The View From Here

Six times a year I take the train from Oxford to London to give a lecture in the City. I have no idea who my audience will be, or how many faces will be staring back at me.

No one need have attended on previous occasions to make sense of the current material, nor need they have any specific background knowledge at all, for I am not teaching on a course, nor will my students have to sit any exams, or pay any kind of fee. The one certainty on which I can rely is that whoever turns up will be there solely because they are interested in hearing, in my particular case, about how the brain works.

In the current age of hi-tech specialisation and course modules that have been frantically notched up to compete in the killing fields of professional employment, my excursion to London starts almost to resemble that of Alice on her journey with the white rabbit. Is there really a world nowadays where broad-based knowledge is sought simply for its own sake, by a general public who might otherwise be more gainfully occupied, or at least enjoying a leisurely lunch?

I walk into Barnard's Inn Hall in Holborn, an old Inn of Chancery, described by Dickens in Great Expectations and subsequently part of the Mercers' School. The place is, amazingly, packed. Unlike my undergraduate audiences in Oxford, here is British society in all its ages and diversity; in the front row sits a boy of some 12 years and a few seats along a sparkly- eyed gent who subsequently confesses to being 90. We have gathered in Gresham College, and I am about to make my small contribution towards the realisation and perpetuation of an imaginative and unusual will drawn up some four centuries ago by the Elizabethan financier after whom the institution is named.

Thomas Gresham wished to disseminate the new learning of the interesting times in which he lived. Accordingly he made provision for, originally, seven professors to give free public lectures on Divinity, Music, Astronomy, Geometry, Rhetoric, Law and Physic (the chair I currently hold). The intellectual climate continued to be sufficiently stirring to inspire the development of the Royal Society at Gresham College, and to accommodate professors as distinguished as Christopher Wren.

Today the same spirit of promoting scholarship primarily for its own sake has endured through the generations of an ever more course-bound, qualification-sensitive society. Of course, the Tudor titles have been creatively interpreted to do justice to bifurcating and burgeoning areas of knowledge, and, in addition, an eighth chair, Commerce, has been added. But the buzz of unadulterated curiosity prevails. The questions after a talk can be profound, glib, perplexing, troubling, naive and exciting; but, deep or shallow, they come thick and fast from a cross-section of people simply eager to learn.

As a Gresham professor, I have been stretched far beyond the familiar brief of a university lecturer. Each presentation must be a stand-alone, and yet detailed enough to compartmentalise my subject into different lectures. The material must grip a range of ages and abilities for an hour at a stretch, yet at all times it must point to the wood at the expense of the trees. It is this incessant reference to the bottom line, an identification and clarification of what really counts in each topic, that I find the most challenging.

Again, when I compare this style to the more conventional one in which I am usually engaged, I am all too conscious that in the hectic time-tabling of tertiary education, we are often so keen to lay out every fact like an item of silverware on the sideboard, that we forget to direct our students' vision to the hazier yet wider horizons of a more holistic perspective.

But the spirit of the new learning does not stop in the here-and-now of the state-of-the-art of the eight core subjects. Under the auspices of Gresham college, I am hoping to arrange for a two-day workshop exploring why relatively few schoolgirls opt for science. Then again, a while ago I had an idea for a novel approach to combating neurodegeneration. I did not stand a chance with the more usual funding channels, which are being directed into the stony terrain of precedented, me-too experimentation. However, Gresham College believed in me.

Fired by the thrill of a different, albeit heretical, approach, they sponsored the pilot work that was needed if I was to have any hope at all of eventual full-scale establishment support. How refreshing to discover that new learning in all its guises, often so chillingly absent in the "modern" lecture hall, library and laboratory, is actually alive and well in Holbornn

The author is professor of Pharmacology at Oxford University and Gresham professor of Physics.