Graduation address: Professor David O'Hagan
Wednesday 27 June 2018
Vice-Chancellor, ladies and gentlemen, graduates.
Very many congratulations to you all for all that you have achieved and in making it across the stage today.
I have been asked to leave a few words ringing in your ears before you set out into the sunlight to start the next stage of your careers.
St Andrews makes great demands on its students and we can do that because we select the very best students from the beginning. It may seem like an age now when you dumped your rucksack on your first bedroom floor, but you came here already with proven ability, and in this ‘bubble’ as it is often termed, you have had the space and time to immerse yourself in your work and mature intellectually. That is what the University offers, a safe space in which to learn and to study, explore and exchange ideas, most interestingly edgy and radical ideas, and discover where your passions lie. It is not vocational it is educational. There has been a semblance of structure in your time here with academic semesters and deadlines. Out there, where the sun is hopefully shining, it is chaos… decisions are made which defy logic, and the world needs steady council and you are ready now to contribute to that.
As the Head of the School of Chemistry I know how hard you have worked. For the benefit of my colleagues behind me, I will remind them that you have the highest contact hours in the University. Most of you working in the physical sciences have spent full days for two semesters attending lectures and then working on your research projects. The research project is the centrepiece of your final year here as a science graduate, but the thing about research is that it is not an exact science. In your projects you were painfully aware, and possibly rather alarmed, that you had broken away from the security that is modular learning, those little capsules of information that are packaged into 10 or 15 or 20 credits that have been finely honed over the years. But the most fun is had in unstructured learning environments, where there is uncertainty of outcome and an excitement in trailblazing. This is where you can also meet with both triumph and disaster.
There is a widely used term in science and science policy. The term is ‘curiosity driven research’. A term which is increasingly being used to describe what is considered to be a rather derogatory activity by those that control research funding and who seek to elevate applied science. It is the uncertainty that make policy makers nervous. They ask, ‘How can we guarantee an outcome for our investment?’ But scientists when they discover something new, they immediately want to know, ‘what can it do?’ So this is covered. Science is expensive and the enterprise can only be justified if it makes a difference to society. But what gets you the biggest bang for your buck? Serendipitous discovery that comes from observations by the curious, like penicillin, or the structure of DNA which led to the genetics revolution, or like Professor Ōmura who found a natural product from a simple bacterium on a golf course, and because he asked, what can it do?, he has saved millions of lives to date. What a staggering achievement. He is an inspiration to us all and what can be achieved in a career of science and in service of society.
For the Ph.D students graduating today, in the blue gowns, you have immersed yourselves in full time research for the last 4 years. The stakes were high as you worked intensively on a single project with no guarantee of a breakthrough. We heard the titles of your theses, and were perhaps amused by how esoteric some of them sounded. But it is the deep enquiry into uncharted territory where significant innovations emerge, of individuals or labs working alone on a problem from the bottom up, not trying to squeeze a little more out of well-established themes presented from above.
The instinct of ministers, who are rarely scientifically trained and operate on short election and budgetary cycles, is to target the larger part of their research budgets for rather obvious projects and agendas that are trending in science and society. This is important of course, but it is all-pervading. The funds for fundamental research have been pushed to the margins. Very simply the University should be a ‘bubble’ where we can use unbridled talent, which is you, and pursue curiosity driven investigations in the knowledge that history has shown that that is how transformational discoveries and technologies emerge. Our political leaders need to have the confidence to let go, and to nurture and trust these intellectually curious environments, which are brimming with talent, and then hold their nerve.
I will say again that you should be proud of your achievements, but you did not do this on your own. Everyone needs support. Well, you need to look to the back seats and you need to look to the gallery. Your families and supporters are here and they are extremely proud of you. They have also worked tirelessly both physically and emotionally, over many years, to help develop who you are. Their sustained effort is longer than you can possibly imagine, and one you will only fully appreciate when you have families of your own. You have been the subject of your parents and supporters intense curiosity. However they did not know how you would emerge, but they held their nerve. They may have seen you as a lawyer or a footballer or a trapeze artist, but hey you turned out graduating today from the University of St Andrews. Your parents or guardians marvel at your lack of predictability and take joy in how unexpectedly interesting you are. You are a surprise and a delight to them in a way they could not have predicted. I would like to think that they will get more bang for their buck than they could have anticipated… so please can you acknowledge those that have supported you with a thundering round of applause.
Have a great day today, work hard and stay curious…
Professor David O'Hagan
School of Chemistry