ABSTRACT
In the more business-oriented, current university research environment, it seems almost frowned upon to undertake any research that is not funded, and in turn, although it might be funded, it might not be from a funding agency that will pay research overheads. There is then a pecking order as far as the university administration is concerned: funding agencies that pay overheads are better than those agencies that do not and, in turn, are better, much better, than doing the work oneself. At the University of Manchester, one of the most famous recent examples of doing the research oneself was the discovery of graphene, which resulted in the Nobel Prize for Physics to Professor Andre Geim and Dr Konstantin Novoselov. They relate the story of how they would reserve Friday evenings for adventuresome science, and one such example was peeling a monolayer of graphene by using sticky tape from a graphite pencil.
