sciences (does it undermine traditional academic values?). or around questions of the public response to GM foods. Taking inspiration from Cronon, but also from (the good) Latour’s analysis of the levering power of laboratories, as well as from recent scholarship that has focussed on the history of the laboratory animal, following the material in and out of biotech centres might provide a different path to studying the modern life sciences.

(I am sharing my possible research ideas, see my tweet here. Most of them remain only 1/2 or 1/4 ideas, so if any of them seem particularly promising or interesting let me know @jon_agar or jonathan.agar@ucl.ac.uk!)

The historical analysis of UK science policy is very patchy. Some organisations active in funding or shaping science are well studied (for example, we have quite a few papers on aspects of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research), but others, for various reasons, are more obscure, at least from the perspective of independent, primary-source-evidence-led investigation.

There are several causes of obscurity.

One is commercial secrecy. For much of the twentieth-century, most UK science was publicly-funded, even if much of the research was conducted by industry. Since the end of the Cold War, the predominant proportion of UK science has both been funded and conducted within the private sector. Yet science policy analysis still focusses mostly on government (mine included). According to most recent ONS figures (2019), £38.5 billion is expended on R&D in the UK, of which 2/3rds (£25.9b) is in the business sector.

According to the EU 2020 R&D Scoreboard, the list of UK companies that spent more than £300 million on R&D were:

 

GLAXOSMITHKLINE	Pharmaceuticals & Biotechnology	5068.0
ASTRAZENECA	Pharmaceuticals & Biotechnology	4795.3
HSBC	Banks	1856.9
ROLLS-ROYCE	Aerospace & Defence	1305.8
LLOYDS BANKING	Banks	1206.6
APTIV	Automobiles & Parts	1037.0
BARCLAYS	Banks	1001.0
ROYAL DUTCH SHELL	Oil & Gas Producers	856.3
UNILEVER	Food Producers	840.0
BT	Fixed Line Telecommunications	629.6
ATLASSIAN CORPORATION	Software & Computer Services	515.5
MICRO FOCUS INTERNATIONAL	Software & Computer Services	452.4
NATWEST	Banks	443.8
RELX GROUP	Media	388.9
MELROSE INDUSTRIES	Industrial Engineering	386.6
DELPHI TECHNOLOGIES	Automobiles & Parts	363.2
BP	Oil & Gas Producers	324.0
BAT	Tobacco	320.0
DYSON JAMES	Household Goods & Home Construction	309.5
EXPERIAN	Support Services	304.4
RECKITT BENCKISER	Household Goods & Home Construction	300.2

We can see the predominance of pharmaceuticals, and we all now know something about what Astrazeneca does. But what I find striking about this list is how little we know, in reliable detail, about much of this private science. The Atlassian Corporation’s R&D spend (£515.5m) is comparable to Cambridge University’s research income for 2018 (£524.9m), yet I think it is fair to say the latter is better known than the former.

The list of top R&D-spending companies in the UK changes over time, partly due to the changing fortunes of business, partly due to how and what is counted as research and development. A similar table from the R&D Scoreboard of 2007 has some of the same names (Astrazeneca, BT, Unilever, Royal Dutch Shell, HSBC, BP, etc) but also different ones (Smiths General, Vodafone, Shire, Reuters). Historians of recent UK science have not addressed these patterns of continuity and change of private science.

But there are also reasons other than commercial discretion that have discouraged detailed analysis of bodies important for UK science.

Which brings me to the Wellcome.

The Wellcome Trust is a private foundation that funds (broadly speaking) biomedical and health research. The overall funding from private foundations is, objectively, relatively small (private non-profit bodies funded just 4% of UK R&D in 2019), but it has considerable strategic significance. Partly this significance is due to the speed and nimbleness that private foundations can act in response to changing challenges, albeit as constrained within charitable aims. Private foundations, by leading, can make publicly-funded science policy follow. This leadership effect is one reason why the accountability of publicly-funded science is not complete without an analysis of privately-funded science.

Within the UK landscape of science funding, the Wellcome is the most significant. It spends more, it has a higher profile, and it is an essential partner and patron for many research institutes and university centres in (as well as beyond) the UK. While it has its origins in the foundation set up after the death of Henry Wellcome in 1936, its contemporary influence rests on decisions taken in the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1986, the Wellcome company was floated on the stock market, the foundation sold its shared, and a large diversified charitable fund was created. When the Wellcome company subsequently merged with Glaxo in 1992, more shares were sold, raising a further £2.3 billion. The Wellcome Trust’s investment fund now stands at £29.1 billion, and the revenue funds considerable amounts of science.

