The world of academia has been shaken to the turn-ups of its corduroy trousers following news that two of our leading scientists have forsaken the charms of jute, jam and journalism — not to mention the prospect of bumping into Lorraine Kelly in Tesco — in pursuit of having their world-class, life-saving research funded properly.

Professor Sir David Lane, discoverer of the p53 gene, the so-called guardian angel gene which triggers the death of cancerous cells, and his wife Professor Birgit Lane, are leaving Dundee, City of Discovery, in favour of Singapore, land of innovation. They follow in the footsteps of Alan Coleman, one of the original team who cloned Dolly the sheep at the Roslin Institute outside Edinburgh. The inhabitants of Scotland’s ivory towers have expressed their concern about the “brain drain”.

I can’t say I’m surprised. Six years ago, I interviewed Lane for a series I was writing on cancer care. I was aware that Dundee University was a world-class centre for the study of life sciences and I remain impressed with the way the city, down on its luck after the closure of much of its industrial base, has reinvented itself. But I was shocked to discover Lane, a man who is to cancer research what Philip Pullman is to children’s literature, was stuck in a crumbling, mouldy basement in a room so cramped you could hardly get two chairs in it.

He was an impressive interview subject, not only for his natural modesty and approachability, but also because he was able to communicate complex ideas with the sort of clarity that meant that even I could grasp them.

But it wasn’t what he said about cancer which was the really interesting part. What resonated was his belief that a certain amount of hardship was advantageous in academia. Lane argued that there needed to be some “level of discomfort” to get the best — those scientists so committed, they will put up with utilitarian decor and rickety furniture.

But then he said he felt that the level of “discomfort” in his world was a little too high. The most brilliant minds were unlikely to go into scientific research in Scotland because there was little job security, poor pay and a shift in resources away from universities. There was no clear career structure and quality was slipping. The teaching of science in schools was diminishing, as pupils opted for less challenging subjects.

Six years on, things have worsened. Lane will no doubt have access to a state-of-the-art laboratory and a large pay rise when he moves to Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research, but I doubt that is what has lured him. It will be the chance of collaborating with other world-class scientists and access to the brightest researchers and the best technicians. The land of James Watt and James Clerk Maxwell has been seriously out-classed in science. The average 20-year-old Chinese graduate makes his Scottish counterpart look like Bart Simpson.

Lane is a global figure whose research has international implications. If his old department has any sense it will institute a two-way programme whereby students from Scotland can go and study under Lane and students from Singapore can come here. When Lane arrived in Dundee he said it was one of the best places to do biomedical science in the world. When he left, he commented that it was one of the best places to do biomedical sciences “in the UK”. If that doesn’t run “Cowdenbeath nil, Stenhousemuir nil” a close second as the most depressing phrase in the English language, I don’t know what does.

On the same day news of Lane’s departure was announced, a research fellow at St Andrew’s University published an academic treatise on the lyrics of Morrissey, the miserablist who once fronted The Smiths. Dr Gavin Hopps deconstructs such deathless lyrics as “I lost my bag in Newport Pagnell” and compares them with the work of Oscar Wilde.

Heaven knows how much time or public money has gone into this enterprise but I would rather pay for a dozen floating duck islands than any more of this irrelevant bilge masquerading as serious study. Our universities are full of superannuated students producing increasingly obtuse work.

The one benefit of the MPs’ expenses scandal is that other publicly funded institutions might start looking more critically at what exactly taxpayers are getting for their money. We’re like Roman courtiers in the reign of Nero, indulging in all manner of extraneous fripperies while losing a grip on the things of real value. We abuse our health service, we despise our justice system and our children scorn the education provided for them.

If we want to keep people like Lane in Scotland, we need to stop indulging people like Hopps. “We need to look after our universities with great care,” Lane said to me as I left him. “They are the places which allow people to think outside the box. Government looks too much at funding innovation but actually what you have to fund is excellence. It all flows from that.”

Perhaps if excellence was the litmus test for all public funding, we would retain thinkers like Lane. But excellence is a pejorative term in many universities and schools, so I guess it’s academic.

gillian.bowditch@sunday-times.uk

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