Dr Paul Merchant, interviewer for A Changing Planet, writes:
Life story interviews do not stop at official retirement ages, or peter out once the scientist leaves their university department, government research establishment or private laboratory. Scientists are followed into retirement.
Some scientists stop observing and experimenting, but continue to read about developments in their fields. Others continue to work in laboratories at home. Richard West explains why his particular form of Quaternary geology could be pursued independently of the University of Cambridge:
‘And what has been the effect of not having access to...university equipment...?
It’s made no difference at all to me. I can do all this at very low cost, I don’t need a grant, I can do it all at home; I call it kitchen science. ...No, I think normally if you’re in post...so much of your university time is taken up with committee work, going to meetings, teaching, trying to get money for research, but I can do all the things I need to do with the aid of a low power microscope and these measuring cylinders for sorting out sediment.’ [Richard West, C1379/34, track 14, 45:09 – 46:34]
For scientists whose research depends upon the use of instruments not easily set up at home, such as mass spectrometers, the internet has offered a form of remote control. Stephen Moorbath continues to work in the isotopic dating of rocks through email exchanges with former colleagues running laboratories:
‘I don’t know how I’d manage without computers. I’m glad I got into it, because I know one or two old colleagues who never got into it and they’re just isolated. So it’s part and parcel of my life and it’s helped me to carry on.’ [Stephen Moorbath, C1379/36, track 11, 49:32 – 49:52]
Ann Wintle describes the use of email and Skype messaging to conduct research in luminescence dating, at a distance:
‘...when you’re wanting to have a detailed discussion with somebody equivalent to having a discussion with them in the room...the Skype comes in and then you’re – you can do instant texting...you can almost type as fast as you can talk. ...And then we send – we’re still sending emails with files on if we want to know – you know, “well, what does that dataset look like” and, “ooh, go check your email box, I’ve just sent it to you.” So you can get that and then you can look at it and then you can both talk about it. ...I can see why in the past some people might have either gone very solitary when they retired or they disengaged totally from their academic field because they didn’t have any interactions....in this way... Now you’ve got the communication...you can discuss things with anybody anywhere, so you’ve I think probably got more chance of staying involved with your research ideas. Though you don’t have the equipment to do it yourself you’ve still got the ideas and if you hit it right you can persuade somebody to do the experiment you would do if you were there.’ [Ann Wintle, C1379/57 track 11, 13:57-15:37]
In contrast, other scientists experience retirement as a break with the past. Desmond King-Hele wrote a poem about his retirement from the Royal Aircraft Establishment in 1988:
‘Escape:
After 50 years in institutions where my life was sheltered and sure
I’ve come out for community care
For a course of kill or cure
Life’s a joke that’s just begun
At the tender age of 61’ [Desmond King-Hele, C1379/13, track 16, 1:27 - 1:47]
He explains that there was no wish to continue on an existing orbit:
‘I could see that the work that I had done had been extremely sort of … innovative in a way to start with, and then as time went on it became more routine but we were still contributing quite considerably to knowledge...about the shape of the Earth and the upper atmosphere, but there was no enthusiasm for the work from the RAE as you know, and it...was...obvious that all the new things that were coming in, like laser tracking...were going to lead to…much more accurate knowledge of the Earth in both respects.... And so I could foresee that the work was not going to continue to be, if you like, top class...so I was in a way quite content to allow it to cease rather than, like some academics do, continue on with their own line after they retire. And I realised that what I wanted to do was to retire and do something different, like history of science; writing about Erasmus Darwin.’ [Desmond King-Hele, C1379/13, track 16, 3:02 – 4:30]
As the number of interviews complete or in-progress for An Oral History of British Science passes 60, a full spectrum of scientific retirements is becoming available at http://sounds.bl.uk.
