Introduction - where this blog came from, and where it's going

“I stand in between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and this makes things a little difficult for me. You artists call me bourgeois, and the bourgeois feel they ought to arrest me.” Thomas Mann, Tonio Kröger

I was brought up to believe I was a scientist, and was duly educated as one. Having done that, I then did what Mrs Thatcher wanted and went to work in industry – where thankfully I discovered that my lifelong feelings of imposture had not been lying to me.

Even as a student I had always felt a vague sense of unbelonging among my immediate contemporaries, akin no doubt to the conviction among transgender patients that they have been born into the wrong sex. Fortunately of course I was able to fool everybody long enough to get my PhD, but keeping up the pretence was too much effort after that and I fled across the border into journalism. Perhaps this personal history is why I have always felt very aware of the innate and cultural differences that mark scientists as a group.

Comprehensively Snowed

While assembling the ideas for this blog, my working title for it was The Three Cultures – to echo the famously titled The Two Cultures... the oft referred-to but almost completely unread 1959 Rede Lecture by novelist, scientist and statesman Charles Percy Snow. For it was with this document that angst about "science and the public", not to mention the whole useless, corrupt, self-serving circus that has since grown up about it, was first conceived.

Another person on the cusp of arts and sciences, Snow was a man trapped by convention into a state of unbelonging. After a short and rather undistinguished research career, he turned with contemporary success to fiction, and the corridors of power. But he was thrice homeless. As a novelist, he hated the literary establishment. As a scientist he never recovered from his first devastating disappointment. And as a government mandarin, one gets the impression that his sympathy for democracy was largely theoretical.

The Two Cultures was a typically sweeping gesture and enjoyed great success. But although everybody working in the business of communicating science today knows the title, few have ever read the original material. As proof of this I can point to the news release that covered a recent pompous declaration (February 2003) by world scientific journal editors, which mentioned The Two Cultures in its opening sentence. These grandees of scientific editing then went on, amazingly, to attribute the seminal concept to Snow’s “eleven wonderful novels” – which clearly none of them had ever read.

Those who do read the original lecture, as well as its predecessor New Statesman article (1956) and follow-up (A second look, 1963) will find it a curious experience. Dated, insular, parochial, badly argued, threadbare – all apply, and more. Nevertheless, The Two Cultures caught the zeitgeist, and it is fair to say that the debate over science’s place in (British) Society has been comprehensively snowed ever since.

Like many who create works that develop lives of their own, Snow had an ambivalent attitude towards his essay. He bitterly regretted that he had not decided to go with his first instinct and call his lecture The rich and the poor – a more easily definable and much more serious divide, which his lecture mainly addressed. But he chose to approach his theme by way of his obsessional hatred for the literary establishment and those who cleaved to it. They, he felt, were undermining the attempts of good, honest scientific grammar-school boys like him to better the lot of their fellow man.

In the 1959 lecture he also worried: “Attempts to divide anything into two ought to be regarded with much suspicion”. Dualism – whether Manichean or Cartesian, it doesn’t matter which - encapsulates something very basic about the way our brains are wired, and Snow was sophisticated enough to know that giving in to it is too easy, and should be resisted. I very much wish he had, and I think he did too.

Arty public-school toffs vs grammar-school oiks

Snow’s concern – in brief – was that Britain was governed by public schoolboys whose education was all literary and historical (and I mean to include somewhere in this blog a look at how the famous son of a Victorian public school headmaster felt about the issue of “arts versus sciences”, at a time when the natural sciences had their tails up).

But, to stay with Snow for the time being, he asserted that the effect of this arts hegemony was to put the reins of power into the wrong hands in a scientific age. He recognised that this was the fault of a peculiarly English education system that made understanding between scientists and non-scientists worse by forcing children to specialise too early. He recognised that the roots of this lay deep in class-ridden British society, the skewed aspirations that result from it, and the baleful influence of the admissions requirements of Oxford and Cambridge universities.

In this he was undoubtedly right. But Snow’s caricatures - and the tendentiousness of his assertions and examples - seem absurd today. His portrait of the typical scientist (born in the progressivist atmosphere of the 1930s) puts one uncomfortably in mind of a Leni Riefenstahl propaganda film on the one hand and an issue of Health and Efficiency on the other. Scientists, said Snow, are “steadily heterosexual” folk displaying great moral health, who put the collective welfare of humanity first, and who apply their commonsensical materialistic view to bettering the lot of the underprivileged.

Literary intellectuals on the other hand, come straight out of Proust; all rouge, absinthe and cocktail cigarettes. Literary men (Snow’s world is almost exclusively masculine) had more of the “feline and oblique” about them, he wrote (1956). They cared more for themselves and their small coteries than for the world as a whole. They sniffed superciliously about what they saw as the empty materialism of technological progress, while more than half the world starved and could not afford such nose-holding.

Stereotypes are powerful stuff, and can be very revealing (though more about their authors, as a rule). Perhaps I should be wary of criticising Snow’s, since this blog indulges in more than a few of its own. However, as mine are considerably less flattering to scientists than Snow’s, they are perhaps more likely to fall nearer the truth.

Even in insular, bourgeois 1959 Britain, there were those who found Snow’s notion that the world was somehow run from the louche salons of Chelsea, or that our failure to embrace the Third World was the fault of luddite poets and literary critics, or that the way in which white middle-class males were educated constituted the most important divide in intellectual culture, laughable. While Snow condemned literary intellectuals for failing to embrace progress (in which so much political capital was then invested, thanks largely to Snow himself), his own hankering after a mythical unified national culture was no less nostalgic than that of Victorian literary men for a pre-industrial age peopled by scholar gypsies. Both were grasping for a deeper myth – the very notion of a “unified culture”.

Our world now strives (or so it says) to embrace diversity. Within that diversity, the cultural split between the scientifically literate and everyone else seems no longer to amount to much. Except, I fear, to scientists, who partly thanks to Snow now think of themselves as one half of something called culture – a piece of monstrous self-aggrandisement that does them no credit and even less service. You hear this belief expressed most starkly when eminent scientists, having elected themselves spokespersons for the whole enterprise, bemoan the fact that while the Sunday Times may devote entire supplements to “the arts”, it does not publish an equivalent one devoted to science.

Just like Snow’s central thesis, it is a little amazing that more people do not see the absurdity of this. Why does it occur to so few people that the Arts exist, very largely, to communicate, give pleasure and be accessible? Science exists for none of these reasons and is in no way equivalent.

The reason lies in a neat example of how words and ideas do not exist independently (a theme I shall return to frequently in this blog, I feel sure). The terms “science” and “scientist” - meaning the pursuit of factual knowledge of the natural world and one who seeks it - were given to the English language by the 19th Century Cambridge polymath William Whewell (1794-1866). We now suffer a semantic distinction in English that simply does not apply in the rest of Europe, where the term “science” or its equivalent tends more to refer to all forms of organised knowledge. But even this is not the whole story. The strictures of Anglophony are as nothing compared to those of Britishness. For, just as academics are nearly always worse communicators than industrial scientists (who are trained to do it well because it means money), there is hardly any innate quality predisposing scientists to being poor communicators that is not hugely exacerbated by being British.