But what science?

The key decision-makers in philanthropic foundations are trustees. Trustees, by charity law, are bounded by the charitable aims, but within these bounds there is considerable flexibility. Trustees – and their interests, commitments, values, experience, background, and worldviews – should therefore be the focus of analysis to understand the science and science policy consequences of philanthropic foundations. In history of science we have an excellent worked example of such an analysis: Lily Kay’s The Molecular Vision of Life (1992), a terrific study of the consequences of the interests of the trustees on the science funded by the Rockefeller Foundation in the mid-twentieth century.

The proposal, therefore, is for an analysis of the Wellcome Trust along the model of Kay’s analysis of the Rockefeller Foundation.

One might wonder why such studies do not already exist, given the importance of science to solving the world’s problems, and the strategic significance of the Wellcome? We can (largely) discount commercial secrecy, since the Wellcome is a non-profit body. Of course as a private body it is not obliged to be accountable in the same way as publicly-funded bodies are (to Parliament, to public audit, and, ultimately, to historians via scrutiny of public records). Nor is it accountable to share-holders, as some companies are. Private means private. But, as argued above, the leadership effect should prompt us to inquire about how decision are taken when they have broader, including public, influence. Even press scrutiny is rare, although Natasha Loder’s article in Nature from 2000 comes close.

I suspect the absence of analysis comes from two sources, one stemming from academic self-interest (why jeopardise future research applications?), and one that comes from a general feeling that the Wellcome is a force for good, which I have no reason to doubt is the case. Who, after all, would not cheer on the people who support ‘science to solve the urgent health challenges facing everyone‘? Who doesn’t want to see mental health, infectious disease and climate change tackled?

But, there is too much at stake to assume the best of the best. I think science is too important for us not ask for as full-as-possible, open, independent, evidence-driven accounts of how the decisions that have shaped it have been taken. This argument applies to understanding how decisions are taken not only in government, but also in private bodies, including companies and foundations.

(I am sharing my possible research ideas, see my tweet here. Most of them remain only 1/2 or 1/4 ideas, so if any of them seem particularly promising or interesting let me know @jon_agar or jonathan.agar@ucl.ac.uk!)

This is not a research idea, but it is an idea about how to try research out.

You might have noticed that several of my 1/2 research ideas are proposals to experiment in terms of method or form. (For example, here, here and here.)

What I would like to see happen is a forum to host trials of experimental historiography.

Who is up for an experimental history of science conference?

It would be a space to take a risk, try something out, and get a response. It would aim to find new historiographical paths and possibilities. Some might work in hoped for, or, even better, unexpected ways.  It might shake things up. It would most definitely applaud interesting flops. It would be fun.

I think I can organise the basics of time and space. In other words, I can find rooms and equipment for a day workshop.

Beyond that I think a few guidelines are necessary:

1. Proposals are sought for ‘papers’, ‘events’, ‘interventions’, that have an explicit aim to experiment in how history of science is conducted or presented, ie experiments in method or form.
2. Experiments in research question are moot, since they might be answered through conventional methods or presented in conventional forms, but more radical proposals might be considered.
3. The method, form or question should depart from usual practice in interesting and bold ways.
4. The choice of the method, form or question should be justifiable and reasoned. Mere anarchy is boring.
5. The experimental aim should be articulable and clear.
6. The apparatus should be realistically achievable, although a challenge is welcome.
7. There should be a criterion for ‘success’, even if it is not met in practice.

That’s a start. Might need tweaking.

If such a conference or workshop sounds exciting then contact me. Happy to collaborate in putting it together.

 

(I’ve suggested history of science because that, along with history of technology, is my main research area. But the idea would also be good to try in the genre of nature writing, not least because it has its own entrapping conventions and well-trodden paths.)

 

(I am sharing my possible research ideas, see my tweet here. Most of them remain only 1/2 or 1/4 ideas, so if any of them seem particularly promising or interesting let me know @jon_agar or jonathan.agar@ucl.ac.uk!)

