*GI: Why did you come to History and Philosophy of Science at Sussex University?* I’d graduated in chemical engineering in 1967, and entered a graduate apprenticeship in ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries: yep, Imperial!). In 1969 I had a Damascus road experience.
Sitting at my little grubby desk in the small stack of offices adjacent to ICI's Fluon (Teflon, PTFE) plant, I had a small project to start: set up a test rig and an experiment, to check something that might be introducing impurities into the product during the manufacturing process. And I just couldn't be arsed: to design it, specifiy and oversee the building of it (which would take a mere couple of hours) and perform the experiment.
The voice in my head explicitly said: Why do I have to do this? Whose need am I meeting? And the voice (from corporate briefings) answered: to put twice as much plastic into the average British car within five years. My guts immediately punched back: Fuck it. Do they really believe I'll generate even one drop of sweat, for an intention like that? I have a head, I'm not a hired hand.
In that moment I left corporate life, my nascent engineering career (I had a first class honours degree), and my aspiration to be the 'new renaissance man' that chemical engineers at that time ('the white heat of technological revolution': Harold Wilson, Labour Prime Minister, 1963) were claiming to be. Within half a year I'd applied for a place in a Master's programme in History and Philosophy of Science at Sussex (I had a friend already in the programme, it sounded cool and reflective) and got a full state grant to fund it: grant not loan, this *was* the white heat of state-sponsored technological revolution.