British disease, British unease

Snow acknowledged that he was speaking from a British perspective. He saw that our university-dominated, early specializing education system deepened the divide between science and humanities. In addition to everything else, British scientists are also more likely to despise popularisation; to be defensive, deferential, prey to academic snobbery, subject to crippling ageism. They have been rather less likely (than US scientists, particularly) to work in big teams - though perhaps this effect is diminishing. Hence they have tended to become more isolated, less socially practised and more peculiar. They are certainly much more likely to be embarrassed in front of a camera or a microphone.

The Island Race gets the worst of all worlds. Its scientists feel the need to justify themselves acutely , while continental scientists (in common with continental intellectuals generally) are self-confident enough not to. However we also lack the easygoing personal presentational skills that Americans seem to imbibe with mother’s milk, and to suffer the impediment of social structures that conspire to make recovery in the short term unlikely.

But the avowed Britishness of The Two Cultures is largely lost on the British who, like scientists, don’t realise how odd they are as a group because they don’t know any better. The British tend to react with shock and surprise when they find that a parallel debate about the position of science in culture is generally not happening - to anything like the same degree - in the rest of Europe. This business of "unrecognised peculiarity" will be another abiding theme of this blog.

A notable post-Snow phenomenon has been the attempt to demonstrate that “scientists are just like everyone else”. I would agree wholeheartedly that scientists are not robots, but the idea that they are just like everyone else is not only patently untrue but does them a grave disservice. Nobody is likely to assert that poets are “just like everyone else”, or to believe that a poet who is, is likely to be any good. Scientists are, in fact, very special, unusual people – who for that reason have commanded my lifelong interest and respect. In a world that embraces diversity, they should be out-and-proud about their differences - while at the same time accepting that distinctive differences also bring peculiar limitations. These limitations must be avowed before they can be addressed.

As a problem, Snow’s “two cultures” was, and is, chimerical. Moreover, it has led us down some very long garden paths that had better gone untravelled. This blog seeks to explore those byways. It seeks to explain where I believe scientists and their cheerleaders have gone wrong. It sets out to describe the embedded ideas and fixed mindsets that give scientists their curiously skewed perceptions and unrealistic expectations of the world. And it seeks to encourage a different approach, based on rather old-fashioned journalistic and PR know-how.

It also seeks to explore scientists’ trademark characteristics of mind. From these, it attempts to explain how scientists’ anxieties have allowed a huge and almost entirely ineffectual “third culture” to grow up around them, of unskilled propagandists and academic parasites and a circus of conferences and talking shops that have become (for those old enough to remember it) a Tanganyika Ground Nut Scheme de nos jours.

London, July 2006

The big plan...

I wrote this blog backwards, in a series of ten polemical "fits", over a space of a few fevered days. So the first written "fit" was Number 10, and this Introduction forms the latest entry by date. This means the blog can now be read like a book from beginning to end.

The entries that follow are:

• Fit 1 – Not like us or, why the things that make scientists good at being scientists may not be universal blessings
• Fit 2 – Little helpers or, the tale of the professor’s lovely assistant
• Fit 3 – Climbing Mount Impossible or, why opening your mind to incredible notions is not always a good idea
• Fit 4: - Oh no they love us after all or, why scientists secretly rather like feeling neglected and miserable
• Fit 5: - Public relations is not education or, why things seem obvious when you don't know anything about them
• Fit 6: - Mayflies & termites or, what makes science different
• Fit 7: - Fun will now commence or, the curse of organised rejoicing
• Fit 8: - Waiting in a row or, all eager for the treat
• Fit 9 - It’s official or, the kiss of death
• Fit 10: - Getting real or, why it’s really a lot simpler than we imagine

science writing

Journalism

Media

Humour

Fit the first: Not like us – or, why the things that make scientists good at being scientists may not be universal blessings

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."
Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

For a world so dependent upon science and technology, you would expect to see scientists everywhere. Wherever people congregate for everyday reasons unconnected with who they are and what they do - in bars, clubs, waiting rooms, foyers, bank queues and massage parlours – throw a stick and five times out of ten, you should surely hit a scientist. Strangely, though, this is not the case.

According to the Office of National Statistics Labour Force Survey for 2001, within the UK working population, just over 1.8 million people hold qualifications in science or engineering. If we accept that in total there are about 58 million people in the UK, that makes just about 3% - about 20 times the number of people in prison, but only half the minimum estimate for the number of Class A drug-users.

And don’t forget, that figure of 1.8 million is just for those who hold a qualification. Most people qualified in science are not scientists by profession – like me, for example. Although even fewer philosophy students go on to be philosophers, science degrees are not necessarily “vocational” either. Most are the passport to something else, like accountancy. There is no shame in this. Arguably, scientists who don't work in science do science more good than those who do. But it is clear that the world just doesn’t need that many scientists to be scientists.

Even if we were to add in retired qualified scientists and technologists, we would be left with an unknowable but considerably smaller number of folk who wear, or have once worn, the white coat. Such people may comprise only 1% of the total UK population. By contrast, 3 million people are registered members of Bingo clubs, while about 5 million belong to UK badminton racquets clubs.

I don’t know about you, but I expect to go to my grave not knowing anyone who plays either bingo or badminton, let alone belongs to a club dedicated to either. Despite living in Stoke Newington I don’t even know any Class A drug-users. For this reason, I believe it fair to say that most people will exit the mortal coil never having met a working scientist. This is very significant. Just as you can explain a lot of things about Britain by the fact that it is an island (and more about that later) you can explain a lot about scientists by this curious discrepancy. Scientists are not a political entity: they are few, divided and together have little influence in the ballot box. By contrast, the fruits of what they do are all-pervadingly powerful. This, I believe, lies at the root of the continuing incomprehension among scientists over their position in society, over society’s perception of them, and the value placed by society on what they do.

Birds of a feather

You don’t have to know the statistics to appreciate that scientists must be pretty rare birds – there is qualitative evidence too.

Scientists themselves would be the first to agree that portrayals of them on TV and in films are always wildly unrealistic. But then so are most portrayals of musicians, journalists, violinmakers and others whose numbers are so low that most people never meet one. Many scientists sneer at the media for this, and fret about how it may be damaging their image.

I do not. Clichés tell you a lot about the people who create them. The portrayal of minority professions like scientists is enlightening about attitudes, precisely because those images are unconstrained by reality. This is not “misperception”. These portraits are not based on perception: they are based on expectation – on how the audience thinks such a character should be. And no profession recognises or likes its fictional image.

In this respect, scientists are just like everyone else. However it is a sign of deep insecurity that they take it so much more badly, and worry more about being portrayed as “mad and bad” than, say, journalists do. Now you might offer, by way of explanation, that this is because of outrage at the injustice. CP Snow asserted that typical scientists think of themselves as being on the side of the angels. Perhaps the unfairness of the Dr Frankenstein accusation really hurts.

