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Gordon Brown gives Romanes Lecture at Oxford University; Gordon Brown speech SOT - It has always been that scientists are seeing possibilities others must catch up with / In 1878, two years after Alexander Graham Bell had invented the telephone, the chief engineer at the post office is reported to have said that we had no need for it in Britain, as we still had plenty of messenger boys / Though others have not even seen the full potential of their own work - such as the Boeing engineer who claimed "there will never be a bigger plane built" - as he stood proudly alongside his creation, after the first flight of his 247, a twin-engine aeroplane that held ten people / As you - more than any audience - know: it is only through trial and error that great advances can be made / There's a story told about Thomas Edison who - having gone on to invent the light bulb - was asked whether it was true that he had first endured a hundred failures, No, replied Edison, that wasn't a hundred failures, it was a hundred small steps towards success / And thousands of trials and millions of errors on - we have a scientific record to be proud of / We have 78 British Nobel Prize winners in science, four of the top ten universities in the world are British - including, of course, this great institution here at Oxford, and a higher share of our growth is delivered by science-based innovations than in any other industrial nation, including the US - which means that today the UK is second in the world only to America on the majority of leading scientific indicators and our science is the most productive and efficient in the G8 / And I believe a vital ingredient of our success is that UK scientists remain amongst the most outward looking and globally connected / With just 1 per cent of the world's population, the UK undertakes five per cent of the world's science and produces nine per cent of the world's papers, and of the UK's foreign-born adult population - around one-fifth are scientist...