Alan Malcolm punctures some myths

‘A real job is one that makes things,’ an experienced business friend told me. Even I could tell that this was nonsense!

The percentage of the UK’s Gross Domestic Product attributable to making things has hovered around 20 per cent for over a decade and diminishes slightly year on year.

Digging coal was clearly a real job. The high death rate of coal miners and the pollution caused by the product was an unfortunate by product.  Building motor cars is obviously a real job. The deaths and pollution caused by the product once again must be overlooked.

Real jobs and economists

One characteristic of a real job seems to be that it pollutes the atmosphere, causes death either to producers or consumers or both, and is in decline. Yet, our younger generation is supposed to seek such jobs, and the government is supposed to use taxpayers’ money to create and subsidise them.

Britain excels in the theatre, film making, pop music, and rowing, as well as winning Nobel Prizes in the life sciences. None of these causes much pollution, so I suspect that serious economists would shy away from calling them real jobs. They would certainly not advocate that they be given subsidies (except perhaps from the National Lottery).

Biology is where most of the major advances in science are likely to be found in the next half century, but does it create real jobs?

Definition deficient

Those working in the pharmaceutical industry make real products with high market values, but many people in the industry are working in research to develop future products, rather than manning the factories that are turning out today’s pills. Biologists find jobs in the medical area whether as doctors or as scientists in hospital laboratories. By my friend’s definition, neither of these holds down a real job.

Teaching biology in schools is a growth area, but the production of a better educated work force and society does not feature in such narrow definitions as ‘making things’.

The huge concern about possible degradation of our environment has led to the appearance of some highly important jobs for biologists: monitoring the problem, analysing the causes, producing a solution. Much of the Thames is now well stocked with salmon thanks to the efforts over decades by biologists to clean the river of pollution which was usually caused in the first place by ‘real’ (wealth producing) industries.

What about cleaning up the beaches after an oil slick? While chemical solvents can be used, the increasingly preferred approach is to develop micro-organisms which can metabolise the hydrocarbons involved. There is a need to analyse nitrate (and phosphate) run off from fields to reduce possible damage to wildlife in the streams and rivers of the countryside, but is it a real job?

Eating words

Being a caterer certainly isn’t a real job since it involves the destruction of the products of the farmer. Yet the proportion of catered meals is expected to rise from 25 per cent or so at present to at least half over the next two decades. Nutrition and food science contribute to the only sensual pleasure that consenting adults are allowed to have in public (and three times daily!). At least my learned colleague would admit that food processing is a real job, since its turnover dwarfs that of pharmaceuticals by a factor of three.

Horticulture is marginal because while flowers, fruit and vegetables are clearly products, the first has a ludicrously short life, and has little function other than to give transitory pleasure. Fruit 'n' veg are only slightly better.

Preserving a dinosaur’s skeleton comes nowhere near being a real job, but South Kensington tube station is regularly jammed with eager children longing to see such things at the Natural History Museum.

Move on

The conclusions are obvious. Jobs which have their origins in biology - conservation, improving the environment, encouraging biodiversity, scientific research, feeding the masses, ministering to the sick - are all expanding, are in great need, and improve the quality of life.

When will our politicians and businessmen realise where the 21st century is heading, and leave the industrial revolution and the 19th century behind?

If you want a real job, train as a biologist.

Professor Alan D.B. Malcolm
is Chief Executive of the Institute of Biology.The views are his own, and may not reflect those of IOB.