Well, possibly. Scientists are just like everyone else in the sense that their capacity for self-delusion is infinite, too. My experience is that scientists are no nobler and have no more (or less) belief in the rightness and importance of what they do than journalists. Journalists also think of themselves as working to the common good, and take what they do very seriously indeed. They may not like the way the public chooses to see them (picture - Kirk Douglas as manipulative and unscrupulous Chuck Tatum in the 1951 classic (Paramount)), but they don’t whinge about it.

Like all rare beings, scientists huddle together for warmth and security. In the days when I pretended to be a scientist, I studied the way encrusting organisms, like barnacles and oysters, choose the place where they should settle for life. This is a big decision for a larval encruster, for whom location is as important for success as it is for any newsagent. If the larva gets the location wrong, the adult – which cannot move once it is fixed – will die.

Not surprisingly therefore, the presence of others of its kind, and even the attachment scars of long-dead forebears, is a powerful recommendation for a site to settle. For this reason, most encrusting organisms tend to cluster – even generation after generation. As the old saw has it - the acorn rarely falls far from the tree. Even for an oyster or a barnacle, the presence of attachment scars renders the decision of whether to settle much simpler. There are no spectra, just yes or no; no weighing up of environmental pros and cons required. Dad liked this place, so will I. Dad did all right here, and what’s good enough for Dad…

It is easy to construct sociobiological arguments why an analogous pattern should emerge among human beings. If your parents are good at something, you begin with the two advantages. Your genetics are likely to predispose you: if dad was good at fishing, you probably will be too. Secondly, you have nurture on your side because you start learning young. So it is that dynasties - in science as well as in business, media and the arts - grow up.

Like any other group drawn together by common aptitudes and interests, scientists grow up together, learn together, marry each other and grow old together. Their offspring stand a high chance of wearing, in adulthood, hand-me-down white coats or hard hats bequeathed by their proud forebears.

What this fact of life achieves is to reinforce the already present tendency for scientists’ perception of the world to be akin to that of – I am tempted to say a barnacle – but I shall say instead that of a ghetto-dweller.

It is easy to see how this can set up a mental conflict. From inside, it looks to scientists as though scientists are everywhere, for all to see. Yet, views of scientists evidently persist that are wildly at variance with reality – and “reality” is a concept very dear to the scientific mind; more of which below. They begin to fret.

Why are WE not powerful like science is?

They look around at the pervasive influence of science and technology. They see people who are delighted to accept the conveniences, but are absurdly over-sensitive about the negligible harm that could possibly arise from things that seem to bring them no benefit. Scientists feel ignored, misunderstood, by-passed and powerless. Once again, the world of non-scientific humans seems even more illogical and incomprehensible than it already did. Why don’t science and technology exert more influence over planning decisions? Why are scientists not believed? Whence this pervasive suspicion? Why does not science have a greater influence over the media and political agenda?

In all generations, but especially since Snow, scientists are apt to conclude that there must be a conspiracy at work. Perhaps it’s those louche but influential artistic degenerates in Chelsea (see the Introduction), or whatever the updated version of Lord Snow’s caricature might be; people who are better connected; who are more gregarious, perhaps; who can do all that small-talk stuff and get invited to parties. And thus, scientists find themselves gloomily participating in their own stereotype; tacitly admitting that they are precisely the isolated, socially inept people they often appear to be in films.

Image: © Hoover Candy Group

The truth is very different. As we shall see, scientists are far from being generally misunderstood and reviled. Science is very far indeed from being politically powerless – it’s merely weak in the ballot box, which is a different thing. Science does exert a lot of influence over the planning, political and media agendas – it’s just that some scientists would not be satisfied until it became the only - or at least the dominant - influence. (The unreality of scientists’ expectations will be explored in Fit 3. )

But we have come far enough to draw a preliminary conclusion. In response to the question: “what are scientists like?” we can say that they are few, that like other professions they tend to cluster together, and that they don’t recognise themselves in the way they are portrayed. They think (characteristically) that portrayals should reflect “reality” as they would define it. But in fact, portrayals only reflect the reality of expectation.

Charles Percy Snow had clear ideas about how scientists ought to be, and he devoted quote a lot of The Two Cultures to giving his audience the benefit of it. The white coats have attracted a few stains since then, and his high-minded, disciplined, puritanical secular saints, motivated by the improvement of the human condition, seem ludicrous today. A liking for flattery is yet another thing that makes scientists just like everyone else.

However, faced with the need to earn money and get on in life, scientists are also part of the ugly world - it’s just that the low strategies they must adopt to survive in it are, naturally, adapted to their own piece of country. For an estate agent, one strategy for getting to the top probably involves dressing in a suit and wearing cufflinks. For a scientist, it will not; however it might well involve suppressing doubts about a dominant theory because that theory was erected by the grandees who now sit on peer review committees, grant-awarding bodies and appointment panels.

In both senses of the expression, these aspects of scientific behaviour are not enlightening. We all express feebleness in the face of the human condition, and we do it in our own ways according to our circumstances. What I am trying to get at are the things that make scientists different. Why? Because in the end we all make our own luck and get precisely the press we deserve. If anything needs fixing in this area, scientists have to look inside themselves for it. And I strongly suspect that the things that make scientists good at being scientists are the same things that make them bad at promoting themselves, communicating with non-scientists, and getting other people on their side.

What I now present is one answer to the question “what are scientists like?” phrased in the form of a negative horoscope for the 13th sign of the Zodiac – the scientist.

I’m not paranoid; it’s just that everyone’s against me

It is the major premise of this blog that, just as the fear of crime is said to be a greater social evil than crime itself, scientists’ own problems – which lie well within their power to change or adapt to – are much greater than any threat “out there” among the (largely imaginary) conspirators. That misplaced suspicion leads scientists to adopt misdirected strategies – almost always for other people than themselves to adopt, naturally – to improve the situation.

This blog contends that most of the “problem” is imaginary, or based on expectations that need a reality check. Once these bogeys are exorcised, the real problems that are left behind as the phantasms fade away, lie with scientists themselves. Unless scientists wake up to this, large amounts of their time (and money) will go on being wasted. For, as the last 20 years have shown (to my satisfaction at least) although plenty of other people are prepared to “help scientists get their message across” as they would say, such folk usually end up helping themselves and achieving absolutely nothing.

Establishing that scientists are in many important ways different from ordinary people runs counter to one of the most conspicuous PR efforts made by scientists and their cheerleaders in recent years; namely, to try to deny their uniqueness and convince the public of the complete opposite. This movement reached its zenith in the 1980s, when everyone (not just scientists) was more than usually concerned about their image.

Scientists in the 1980s looked upon their stereotype and despaired. Then, extending arguments that were already gaining currency at that time about social embeddedness – the notion that scientists do not work in a pure vacuum isolated from their historical and social context – commentators began to write about what warm and cuddly people scientists were, too. Not only was science not conducted in isolation from society; it was carried on by intuitive and creative folk who were most definitely not robots, not heartless and cruel, and most of all, not peculiar - just like everyone else, in fact. And you may ask: “If people are happy with the notion, where is the harm?

• First, if it isn’t true, it won’t wash. Contrary to popular belief, successful Public Relations (which is what this is) relies on truth - and the one thing that always gets you found out is a lie.
• Second, why should scientists not wish to be seen as special and different? Why would scientists not wish their unique qualities to be recognised and respected?

