This story on the BBC caught my attention because of its similarities to my own situation.
My heart goes out to this young mother who, aged 33, has been diagnosed with cancer. After two weeks of “migraine”, she was persuaded to see a doctor, who immediately sent her to hospital. Two hours later, she was talking to an oncologist. An MRI scan had revealed 7 brain tumours, and a later CT scan found 3 in her lungs, which was the primary site.
As I understand it, all tumours are gene mutations. She has a mutation of the ALK gene that produces a rogue protein that causes affected cells to grow uncontrollably. It can be controlled by a new wonder drug called Brigatinib which blocks the action of the protein. I have a similar but different mutation.
An enormous amount of research is going into the genes involved in different kinds of cancer, and the precise mutations involved. In some cases, drugs can disrupt the growth of affected cells. More and more of these treatments will emerge in the coming years, but development is expensive. Drug companies charge thousands a month to recover their costs. Brigatinib is £5,000 a month; the Tepotinib I take is £7,000 (less confidential NHS discounts). It amounts to many tens of thousands per patient per year. The financial implications for the NHS and health insurers are astronomical.
Is it worth, say, £100,000 to prolong someone’s life for two years? For 10,000 new NHS lung cancer patients each year that amounts to £1 billion per year. What about other forms of cancer? What about other health conditions? What about other issues in the broader arena of health and social care? At some point, the answer will be no.
Conservative governments are non-interventionist. They do not like the state to run anything. They spent the 1980s and 1990s selling off the country’s assets and giving away the proceeds. It continues today in their unwillingness to pay for public services or regulate things properly. Some of them would privatise health and education if they could get away with it. That is why, if my health holds out, I will not be voting Conservative at the next election. I will see the bastards* go to hell before I do.
And yet, in the 1980s, they did intervene. A 1978 television documentary, ‘Now the Chips are Down’, made clear how woefully unprepared Britain was for the silvery white heat of the computer revolution. It scared the Thatcher government so much that they funded a number of costly initiatives. Two in particular stood out for me.
In one, the BBC was recruited to raise awareness of the skills needed. It led to the ‘Computer Literacy Project’, which ran from 1982 to 1989. It was linked to the specially commissioned ‘BBC Micro’, which was taken up by many homes and most schools, with over a million sold.
In the other, the ‘Microelectronics Education Programme’, massive amounts of money were spent putting computers in schools, setting up and funding resource centres, and training teachers. Politicians boasted that Britain led the world in “equipping the children of today with the skills of tomorrow.”
Did it actually achieve anything, or was it bluster and spin?
At least it got my new career off the ground. After escaping from accountancy into a dream job as a university researcher, I knew as much about these new concepts and technologies as anyone. It would be hard to overstate how immersed, obsessed even, I was in this bright new world of colour and light.
I recently discovered that the television programmes, and more, are freely online in the ‘BBC Computer Literacy Archive’. It has the 1978 documentary which set things off (still informative 45 years later), and Dominic Sandbrook’s wonderfully evocative reflection on the social changes of the nineteen-eighties (not only computers). Incredibly, one programme even shows my own small part in this.
Watching again now, I am struck by how aware we were of the social questions posed by what was about to come. How would people spend their time in a world with less work? How should wealth be shared across society? It is not turning out as well as it might.
Most fascinating for me is the series ‘The Learning Machine’ (1985), about computers in education, the area in which I worked. Here, once again, are the names and faces I knew and discussed things with at workshops and conferences, such as the main writer and presenter, Tim O’Shea.
He was scathing of the Microelectronics Education Programme, which, he said, had foisted cheap, underpowered computers and poor software upon parents and schools. The attractive message about improving the quality of education, disguised what was really on politicians’ minds: the job market, supporting British industry, and making education cheaper. Eventually, we might even do away with schools and teachers completely.
The then ubiquitous programming language, Basic, comes in for particular criticism. It encouraged tangled, undecipherable code, leading self-taught home and school users to think they knew how to write software, when, really, their knowledge was badly lacking.
I think Tim was broadly correct, but we were all still trying to understand how to use computers in education, and few teachers had the skills to teach programming. I was taught structured methods and had no difficulty creating reliable, intelligible Basic programs several hundred lines long.
It can also be argued that the initiatives did have benefits, but they were two decades in the making. A generation of youngsters became fascinated by computers, seeding Britain’s successful computer games industry. So, perhaps it did work out well in the end. Tim did well too. He became Principal of the University of Edinburgh.
One other series caught my eye: ‘With a Little Help from the Chip’ (1985), about helping those with special needs. I was astonished, in programme 3, to see a one-minute clip of software I designed and coded, being used in a school for deaf children. I have written about the programs before, but never seen the TV programme. It brought back all the satisfactions of going into schools to observe and collect data.
Do you ever wonder, were it possible, whether you would happily go back to an earlier point in your life? I would, to this time for certain. And I would jump at the chance of another forty years. Most of all, it was an innocent, optimistic time, focused on what we were doing rather than the unrest and disruption taking place. We were trying to make the world a better place. We could do with more of that now.
* A name used by Margaret Thatcher for Eurosceptic right-wing Conservatives.