This idea goes back to conversations about research collaboration Jeff Hughes and I had back in the 1990s. We were both interested in the mobilisation of scientists during the Second World War. Jeff’s research was on interwar nuclear science, and mine was on post-war radio astronomy. His scientists went into war labs and mine came out of them. We started drafting a paper on scientists at the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE), home of UK wartime radar. We argued that the scientists at TRE learned particular ways of working, and, not least, promoting, projects, as well as gaining entrance to influential networks of contacts across military, academia and government. These networks in turn shaped post-war science. We gave some talks on it at the time, but the paper was never published.

I drew on some of insights in the ‘radar sciences’ section of my Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond book.

But this idea is narrower.

Working on radar exposed scientists from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds to the techniques of manipulating “pulses”, loosely defined, of electrical current. The significance of this expertise in the manipulation and storage of discrete electrical current can be seen in, for example, the success of the team under F.C. Williams and Tom Kilburn, both ex-TRE, in being able to build the electronic, stored-program computer at Manchester University, working as early as 1948, ahead of other groups. The pulse-storage CRT “Williams Tubes” were at its centre.

The research question would be: by following technique, what were the consequences of shared, wartime, practical experience in pulsed electronics in the post-war sciences?

Another case study, for example, might be George Porter, radar officer in the Navy during the war, who, post-war, used pulse techniques and flash photolysis in investigating fast reactions, work that subsequently won a Nobel prize. Was there a connection between the war and post-war work? The scales of space and time – picoseconds, nanoseconds – are also interesting to me (I explain my interest in scale elsewhere).

There are plenty of other candidate case studies for this proposal of a practice-centred history of important threads of twentieth-century science. The trick, I feel, would be to follow techniques across disciplinary boundaries as they are picked up and applied away from radar.

(I am sharing my possible research ideas, see my tweet here. Most of them remain only 1/2 or 1/4 ideas, so if any of them seem particularly promising or interesting let me know @jon_agar or jonathan.agar@ucl.ac.uk!)

The sociological investigation of technology through the examination of how different social groups interpret, build, or challenge devices, machines and systems is very familiar now. Pinch and Bijker’s ‘Social construction of technology’ is over thirty years old. But there is still work to be done.

The idea here is very simple. Does it make any sense to consider criminals as a ‘relevant social group’ in SCOT terms? If so are there distinctive ways that can be discerned of the criminal shaping of technology?

‘Criminal’ is, of course, an almost ridiculously heterogeneous grouping. It is quite possible that the sheer diversity within criminality means this project is foolish. But there are shared features, and these features might point to shared interests and therefore shared characteristics of shaping technology.

What are these features? First, criminals must, at some level, be deceitful. What is done must be hidden to some degree from legal authority. Second. criminal processes must be both dependent – even parasitic – on legal bodies, systems, organisations, but also, at crucial points, disconnected. This pattern of connection/disconnection makes manufacturing, consumption and maintenance of technology possibly distinctive. Third, criminals have to work at speed – the longer a criminal act is ongoing the more likely the chances of detection. Working outside the system and at speed encourages bricolage – perhaps a distinctive, emergent feature of criminal technology. Fourth, some, but of course not all, criminals are willing to resort to violence, which the technologies of violence enable. You can, I am sure, extend this list.

As a sideshoot of my Government Machine project, I traced the history of ID card systems, a deeply fascinating combination of infrastructures of identity, bureaucratic information technologies, and interface between citizen and state.  What was clear, too, was that, in the UK when these systems were introduced in 1916 and 1939, they enabled new crimes, often but not exclusively of fraud. The criminal shaping of the technology, such as the forgery of a card, was deceitful, dependent on the official system (in order to work), but disconnected too (the fake ID didn’t appear on the central system), and were used speedily and briefly (or the fraudster was caught). No direct violence in these cases.

So one case suggests some of the features of the criminal shaping of technology. But what features would become prominent of more case studies accumulated?

It struck me some time ago that museum collections might help as sources of such case studies. In particular, the Metropolitan Police (ie “Scotland Yard”) has maintained a so-called “Black Museum” of the artefactual residues of crime since the 1870s. For most of its history it has been strictly off-limits to the public, although in the early 21st century it was renamed the Crime Museum and opened a fraction of its collection to visits. Currently it is closed for Covid reasons, I think. If it ever becomes open again, then one possible project might therefore be a sociological study of criminal-made artefacts as shaped technologies.