The key to “why not” lies in respect. Some scientists – Darwin, Newton, Einstein - are scene-shifters and change our world forever. But the rest are for the most part deeply conformist in outlook and sensitive to what other scientists think of them. This curious fact comes about because science is overtly collective - which makes it unique among human intellectual endeavours. But collectivity, while it has many positive aspects, also has its down side.

Mob mentality

Science journalists are fond of noting how many scientists, when they think they are addressing the public down a microphone, are really thinking about how their performance will play with their colleagues, so terrified are they of being thought idiotic or publicity-seeking. That is one reason why “standing out from the crowd” is unpopular with scientists – they have a mob mentality.

But even more basic than this is the simple dread felt by the swotty kid who tires of getting his satchel kicked around the playground. He wants mostly to blend into the general background (while enjoying, if possible, star status among like-minded friends in the Bus-spotting Club). Science provides an outlet for such people (classically, men) with low social skills and obsessive attention to detail in limited fields of inquiry; people who fall at the mild end of the so-called autism spectrum, and are said to display Asperger’s Syndrome.

Characteristics of Asperger’s Syndrome are relatively common in the population, but are much more common in some sections than others. The characteristics of a typical Asperger’s patient occur ten times as often in men than women, and the figure may may be even higher than that. Prof. Simon Baron-Cohen, a clinical psychologist at Cambridge University, has found that Cambridge undergraduates in science and technology were much more likely to show Asperger traits than those in the arts and humanities. Mathematicians come top of the Asperger league, followed by engineers, computer scientists and physicists, and with biologists showing the lowest tendency. Baron-Cohen has since written a book about his belief that Asperger’s Syndrome is an extreme version of typical "psychological maleness".

The typical traits of an Asperger’s character involve finding social situations difficult, a low ability to make small talk, a very high ability in picking up details and facts, a tendency to find it hard to know what others are feeling, a very high ability to concentrate for long periods on the same thing, a tendency to have strong but narrow interests, to like routines, to do things inflexibly and repetitively, and – unsurprisingly perhaps - a certain lack of success in making friends easily.

It is not hard to see why such mental characteristics may be real advantages to a scientist or computer technologist, but disadvantages in, for example, a career in public relations. Taking all these things together, such mental attitudes and social conditioning can – in other contexts - be highly disadvantageous. They lead scientists to shy from the world and take refuge in delicious and maudlin self-pity. Sometimes I fear that this is a condition from which scientists collectively will never break out. It is one of my main reasons for writing this blog.

Meet my friend Thing

Realising that most people are not very interested in things and ideas comes early in the career of any would-be science writer. In my case, the scales fell when a publisher handed me back a book proposal (about geology) and said: “I am sure this would be a very good book. The referees were all positive about it. I agree that we would be well placed to publish it. But we won’t. We won’t because there are no people in it. People, you see, are interested in people”.

He might have added, “…and most people, unlike scientists in the main, live their lives entirely through their emotions and sensations”, because turning science back into something about people that will excite the emotions and the senses is what the professional science populariser’s job largely consists of.

At that time I had just emerged from the oil business, where I had been involved in technical writing – writing scientific reports as a consultant to various client companies. This is a form of popularisation, but it is not the Daily Mail. Though the folk you write for may not be scientists, they are highly motivated readers - they have dollar signs in their eyes. All a "technical writer" must do is translate jargon.

So I remember this interview as something of a personal epiphany. Not only did it dawn on me that as a popular writer, my readers must always be the focus of everything I write; I also realised that, as a scientist, I had been gradually retreating from life all my career.

I had begun as a zoologist. Then, plants seemed more interesting and I veered botanical. Then fossil animals claimed my attention and I became a geologist. Then fossil plants seemed to offer the sort of challenge I was after. Finally, in the oil business and earning money, I found that I had developed an overweening desire to understand the chemistry that drives the processes of solution and precipitation during the post-burial history of limestones.

Lots of bucks there, but not a lot of life.

Chemists would undoubtedly view it differently, but this drift from the very alive through the once alive to the inanimate, marked an act of retreat; of craving for the safety of controlled conditions and predictability. It seemed that the deader things were, the more I liked it.

I had already decided that my scientific career had been more or less a sham, conducted by someone whose talent, if he had any, lay with words – a memory for which (combined with a knack for literary imitation) had enabled him to carry off the white coat long enough to fool a university into giving him a doctorate. But now, facing the grim reality of work, I had a fright. I suffered that mid-20s crisis that sometimes grips people who leave the congenial world of education to find themselves emerging from a door in a back alley on the wrong side of town, surrounded by thugs.

I ran away to the circus and became a science journalist.

"...Awkward at parties, shy with strangers, deficient in irony - they have had no choice but to turn their attention to the close study of everyday objects."

Fran Lebowitz, Metropolitan Life (1976)

Specialist journalists (at least on UK papers) are not excused the need to make their stories relevant to the everyday lives of their readers. I am easily (alas) old enough to remember when an education specialist for a worthy broadsheet like The Independent could bash out a 400-word scoop on some arcane policy shift in a dispute between university funding bodies and vice-chancellors over the Dual Support System for university research. I know because I used to help them write them.

There are relatively few such ghettoes left in newspapers these days and all news must fight for its right to live in the pages alongside everything else. Today’s news editor will throw your 400 erudite words back with the cry: “Where are the students/lecturers/parents in this garbage?” In other words - like the man said - people are interested in people.

But the real business of science is things and ideas, not people, emotions and sensuality; and what makes scientists unusual is the fact that they are happier with things that way. I have felt the pull, so I know. The world of things and ideas – the world of science – embodies simplicity and safety. Things are manipulable, facts testable, behaviour predictable. This is a world where, the more you understand, the more predictable everything becomes because the rules don’t change. What’s true today is true tomorrow. Such reliability is what makes science powerful. It is also what makes it safe. It doesn’t let you down.

It’s not only scientists who have this unusual penchant for things over people. All academics and intellectuals are to some extent wired up the same way, to a greater degree than the average fare-payer on the Clapham omnibus. It’s just that scientists are more closed off because of the nature of their subject.

The ideas of a literary critic, for example, about a thing called a novel are more accessible to the layperson because a human being with a life story wrote the novel; the novel is a tale about fictional people’s lives, and is itself intended as an act of accessible communication. Scientists, by contrast, study things that really are just things. And some of their ideas are not even rooted in everyday objects. This natural penchant may not preclude an interest in people, but as usual there tends to be a spectrum. And scientists tend to be nearer the other end of it than most of us.

Taking the epistemology

Scientists do not lavish much time on the philosophy of knowledge – one more characteristic that they do share with the rest of humanity. When Thomas Henry Huxley glibly (and rather misleadingly) defined science as organised common sense, he was reflecting an attitude of mind among researchers, not describing science itself. Actually, much of what scientists discover is completely contrary to common sense. But scientists do take a straightforward approach to reality and truth that is, basically, commonsense. If they have ever heard of it, scientists applaud Dr Johnson’s footballing proof of the true existence of material things. The scientific method gives them all the philosophy they want.

