Mark Jones gets carried away, Crick and Watson discovered DNA, they didn't invent it. Cuba's government recently honoured Baron Marc von Montagu, an Austrian, as father of genetic engineering. I was told by the Nottingham University scientist who developed the science behind the Flavr Savr tomato that he thought it would soon be impossible to work in the UK - a belief supported by the courts' failure to jail the hooligan Lord Melchett.
Mark's affection for British science is charming, if a little retro. British scientists were overtaken by Germans in the chemical industries at the end of the nineteenth century. Americans developed electric light, sound recording, the cotton 'gin, high yield crops and landed on the moon. John Logie Baird's television is not the one that is the basis of our contemporary TVs, which are instead based on the near contemporaneous American invention.
Britain *did* invent concentration camps (Boer War), aerial bombardment (Iraq 1920), and were pioneers in secret service techniques, native regulation and eugenics (a monstrosity that it took American anthropologists to unpick).
Claims to have invented computers and the web are difficult to sustain. After all the ancient Egyptians 'invented' steam power (to open a set of temple doors) and are reputed to have made large chemical batteries. But without any evidence of having exploited these technologies they remain accidental curiosities. Charles Babbage's difference engine was never built in his lifetime, Alan Turing was persecuted as a homosexual and killed himself, and Bletchley Park was dismantled after the war.
This thread shows some similarity to the Soviet claims to have invented everything from helicopters to Shakespeare, or that of radical black activists that the Egyptians were the progenitors of civilisation. Such stories occasionally have an element of truth, but that is belied by the obvious compensatory psychology of such tales.
Tragically, in Britain Department of Trade and Industry policy is moving away from investment in the sciences to the promotion of Britain as a cultural centre. That, along with the environmental baggage that is choking off British inventiveness is a counsel of despair. If you want to know how the British elite see themselves, you had to have visited the Sensation exhibition of rotting cows heads and mass murderers when it was showing in New York.
In message <p04310100b54e29d36f55@[216.254.77.128]>, Doug Henwood
<dhenwood at panix.com> writes
>Mark Jones wrote:
>
>>Now that you mention it, Brits invented not just the web; there is also:
>>computers, radar, jet engines, antibiotics, DNA + cloning, central banks
>
>The Bank of Sweden - Sveriges Riksbank - is older. The B of E was
>founded in 1694; the SR in 1668.
>
>>(OK, the Scots), the steam engine, the power loom, television and a few
>>other things besides.
>
>Gosh, no wonder they call it Great Britain. Why'd the USA take the
>lead in developing and producing almost all the inventions you list?
>
>Doug
-- Jim heartfield