Wikipedia defines “geek” as people who choose “concentration rather than conformity” and who “passionately pursue skills and imagination, not mainstream social acceptance.” These days, being a geek can be seen as rather cool. DC has a high concentration of self identified geeks: in fact, if only being “geeky” could become supercool the world would be such a better place.
Just look at some of the great British geeks that have made our world what it is today. Darwin travelled the world, not for gold but to study plants. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. A British-American team of James Watson and Frances Crick discovered the double-helix structure of DNA—building on the work done by England’s Rosalind Franklin.
But British geeks aren’t just in the history books. They’re still changing and improving our world today. Where would we be without the World Wide Web, created by Sir Timothy Berners-Lee? If you’re reading this on an iPad or iPhone, you’re using the work of Sir Jony Ive who helped make an everyday object sleek and an icon of cool. Hundreds of modern geeks and innovators have found a home in Tech City, the area of East London that is quickly becoming the Silicon Valley of Europe.
One of the great new frontiers for geeks is revolutionising how we access and use data. I had the privilege to be part of a big step forward in that revolution earlier this month, when I hosted an event for UKTI celebrating the launch of the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) in the UK’s National Health Service. The CPRD makes anonymised NHS clinical data available for R&D work outside the NHS. With the UK being home to one of the world’s largest life science sectors—employing 165,000 people at 4,500 companies and turning over $80 billion in business every year—opening up NHS data should lead to some world-changing discoveries. Thank goodness our best brains want to work in such projects.
A few days later at the IMF I met another group of talented individuals from the IT industry. Their company, The Data Exchange, acts as an online platform for companies and industries looking to open-source their data. For now, they’re a small business with a footprint in both the UK and US. But they are working with the travel industry to improve efficiency and direct marketing. With the right talent at the helm, they’ve got the right stuff to make it big.
I am very proud Britain has a history of our greatest brains devoting themselves to incredibly technical but very worthy pursuits, be that in science or technology. It’s fantastic our society is celebrating such careers and people who once were mocked in those cringe-worthy 70s and 80s movies. Let’s hope that it continues so our best brains take up careers that will make the world GREAT.