Scientists believe in an objective truth. They look for knowledge that is self-evidently true because it works and can be used as a basis for prediction. Most scientists envisage their explanations as ever-nearing approximations to this absolute truth. Newton is fine as far as he goes, but Einstein is better and one day someone else will better Einstein.

But by and large, workaday scientists just think of themselves as finding out what is. And for some it is a small step from this approach to the belief that only science can provide valid knowledge at all – but more of that below. First, I want to look at how scientists go about explaining what they have found by putting it in words.

Having discovered what “is”, scientists believe they should express it directly, and unambiguously in a manner that is style-free. They want to say only what they mean, and to mean only one thing at a time. Their approach to language is quite the opposite of, say the literary critic, for whom the what (the idea being communicated) cannot be separated from the how of the language in which it is put. For scientists, there is complete distinction between what is being said, and the means by which it is expressed. For those who believe in the existence of ideal and external truth, the idea and the word exist independently.

Working alongside scientists as a journalist, or better still as co-editor of a publication, you quickly discover that this desire, crystallised in the mannerisms and conventions of their chosen literary form the scientific paper, is very deeply ingrained.

The scientific paper is a work of fiction that presents the process of scientific discovery back to front. After a proper contextual introduction, scientific authors adduce observational evidence, consider multiple hypotheses, and then reject all but one, which emerges at the other end like a newly minted coin. The form reinforces the false notion that the scientific method is a handle-turning process like a calculating engine.

But all scientists know that what really happens is nothing like that. The true process goes more like this. Scientist observes something odd. Scientist has momentary flash of insight, in which scientist sees answer perfectly. Scientist then goes around amassing evidence to support guessed conclusion. Finally, scientist turns whole process on head, and pretends it was all deduction.

For those who might not recognise it from this oversimple account, the process is called “hypothetico-deductive” as defined by William Whewell, whom we have met already.

It is odd that the revered scientific method – which is what we are talking about - is enforced by the dictates of a fictional form. The actual scientific process is intuitive; but the method of explication is what underscores science’s verifiability. This is more than window-dressing, yet it is actually applied in the perspiration phase, the bit scientists generally hate, not at inspiration – the moment they all crave.

This crucially important literary form demands that scientists write in simple, straightforward objective language. Of course this is rarely the case, because of jargon (which cannot be avoided yet which could be avoided much more than it is). The tone is neutral, impersonal, divorced from the messiness of how things actually happened, and of course, aimed at telling the story deductively, one thing at a time, without confusion or ambiguity. These literary tics are also, coincidentally, what makes nearly all scientific papers deadly to read, since the impersonal expressed in the passive voice are unmistakable hallmarks of truly bad literary style. Scientists generally think in black-and-white, and write in grey.

Conveyancing fact

But for scientists, communication means what I call “conveyancing fact”, and doing so impersonally and unemotionally, with all excitement rigorously expunged. Just as their penchant for safety and predictability can make them prefer the world of things, scientists’ literary habits reinforce another interpersonal shortcoming often observed among them. Scientists can be rather bad at picking up “metamessage” – information hidden in the main signal.

This talent is sometimes called “reading people”, since very often in the messy world of human beings the most important stuff to know is conveyed in metamessage. To scientists, however, metamessage is ambiguity – noise in the signal; an impurity, that needs refining out. The idea that real writers may deliberately layer their meanings to convey many things at the same time; that much of this information is often not factual at all, and that this, too, constitutes communication - is alien to them.

Their colourless, utilitarian approach to expression does not improve scientists’ chances of communicating what they do to the public. It is very difficult to learn to write in more than one manner, especially if your very thought-processes, engendered by your genetics and enhanced by your nurture within the scientific ghetto, cry out together against it.

A scientist friend of mine, who also chafes at these conventions but has to live within them, once asked me about a sentence in one of his papers beginning: “Numerical experiments suggest that”. Alas, the journal’s US-based scientific editors had objected to this because in their view an interpretation was being given - numbers themselves, after all “suggest” nothing – and demanded a rewrite to reflect that. Hence he was left with having to rephrase his shorter, more lively words with the appalling “Results of the numerical experiments are interpreted by the authors as suggesting that…” to satisfy his pedantic referees (though there is a long history in US science about the separation of fact from interpretation, about which books have been written). I suggested he say: “We interpret the results of our numerical experiments…” but that, being in the active voice and good writing, also runs counter to the scientific cult of impersonality.

This is the sort of stylistic sterility that scientists find themselves up against when they write for publication. Examine any of the works of the most successful scientific communicators – I would suggest Richard Fortey and Stephen Jay Gould – and you will see that they owe their stylistic success to the fact that they have shucked the surly bonds of science’s arid, linear, literal and monothematic stylistic constraints.

Lastly, habitual literalness of mind (which comes as a job lot with their concern for what is, and its impersonal expression) further exacerbates scientists’ problems. For one thing, it means they tend to underestimate the public’s ability to discount - or at least qualify - what they see, for example, in the media. This also goes some way towards explaining why scientists react so badly to what they see as unhelpful stereotyping. Scientists have an unfortunate tendency to think that such evidence has much more persuasive power than it really has. Ordinary folk have a greater ability to detect and discount nonsense than intellectuals give them credit for.

Method acting

However post facto the scientific method is, and however epistemologically threadbare it can sometimes seem to the sophisticated, scientists are very proud of it. In fact, they tend to be a little too proud of it. As we have seen, this is especially true in Anglophone countries because of the restricted meaning of the term “science” in our language. Alas the word is therefore more easily appropriated in English by what I (and others) have identified as a baleful tendency to strut among some scientists and their self-appointed spokespersons.

Professor Stefan Collini who edited C P Snow’s The Two Cultures for publication by Cambridge University Press in 1993 makes the point well in his insightful introduction:

“In the second half of the nineteenth century, in the heyday of the scientistic aspiration, this could mean discriminating those enquiries whose methods gave us “real” knowledge from those which did not. Many practising scientists continue implicitly to endorse this assumption, and occasionally a self-appointed spokesman for science will articulate it in its most arrogantly imperial form” (p. xlvi)

When I encounter scientists who fall into this category I often suffer subliminal flashes of three historical groups: Roundhead soldiers smashing centuries of mediaeval heritage, barbarian crusaders disgracing themselves at the Ottoman Court, and Viking raiders. The Roundheads had moral certitude on their side. The crusaders had it too, and rampaged through more sophisticated cultures to which they believed themselves superior. And the Vikings also had at their disposal a new and superbly successful method for discovering things – the longship. They had a strong culture and made great contributions to world literature. But as the art historian Sir Kenneth Clark wrote of them:

“…one must admit that the Norsemen produced a culture. But was it civilisation? The monks of Lindisfarne would not have said so, nor would Alfred the Great, nor the poor mother trying to settle down with her family on the banks of the Seine.”

When I see the longships of scientific imperialism nosing upstream, I do not think that what I am witnessing is the arrival of civilisation, nor even 50% of a thing called “culture”, but one rich, powerful - and therefore occasionally dangerous - contributor to the way we live and think.

