THEY'VE conquered the worlds of science and business, developing and marketing chips and components to fit inside products ranging from mobile phones to iPods and PlayStations. But David Milne (DM) and Richard Laming (RL) faced a different challenge this week when they visited Currie Community High School, near Edinburgh.
Milne, who founded Wolfson Microelectronics, and Laming, whose Oligon business was bought by Wolfson last year, are both scientists who have succeeded in business and are now sharing their experiences with teenagers through the Generation Science C
lub.
With the help of Krissie Davis (KD), principal teacher of biology at Currie, the club – run by the people behind the Edinburgh International Science Festival – brought the two scientists together with four pupils: Karen Craigie (KC) and Clara Morriss (CM), from S1; Laura Murray (LM), an S5 pupil studying Higher biology and chemistry; and Helen Skinner (HS), an S6 pupil also studying Higher biology and chemistry. Peter Ranscombe started the questioning.
What do you remember from your own school science lessons and did they inspire you to become scientists?
RL: I did all the sciences up to O-level and then physics, chemistry and maths at A-level. I dropped biology early on – there weren't enough numbers in biology for me. Physics was probably the best, especially at A-level, because we got to do experiments. Science is brilliant because it's all about chipping away and solving problems.
DM: I took physics and chemistry and also technical studies, which was very useful because, later on in my career, it helped me to make practical things. I found physics easier than chemistry. I liked the experiments and finding out how things work.
CM: If you had a choice, would you choose a different career?
RL: I wouldn't choose a different career from engineering and science but, when you work in technology, it's about choosing the right time to develop your ideas.
DM: When I started, you chose a career and stayed in it, but these days people don't stay in those straight lines. All of the exciting new science is being done in biology at the moment. I wouldn't want to persuade people not to go into electronics, but a lot of exciting things will happen with biology.
KC: Who or what influenced you to become a scientist?
DM: Not my family; they weren't involved in science at all. I got on very well with my physics teacher, Jim Jardine, who wrote the textbook Physics Is Fun – he was the Scottish equivalent of America's Richard Feynman. He used to drive up and down the playground demonstrating the Doppler effect.
RL: I'd struggle to pin it down. There was no specific thing made me go into science, except the problem solving and wanting to learn how things work.
HS: When did science grab you at school?
RL: When I picked my A-levels I focused on science, so I made by choice at 16.
DM: For me it was later too. I don't think it matters if you come to science later, but it does tend to be progressive in that it builds on previous knowledge. So it can be hard to pick up if you don't have the basics.
LM: How easy or hard was it for you to get into the position you are in now?
DM: I don't think it's so much about a subject being "hard" it's more a question of how interested you are in it. You need a good work ethic to enjoy the rewards.
RL: I think going back to university after working for Ford was one of the key decisions that I made. A lot of your career is about making the right decisions.
CM: What have been the real challenges during your career?
DM: One of the big challenges in business is making the money to pay your staff. When you're a small company, it's incredibly scary. There are technical challenges as well: getting the first chip to work for example. Then getting a customer that wants to buy it.
RL: Some of my challenges were scaling my company up to make stuff. If you get to a point where you're confident that you can get there in the end, then you have to just keep going.
KD: Have your careers given you the chance to travel?
DM: Very much so. Tech businesses tend to be quite international in their outlook, especially in electronics. We have offices around the world.
We set up our first office in Taiwan – we set up there because we were looking for business and that's where people wanted our services.
Then we went to Japan, a fascinating country, and now we're in China, Korea, India, Singapore, America and Europe. Engineers go off visiting customers around the world and some customers come to Edinburgh.
RL: When you're a researcher at university, part of your job is writing papers, which you often get to present at conferences around the world. You get to interact with people all over the world. The research group I was in was cosmopolitan, too. Now at Wolfson, the people come from all over the place. It's an international market.
The full article contains 868 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
