I would guess, for instance, that if you asked 100 professional bio­logists today where, when and how life on Earth began — surely among the most fundamental of scientific mysteries — the answers you would get would be little more informed than if you asked 100 physicists or even — dare I say it — 100 random people on the street. The reason is simple: as a biologist you get grants to come up with new drugs and new bugs, not to find the origin of life — which isn’t going to make any shareholders a penny. Even if your research is not commercially driven, by the time you enter the postgraduate world you will be working in a specialism of incredible narrowness, probably concerned with just one sort of protein or gene, or one species of microbe.

Things are particularly bad in the field of physics. Not many physicists admit this, but this most basic of disciplines has not seen a major breakthrough for a generation — something which has not happened, as the American physicist Lee Smolin argues, since the 19th century.

The reason for this may again be partly to do with this ghettoisation and the way the peer-review system works. The dominance of the Big Thinkers, scientists capable of peering far beyond their professional horizons and getting paid to do so, is long over. If you asked Charles Darwin whether he was a biologist or a geologist or a meteorologist or indeed a physicist, he would look bemused and, once you had explained these modern terms to him, probably profess that he was all of them. Albert Einstein was not even a professional tenured physicist when he wrote his first four seminal papers during his annus mirabilis of 1905. He was working in a patent office. It’s hard to imagine a young Darwin or Einstein getting grants today.

The great leaps forward seen in science from the days of Galileo until the 1960s were often motivated by maverick thinkers who eschewed the kind of ultra-specialisation that gets you funding these days — and certainly never had to worry about commercial tie-ins or formulating “economic impact” statements. It is probably a coincidence that some of the last great physics breakthroughs were made in the era of Richard Feynman, a wonderful polymath of the old school, a lover of the bongo drums and nude dancing bars as much as of quantum electrodynamics. But there is certainly something to be said for Lee Smolin’s thesis that the current cul-de-sac in which physics finds itself — an impasse centred on an almost impossibly arcane field called string theory which may not even be testable — is largely down to the way the funding is set up: you are either a string theorist or you won’t get a grant. Mavericks need not apply.