What a fabulous testimonial to our modern way of life. For all its faults, I can’t imagine anyone wanting to turn the clock back even just a hundred years. And it’s getting better still.

You expose a facet of “sustainability” I hadn’t grasped: that it can directly limit the possibilities open to us. Yes, let us aim at improvement, greater performance, fuller satisfaction. There is hope, let us embrace it.

Those statistics are much better than a “sustained” result – they represent major progress and forward momentum towards an ever-better world. And they reflect the phenomenal achievements of the scientists of yester-year.

What has happened to public science today? We are forever hearing what we can’t do, rather than what we might aspire to do. Why we should abandon ambition, and settle back to a grey and unchanging world, that is no worse than the one we inherited. Doomsaying and malthusian pessimism are the order of the day.

But there is hope. In country after country, opinion polls confirm that this defeatism is unacceptable. The human spirit will remain undaunted and, if public science can deliver nothing but nannying, resources will move to private sector science – which is still pushing out the frontiers of knowledge and productive capacity.