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Susan Baroness Greenfield is a British institution. In a country that perceives its scientists as white-coated eccentrics, and probably male, Lady Greenfield is fashionable, extravagant, and female. At least, that is the image she has sought to project as a populariser of science. She is accused, though, of bringing another British institution, the Royal Institution ( RI), to the verge of bankruptcy. The RI, of which she was director from 1998 until last Friday (January 8th), has made her job redundant. She says she plans to respond with a suit for sexual discrimination.
Lady Greenfield, a neuroscientist at Oxford University, was recruited to shake up the two-cen-tury-old institution because she had made a name for herself, particularly on television, as one of the popular faces of science. The RI is, in part, a members´ club famous for its Christmas lectures "adaptedto a juvenile audience", which are broadcast on television every year, and its Friday eve-ning discourses (black ties, please, gentlemen), in which prominent scientists chat about their work for precisely an hour--no more and no less--before everyone is served tea and chocolate cake. But it is also a serious research laboratory ( one of the longest-established in the world), loo-king into things like the medical applications of nanotechnology.
Lady Greenfield´s offence, if offence it be, was to modernize the RI´s headquarters in May-fair, one of the most stylish parts of London, without proper cost control. The redecoration includ-ed a high-class bar and restaurant that are open to the general public. Sadly, these opened for busi-ness in October 2008--the least favorable moment imaginable for such a venture.
The redecoration, which cost ~ 22m, much of which was raised by selling the institution´s shares of property, has left the RI ~ 3m in debt, and the trustees have decided that one way to cut costs is to cut the job of director. Lady Greenfield, the first female director in a line that stretches back through Michael Faraday to Humphry Davy, seems to suspect that financial considerations were not the only ones when this decision was made.
Instead of a director, the RI is to be led by a newly-invented chief executive officer, in the person of Chris Rofe. Mr. Rofe, who was appointed in April 2009, has a degree in business administration, not science. Given the debt, though, perhaps an alchemist, a person who devotes himself to turning ordinary metals into gold, would be the most appropriate person for the job.
By saying Lady Greenfield is“a British institution”，the author means