But - partly, perhaps, because they are compensating for the chip on their shoulder - scientists too often present an embarrassingly swaggering, hairy-arsed arrogance to the world. They often pretend to believe (and some perhaps do) that science is not only the most powerful way of investigating the natural world – but the only valid way of looking at it - or indeed at anything else.

This is destined to alienate people who might otherwise be their friends and helpers. The wider practical consequences of this blinkered worldview will be explored in Fit the Second.


Envoi

A good friend of mine, the distinguished geologist Prof. Richard Selley of Imperial College London, once wrote: “All generalisations are dangerous – including this one”.

This does not mean that generalisations are not useful – it is a warning lest some idiot think that they apply universally. Scientists are not the Snow-white sepulchres of The Two Cultures, any more than they all resemble over-indulged - or borderline autistic - children (though a few come pretty close).

All the best clichés are rooted somewhere in truth. And the truth is that all professions favour people with certain personality characteristics. It is hard, for example, to believe that you can ever be a really good journalist if you are not a gossip. Conversely, there are plenty of professions where being a gossip would be a distinct drawback.

Scientists share, to a greater or lesser extent, many unique and enviable characteristics of mind – characteristics that in other circumstances might be defects, but which to a scientist are very positive indeed. Rather than pretend to be ordinary folk, scientists must recognise these and be proud. However, these characteristics, combined with the sociology of the scientific community, lie at the root of that community’s frequently expressed dissatisfaction with the way it is regarded by the non-scientific world. They are also the very factors that prevent scientists from reaching the level of self-awareness required for them to understand why they have only themselves to blame for this.

There has been quite enough bootless whingeing from scientists about how everyone is against them (an unsceintific assertion for which there is nothing but negative evidence - see Fit the fourth), and how others must change their ways to suit them.

Worse, innumerable, useless and expensive initiatives, mostly from government but some also from industry and its collectives, have managed a wonderful combination of squandering resources while raising false hopes. Far from improving matters, and while other folk just got on with the real job of communicating the excitement and sheer beauty of science to a wider audience, we have somehow given birth to a futile and increasingly self-serving Public Understanding of/Engagement with Science industry. This has dragged in conference organisers, pollsters, PR companies, Government departments, scientists themselves and their learned societies, until it has become the Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme de nos jours.

But that is for another Fit. Let me conclude this Fit with a general principle. Only when scientists accept that they are not just like everyone else and come to terms with it, will they also be able to come to grips effectively with what afflicts them.

Fit the second: Little helpers – or, the tale of the professor’s lovely assistant

"The greatest ignorance of all is the one that believes it knows everything."Albert Camus

An editor – who was neither feline nor oblique and offered no support whatever for CP Snow’s Chelsea salon conspiracy theory - once asked me to write him a piece about “oil on other planets”. I blinked. “Are you sure boss?” I asked. “Wouldn’t you rather I do something about metals and such?”

Like many editors, his face was well adapted to conveying complex messages in a single glance. This one was saying: “You are completely lacking all news sense and a moron and about this close to getting no further work on this paper”. Metals weren’t sexy. Why not oil?

Now - freelances don’t get business by telling editors they are ignoramuses, and I needed the money. So I tried again. “What I meant was, wouldn’t it make more of a piece”, I said, “if I were to broaden it out into resources generally?” To this, mercifully, he agreed.

My editor knew nothing about science (thank goodness – that was why he was employing me). He knew that oil came out of the ground, and things that come out of the ground are mineral – it says as much in the dictionary. In his world, the only criterion of any importance was news value – about which he knew a lot. People would read about oil, but not metals.

His opinion on news was worth something - but I doubt he would have been presumptuous enough to advise, say, a cosmologist or a molecular biologist on how to ply their respective trades. Unfortunately there is something about some scientists that makes them think they are entitled to pronounce on everything. This seldom endears them to the professionals they need to help them “get their message across”.

Being proverbial doesn’t guarantee that everyone gets it, so it may be worth repeating that in a free society everybody is entitled to his or her private opinion. If Uncle Denis wants to believe that the Earth is flat and created in seven days along with a moon rich in hydrocarbons, he is perfectly within his rights, no matter how much it offends scientists.

The public clearly understands this, and (as revealed in a survey of public attitudes (October 2000) about which I shall have a lot more to say later) treats the opinions of scientists with respect when it comes to their professed subjects, subtly diminished according how and where they get their shilling. This is all as it should be. Scientists are relatively well trusted, but commonsensically treated more or less like anyone else.

However, many scientists think all their opinions are more worthy of attention, by virtue of being arrived at by someone whose razor sharp scientific intellect has given the matter some free processing time. The source of this arrogance is the revered scientific method – the rigorous process by which, according to a myth many scientists tend to believe - they live and breathe. You see it laid out to best effect in those works of fiction called scientific papers, which as I mentioned in Fit the First, present the process of scientific discovery completely back to front.

Now I know there are shades in all of this. There are scientists who are big on ideas and low on the backbreaking grind of proving them, and conversely, those who are low on ideas but high on drudgery. This is how we have armwavers and nitpickers. And there is undoubtedly a character spectrum, ranging from scientists on the physics and chemistry side, whose data can be complete, and those on the geology/archaeology side who have to make deductions from data that can never be complete. It is interesting also that the latter tend to be bolshier and less respectful of hierarchies than the former, and to be more fun at parties. Probably this is a group that would agree with WH Auden (whose brother John was a geologist after all) when he says: “guessing is always/more fun than knowing”.

But as a rule, all scientists of whatever stripe abide by the great “method” – the discipline enforced by the scientific paper with its curious but necessary back-to-frontedness. And this they hold up as the thing that sets them apart from sloppy thinking folk, giving them a right to determine all things and lending their opinions and observations special weight.

Problem is, it doesn’t. At their best, scientists are creative, intuitive, impulsive and irrational and all their much-vaunted discipline is actually post facto rationalisation. Before they embark on the drudgery, scientists’ brains are no more disciplined than anyone else’s. And it shows. For example, they are frequently heard to complain - to folk in science journalism and PR as well as one another - that there is “no” science on television. They also frequently claim never to watch TV. Many scientists I know are well able to make both statements in close succession without blinking. If pressed, they may then say: “Ah, well I never watch TV because there’s no science on it”. Thinking is rarely clearer than when it is circular.

Muddiness of thought and a willingness to believe their own prejudices is a characteristic found as much among scientists as everyone else, and goes right to the top. When the grandees of the Royal Society set up their Committee on the Public Understanding of Science (COPUS) in the mid-1980s, the multiplicity of mistaken assumptions that underpinned it was truly staggering. However, what was even more amazing, in a way, was the publication – in 1988 – of a paper (or at least something dressed up as a research paper) in that most distinguished scientific journal, Nature.

This paper, all eight pages of it (that’s long for Nature) – was written by John Durant, a leading science cheerleader at that time and later Professor in the Public Understanding of Science at Imperial College. The paper made shocking reading, but not – at least as far as I and other science journalists privately thought - for the reasons the author intended.

Without going into detail, Durant et al. concluded that the public (whoever they are), were ignorant of science. This assertion was made on the basis of a frankly ludicrous pub-quiz style questionnaire to which a number of “members of the public” had been subjected.

