Broers was born in Calcutta, India and educated at Geelong Grammar School and Melbourne University in Australia and at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in England.

In September 2008, Lord Broers took over from Sir David Cooksey as chairman of the board of directors at the Diamond Light Source, the United Kingdom's largest new scientific facility for 45 years.

[8] Alec Broers began his research career in the Engineering Department of the University of Cambridge in 1961 working with Professor Oatley, and later with Dr William C Nixon, on the in situ study of surfaces undergoing ion etching in the scanning electron microscope (SEM).

Garry Stewart, who was another of Professor Oatley's students, then moved to the Cambridge Instrument Company where he oversaw the design and building of the world's first commercial SEM, the Stereoscan.

During his PhD Alec rebuilt the SEM fitting a magnetic final lens in place of the original electrostatic lens thereby improving the microscope's resolution to about 10 nm, and after examining ion etched surfaces, used the microscope's electron beam for the first time to write patterns,[11] subsequently using ion etching to transfer these patterns into gold, tungsten and silicon structures as small as 40 nm.

IBM had built the first billion bit computer store using an electron beam to write on photographic film and the relatively short lifetime of the tungsten filament sources was not acceptable.

Initially this high resolution low-loss mode was used to examine bacteriophage and blood cells in collaboration with researchers at NYU,[16] and at the Veteran's Administration Hospital in New Jersey[17] however, the bulk of his work was devoted to using the microscopes as tools to scribe things using the lithography techniques that were becoming familiar for making silicon chips.

[23] Because these dimensions were now measured in single nanometers he and his coworkers decided to call these nanostructures and the techniques used to make them nanofabrication[24][25] rather than use the prefix micro that had been common parlance until then.

When he arrived back in Cambridge, Lord Broers set up a nanofabrication laboratory to extend the technology of miniaturisation to the atomic scale by developing some of the novel fabrication methods[27][28] that he had discovered at IBM.