Between the short term crisis and the long term disaster scenario, there lies a neglected set of mid-term issues where effort is needed and where rewards are compelling. A key example is the shaping of a sympathetic climate for manufacturing in Britain. Current trends are alarming and current solutions are exhausted. The debates run between the simplistic on the one side and the academically effete on the other. The facts offer a basis for reasoned discussion, for the building of consensus and for remedial action.

Professor Sir Richard Brook OBE ScD FREng is Director of the Leverhulme Trust, a privately funded research support agency covering all the academic disciplines, and a member of the Board of the ERA Foundation. He is a materials scientist with a doctorate from MIT.

Following appointments at the University of Southern California and the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (Harwell), he became Professor of Ceramics at the University of Leeds. He was appointed Director at the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research in Stuttgart in 1988 and Professor of Materials at the University of Oxford in 1991.

From 1994 to 2001, he was Chief Executive at the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.