 

(I am sharing my possible research ideas, see my tweet here. Most of them remain only 1/2 or 1/4 ideas, so if any of them seem particularly promising or interesting let me know @jon_agar or jonathan.agar@ucl.ac.uk!)

I really dislike the film adaptations of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris.

It’s not just the interminable scenes of lapping water in Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), nor the missed opportunity of Steven Soderburgh’s version starring George Clooney of 2002. Neither really engages with Lem’s question: if we encounter something truly alien can we ever know it? All attempts by the visiting cosmonaut-scientists to make contact with the apparently intelligent ocean of Solaris are futile. Hollywood especially cannot resist turning this classic sci-fi conundrum into a metaphor for human-human communication – see the dreadful run of recent films each of which turns the cosmic into the personal and parochial: Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), Ad Astra (2019), and so on. (Although I have a soft spot for Arrival.)

There’s plenty of critical interpretation of Lem’s Solaris, some of which predictably read it as a Cold War commentary or dissent. Others are better, and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.’s ‘The Book Is the Alien: On Certain and Uncertain Readings of Lem’s “Solaris”‘ is good example.

But there’s two parts of Solaris I would like to see done right.

The chapter I most enjoy in Lem’s Solaris, as a historian of science, is ‘The solarists’. In it Lem gives us the history of Solaris studies, as scientist after scientist propose new hypotheses for understanding the ocean. Each one falls. It is partly a parody of scientific debate, but it also contains a deeper point. Science, as Kuhn told us, makes sense of a subject once a paradigm is established. If a paradigm doesn’t form, then all there is is a churn of failed interpretations. Lem’s Solaris was published in 1961, Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions the following year.

The ‘Solarists’ chapter has never been filmed. I think that is a shame, and would make an entertaining short. Historians of science could act the roles of Solarist scientists.

Second, I would bookend it with colourised footage of Earth’s clouds as seen from an airliner. It is clear to me that Lem’s descriptions of the wondrous forms taken by the Solaris ocean take inspiration from such a view.

I have no film-making skills.

(I am sharing my possible research ideas, see my tweet here. Most of them remain only 1/2 or 1/4 ideas, so if any of them seem particularly promising or interesting let me know @jon_agar or jonathan.agar@ucl.ac.uk!)

Think of this one as Animal Studies meets History of Technology.

Specifically, think how our technological infrastructures are experienced differently by humans and other animals.

Take an airport. It is an extraordinarily carefully designed infrastructure that sorts, stops and moves humans. To a rat an airport is a place for food, shelter or accident. In the 1970s how a rat could move around an airport depended on what species it was. The National Archives file MH 148/888 contains instructions and debate about what to with rats found on aircraft and airports. Generally they were killed, if found, and incinerated. But if a rat was suspected to be a Ghana or Gambian Multimammate Rat (Mastomys natalensis) then it would be differentially sorted, packaged up and sent to Porton Down for analysis. The reason was concern about Lassa fever. 

The authorities even produced this pictorial guide to distinguishing species or rat and mouse, although I’m not convinced it would have helped.

Other big technological infrastructures have also been designed with animal movements in mind. The Channel Tunnel for example has fences not just for humans but also for stray dogs and foxes. The concern in this case was rabies, which had, and has, a distinctive cultural history of fear in Britain.

So the thought is: what would history of technological infrastructures look like from an animal studies perspective?

(I am sharing my possible research ideas, see my tweet here. Most of them remain only 1/2 or 1/4 ideas, so if any of them seem particularly promising or interesting let me know @jon_agar or jonathan.agar@ucl.ac.uk!)

One of the very first acts of privatisation under scientist-turned-politician Margaret Thatcher was The Radiochemical Centre, floated as Amersham International Ltd in 1982. Much smaller than the the privatisation of public sector telecommunications, gas, electricity, docks and air travel that followed, it nonetheless a first, experimental test of the flagship Thatcherite policy. It was an intriguing mix to me, even more so when I found out that one of the Radiochemical Centre’s key products depended on the supply of blood – and traditionally in the UK blood donation was seen as a ‘gift’ relationship not a market one.

I followed this one up.

Amersham is the main case study in ‘Chapter five:  radioactive privatisations’, in my Science Policy under Thatcher (UCL Press, 2019), available open access for download.