This survey had asked a set of questions best exemplified by the oft-quoted, almost talismanic: “Can antibiotics kill viruses?” (I may be paraphrasing). The only allowable “correct” answer to this was “No”, but actually this is a question that many a biologist would struggle to answer. Sure, we have no antibiotics at present that work against viruses. But this does not mean that in principle antibiotics might not kill viruses.

In any case, does knowledge of a set of nerdy facts such as how many planets there are in the Solar System (another moot point, actually) really test understanding of anything? Like anyone else, I know rather a lot about quite a lot of subjects on which, however, my command of detailed factoids (such as might win me a round of drinks at the Dog and Duck) is decidedly shaky. I understand quite a lot about the geology of the moon, and can explain the difference between the many theories of its formation, and even venture a suggestion as to why the leading theory is leading at the moment. I can explain how geologists know that once, the Moon was much closer to the Earth, and what that meant for life on our planet. But am I really confident about the current distance in kilometres of the Moon from the Earth, with John Durant peering at me from the quizmaster’s desk and saying “Have to hurry you…”? And would it matter if I were? Would it betoken any higher understanding? No. So need we wring our hands over anyone not knowing such things? No.

However, despite the obtuseness of this “survey”, Nature – which seemed to have relaxed its usually famous rigour (referees, evidence of controls on samples and so on) – published it almost in a spirit of public duty. The paper created great publicity. Questions were asked, perhaps even in the House. Newspapers told the public straight – they were ignorant. The “deficit model”, and the assumption that “science” consisted of the contents of, to pick a random example, Professor Lewis Wolpert’s brain, was born. The public had to be made to know what scientists know.

COPUS pocus

This approach of COPUS – that only “we scientists” are the keepers of the Truth and therefore only we can explain it – flattered great and small alike and made it easy for scientists to accept the model as correct. It played well with those scientific professors (many of whom were on COPUS) who wrote occasional books for what they imagined to be “the public”, and who considered their subjects too complicated and important to be left to anyone but them to explain. It pandered to scientists’ secret desire to remain a priesthood, or at least regain that status, already well lost by 1988. That this view ran counter to the very nature of science – its openness, accessibility and challengability, the things that make it the complete antithesis of a religion – seemed to occur to no-one; at least no-one in COPUS.

It also drew deep draughts from the almost unassailable arrogance that is the subject of this Fit – that only scientists know anything that is any use, and that should they choose, they can do anything in the world – relegating every other field of expertise, and every other non-scientific professional, to the role of little helper (picture).

In the literature of cliché (and what literature is not cliché?) one is familiar with the character of the scientist’s little helper – one which is only now being written out as scientists themselves take on more dashing dramatic guises. Indiana Jones was an unusual film character, portraying as he did the academic scientist as action-man. Hitherto, however, lovers of science fiction were much more familiar with the scientist as sexless philosopher-wizard, an arrogant, unworldly, occasionally megalomaniac obsessive with a beautiful daughter (to provide romantic interest for the hero action-man). This ancient dramatic tableau, portraying in allegory the timeless theme of sexual liberation, can be traced back to an obvious model in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

This play was written about 1611 and has no very obvious authored models. A German play called Comedia von der schonen Sidea by Jacob Ayrer of Nuremberg features a sorcerer prince with a spirit attendant and an only daughter who falls for the dashing son of her father’s greatest foe. The model for this, critics believe, was probably English, however; since the traffic of dramas in the early 17th Century mainly involved German remakes of English originals. Folk tales abound with examples of sorcerers with only daughters. It was all there waiting for Shakespeare to pick up, just as Shakespeare was for 20th Century science fiction writers.

Science fiction has quarried The Tempest mercilessly, often overtly - as in the 1956 classic Forbidden Planet, wherein –with the help of a vanished race of aliens whose civilization he is investigating - monsters from the Id of Prospero character Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) try to prevent his version of Miranda (Alta, played by Anne Francis) from being sexually liberated by dashing spacetrooper Captain Adams (Leslie Nielsen). But hardly a sci-fi movie since then has not given the arrogant egghead megalomaniac scientist/sorcerer character a daughter or lab assistant to provide romantic interest for the hero action-man who has, generally, to foil the evil father.

The first Dr Who (William Hartnell) was furnished with a daughter called Susan Foreman (Carole Ann Ford), and that lengthy BBC drama spawned many more young ladies who filled her role as the one who screamed a lot, twisted her ankle while fleeing and generally getting into trouble. The producers are said to have written one Doctor’s assistant out of the series (a scientist, Liz Shaw, played by Caroline John) who because of her scientific education failed to behave cluelessly enough for the audience to identify with. For dramatic reasons, because she did not need to have things explained to her, she made the writers’ job (of getting the message across to the audience) more difficult.

Digging deeper still into the BBC sci-fi archive, Professor Bernard Quatermass also had a daughter. Played by Monica Grey, she provided a human foil for the Quatermass, who conformed well to the forbidding sorcerer model of screen scientist. Consequently she had a habit of going misty eyed, squinting vaguely off camera and speculating distractedly about what horrors might befall if her father were not successful in his fight against the latest cosmic threat.

Cliché and truth

This may be all very well and amusing but what does it have to do with reality? All good clichés are rooted in truth, and there is more to this “little helper” scenario than dramatic necessities and expository tools. Scientists, particularly academic ones, have historically been ploughers of lone furrows. Big-team cooperation is much more a feature of US science than it has been in Britain. By and large, the romantic notion of the lone genius (read any of Sir Fred Hoyle’s science fiction to see the lone anti-establishment central character triumph against all the odds) still dies hard. It is the revenge fantasy of that quiet kid in the playground while his satchel is being kicked about, waiting for his aggressors to become bored.

Also, scientists’ actual experience is one of a world peopled by little – and, it has to be said, often female – helpers. Librarians, research assistants, PhD students and armies of technicians of one sort or another, render their small services and might gain (if they are lucky) a condescending thank-you in the acknowledgements of the great paper when it is finally published. Aspiring successors (like PhD students) might get co-authorship as a privilege of caste. But it is a world peopled by “scientists” and “little helpers”.

In the wider world this manifests itself in many curious and trivial ways. I once had to recruit a Parliamentary liaison officer for a scientific organisation, and found it impossible to dislodge the job-title “research assistant” from the mind and writings of the responsible committee chairman, even to the point where he wanted it in the advertisement. We all interpret the world in terms of what we know. But this attitude of mind, this division of the world into two castes, “scientists” and “everyone else”, is perhaps one of scientists’ most irritating and unsympathetic characteristics. In a world where they are effectively out of the water, or perhaps in the water and out of their depth, scientists need all the friends and help they can get.

Some time ago I sat in on a meeting, and heard one attendee say of the magazine I edit: “I never read the thing, but I think it lacks…”. He uttered this self-contradiction without a blink, and proceeded to list some things he thought should be in the magazine – all of which, of course, were.

Next day I received an email from him - by way, he said, of "clarification". What he had meant was that he “only rarely” read it. And he then went on at some length to explain to me how much better a magazine it would be, if.

