50 Years Ago

In a recent address given in the University of Nottingham, Sir William Slater, secretary of the Agricultural Research Council, made a strong plea that universities should lead rather than follow contemporary thought, and in particular that they should be sufficiently independent financially to be able to allocate sufficient funds for research on lines of work entirely of their own choosing. Sir William was discussing the relative values of such research and of sponsored research, undertaken with the assistance of outside bodies ... The problem of course arises out of the extent to which the universities are now dependent on public funds, and how far, even with the University Grants Committee, it is possible for their independence from outside pressure to be fully maintained.

From Nature 15 October 1960.

100 Years Ago

The second congress on radiology and electricity was held at Brussels on September 13–15 ... [The] president called upon Madame Curie to give an account of the recent experiments made in Paris to isolate metallic radium. It will be remembered that this metal has hitherto not been separated from its salts, although a radium amalgam was obtained some years ago by Coehn. The beautiful experiments described by Madame Curie, resulting in the isolation of metallic radium, must be regarded as a triumph in chemical manipulation when it is remembered that ... the operations had to be carried out with minute quantities of material in such a way as to avoid loss of the precious substance during the process. These experiments should remove all possible doubt that radium is, in fact, an element belonging to the same group of metals as barium.

From Nature 13 October 1910.