When discussing the difference between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ research in his insider history of the British Medical Research Council (MRC) published in 1973, Sir Arthur Lansborough Thomson (1890-1977), suggested: “Men of science themselves are apt to find little reality in such a distinction, and less utility in attempting to draw it”. In this paper I will argue that as far as the MRC is concerned its senior members were acutely aware of the distinction, but were reluctant to define it due to the politically sensitive nature the terms had taken on. Instead, I argue that the MRC, under the supervision of its first secretary Sir Walter Morley Fletcher came up with an alternative way to articulate their ‘pure’ scientific agenda. In 1929 Fletcher delivered the Norman Lockyer Lecture under the heading Medical Research: the Tree and the Fruit. His address went on to articulate a similar metaphor for scientific research to that used three hundred years earlier by Francis Bacon. Fletcher stated, “We may know in the first place that as the body of accurate knowledge grows, like a tree with its stem and branches, fruit in practical usefulness will certainly come in due course”. Fletcher’s imagery of the tree and the fruit aimed to give the impression that scientific research is most effective in an organic, natural state where scientists work freely from the restraints of productivity.

This paper explores how Fletcher’s metaphor was a way of avoiding the politically sensitive subject of ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ research while continuing to push a “basic” research policy. As Sabine Clarke has shown in a recent article, research institutions funded by the state were reluctant to use the term “pure science” because of its perceived distance from public concerns. Instead the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research used the more ambiguous term “fundamental research” as a rhetorical device to appease both scientists and industrialists. This paper argues that Fletcher’s metaphor was intended to work along similar lines. The idea of the tree and the fruit fitted both his personal ideals of “disinterested or ‘pure’ science” and the wider public’s utilitarian values. Studying the history of the MRC, I will show how Fletcher and others did have an awareness of the distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ research, but because of the deeper cultural image the terms had adopted, attempted to find alternative ways to promote their aims.