Philip Gummett

Microelectronics, Productivity and Employment

OECD 1981 Paris: OECD 290 pp price £7.20 An observer of the street scene in any major city in the 1880s, noting the rate of increase in horse traffic, might have been forgiven for predicting that within, say, 40 years, the streets would be buried under a metre of horse manure. Our appreciation of the dynamics of technical change, and in particular our realisation that apparently solid statistical trends can be broken by many factors (one of which is the advent of new technology) should now make us a little more cautious about such crude extrapolations.

The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology

Wiebe E Bijker, Thomas P Hughes and Trevor Pinch (eds) 1987 London: MIT x + 405 pp price £29.95 ISBN 0 262 02262 1 Science and technology have come under scrutiny from several social science perspectives. Historians, philosophers, economists and sociologists have all made their contribution.

The contract university

Remarkable changes are occurring in the relations between British universities and the state. These are not always appreciated inside universities, let alone by those outside.

European Technological Collaboration: Chatham House Papers 36

Margaret Sharp and Claire Shearman 1987 London: Routledge and Kegan Paul (for the Royal Institute of International Affairs) xii + 122 pp price £5.95 (paperback) ISBN 0 7102 1212 7 How many readers know the meaning of the acronyms Bep, Bap, Biceps and Cube? If I say they come from the same stable as Esprit, Brite and Race, readers may quickly guess they are European Community initiatives, though it may take longer to associate them with their field – biotechnology.

Defence and development

About a year ago, a working group of the Council for Science and Society (CSS) published a report entitled UK Military R and D (Oxford University Press, 1986). The interest the report created and the attention the subject has since received, not least from the Cabinets Advisory Council on Science and Technology, led the CSS to convene a meeting at the Royal Society on 29 October 1987.

Sizewell Report: What Happened at the Inquiry?

Martin Ince 1984 London: Pluto 212 pp price £3.95 (paperback) ISBN 0 86104 627 7 Here is the first of what will doubtless become an extensive library of books on the public inquiry into the proposal to build a pressurised water reactor at Sizewell in Suffolk. The book is by a science journalist who also participated in the inquiry as an objector.

Global Fission: The Battle over Nuclear Power

Jim Falk 1982 Oxford: Oxford University Press 410 pp price £24 (£7.95 paperback) ISBN 0 19 554315 7 Hdbk, 0 19 554316 5 Pbk A prominent example of Roman advanced technology, the 73 mile long Hadrians Wall, took eight years to build. The lead-time for modern advanced technology is typically longer, and this is especially true of nuclear power technology.

The Nuclear Barons

Peter Pringle and James Spigelman 1981 London: Michael Joseph xii + 578 pp price £12.95 As befits its length, the scope of this book is impressive. Working chronologically, the authors (one a British journalist, the other a former Australian government official) discuss the development of nuclear energy policy in every country that has gone nuclear in the military sense and in many that have done so in the civil sense also.

The Politics of Uranium

Norman Moss 1981 London: Andre Deutsch vii + 239 pp price £4.95 (paperback) Norman Moss provides a lively and readable discussion of the politics of uranium, in both its civil and military aspects. He tells some fascinating anecdotes, and is especially good value on the post-war uranium rush and the little known uranium cartel of the early 1970s.

Science and Technology Policy: Priorities of Governments

C A Tisdell 1981 London: Chapman and Hall xii + 222 pp price £12 The first section of this book systematically reviews our knowledge of the application of science policy to economic questions and discusses, from an economists viewpoint, the arguments for and against government involvement in science and technology. The discussion is useful, if brief.