For example, what if the attractive but uninformative colour photograph on the front (which conveyed no information at all) were replaced with text, so that interesting facts could be seen immediately - presumably without the bother of opening the polybag the magazine is delivered in? This would surely lower the “activation energy” (an example there of scientific metaphor) required to delve into the thing.

He was full of wonderful ideas of this sort. Removing the colour, for example, would reduce costs, surely? And filling up all the white space in the page design (what was that about?) with words (the more to conveyance further facts) would increase the magazine’s capacity, and drive down page costs. The fact that no magazine you ever see anywhere possesses these characteristics, obviously cut no ice. Well why should they? That would assume that the idiots who put magazines together for a living knew anything about what they were doing.

He closed by assuring me he was full of admiration for my work but the application of a scientific mind to everyday problems could always be of immense benefit.

So, I hope he also felt it an immense benefit to be asked to shove his incisive scientific mind where the Cercopithecid primate (left) shoves his woody, indehiscent, pericarpal fruit (Much more about groundnuts in Fit 7, below) . When it comes to scientists’ communication through the media, dealing with mostly non-scientific people (whose profession, though, is not notably less imbued with mental rigour and discipline) such condescension might be characterised as “part of the problem rather than the solution”.

Envoi

Underestimating one’s fellows is not, of course, unique to scientists – it is a characteristic of all intellectuals. Scientists, however, add, their own special twist to it, just as they do to their next common failing: namely, making unrealistic expectations. And that brings us to Fit the third.

Fit the third: Climbing mount impossible or - why opening your mind to incredible notions is not always a good idea

“But Scientists, who ought to know,
Assure us that they must be so....
Oh! let us never, never doubt
What nobody is sure about!"

Hilaire Belloc, The Microbe

Believing that what everyone thinks impossible might just be possible is generally held to be something of a virtue in scientists. After all, the Earth is round. Space is curved. Continents do move. And we know these things because someone once had the courage to believe the impossible. But it isn’t always like that. Sometimes the impossible really is impossible.

Ichthyologists, the happy band who study fish, are almost unanimous in the view that yogic breathing techniques provide absolutely no protection against shark attack. Behavioural ecologist Erich Ritter, a Swiss researcher based in Miami, held a different view, however. He had long espoused the method that all his colleagues pooh-poohed as impossible. And in April 2002 the world’s media reported that he was now recovering in St Mary's Medical Centre, West Palm Beach, Florida, after an adult bullshark - unimpressed by the yogic inhaling - took a chunk out of Dr Ritter’s leg (on camera).

Dedication to proving sincerely held theories - to the point of folly and beyond - is one of those things for which the public admires scientists. Stories of scientists risking their lives in the pursuit of truth do them no harm in public relations terms, even when they are spectacularly wrong – which, writing about his story at the time, I offered as some slight consolation to Dr Ritter during his convalescence. Happily, Dr Ritter has made a good recovery and is now back in the water.

However, concern about the image scientists have with the public – so much the vogue in the 1980s (Fit the first) – has now taken on a more serious cast. Scientists today seem to have given up worrying about how to combat unhelpful media clichés and the like. In the wake of foot and mouth, mad cow disease, nuclear waste disposal and all the rest, the big issue of the moment has become - public trust.

So serious is this situation thought to be that The Royal Society dedicated its very first National Science Forum to examining the subject (Do we trust today’s scientists? Royal Society, March 6 2002). Several of my media and media relations colleagues spoke at it. There was a debate with non-scientists. There was a panel of the great and good, who agreed to answer questions from the floor. There were regional versions too, linked by video. All in all, it was quite an effort, and a measure of the seriousness with which the UK’s de facto National Academy of Science takes this subject.

However, those who have sat through many such earnest gatherings (as I have) know that the trouble with the "public trust" debate is that it rarely honestly conducted. When scientists ask "why does the public mistrust us?", what they usually mean is "Why does the public not trust us implicitly?". Thus if anyone dare suggest that the right answer might be "Yes, you should trust scientists, but no more (and no less) than you would trust anyone else, so use your common sense", their view tends to be regarded as in some way less than satisfactory.

It is not long before one begins to wonder how much of this alleged problem resides only in scientists’ minds. The 2001 Wellcome Trust/Office of Science & Technology survey Science & the public – a review of science communication and public attitudes to science showed clearly that the public does, in fact, trust scientists - up to a point. They trust university scientists more than government scientists, and government scientists more than commercial scientists, because it seems obvious to them that anyone who pays the piper gets to call the tune. Most folk would say this was an eminently sensible attitude. To expect more (as many scientists seem to) would surely be believing the impossible…

Concern over paymasters’ influence on science was also borne out in a MORI poll commissioned to coincide with the Royal Society’s Forum. Of those questioned, 55% agreed (28% strongly) that science funding was becoming too commercial. This might be encouraging – it suggests we are not witnessing a failure of faith in science itself, but merely the public’s suspicion that filthy lucre and the heavy hand of Government are corrupting it. Would the belief that scientists are far too pure in heart to yield to the allure of money and the approval of the powerful, constitute "believing the impossible"? I believe it does. Yet that would appear to be what many scientists think their due.

It took maybe as long as a decade, but now at last the "Public Understanding of Science" lobby (as it no longer calls itself) has been officially born again in the knowledge that what is needed is not so much more understanding of science among everyday folk, but more scientists who understand the public. So, in 2002 when the Royal Institution’s new (and independent) Science Media Centre opened (March 28), the opinion poll it commissioned concentrated on helping scientists do just that. What are the public’s expectations of science and scientists? We had had polls on the image of scientists, and attitudes to science; but we don’t know very much about expectations. The results were significant.

The SMC’s poll suggested that 71% of the public "looked to scientists to give an ‘agreed view’ about science issues", while 61% expected science "to provide 100% guarantees about the safety of medicines". In other words, the public tends to want science to do the very thing it cannot do – provide absolute certainty. As Dr Mark Peplow, then Science Information Officer at the SMC (now Editor of Chemistry World), said in the covering statement released with the findings: "The public’s expectations of what science can deliver are wide of the mark. Disagreement is a fundamental part of scientific enquiry." The poll also revealed that 85% of the public felt scientists needed to improve the way they communicate their research findings to the public through the media; good news for the Science Media Centre, because that is what they were hoping to do.

On the one hand the public expects the impossible of science (that it should provide certainty) while on the other, many scientists continue to believe the impossible of the public (that they should trust them absolutely). With each having placed such unreasonable expectations on the other, domestic strife cannot, surely, be far away. The public feels let down when it doesn’t get certainty. They look for reasons and sensibly assume that money and power lie at the root of it. Scientists, still fondly hoping they can wash the stains out of their labcoats, begin to despair that nobody trusts them at all – which is both an over-reaction and untrue.

There is no moral to this tale, except perhaps that probably things are not as bad as they seem. Young scientists are keen to get trained in public presentation. According to yet another survey (published on March 21 2002 by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council), while 60% of scientists questioned had at one time done some communicating, almost none had received any training. They evidently felt bad about it because 76% said they would take up the Council’s new Public Communication Training Funds (PCTFs).

These grants were made available as an option on all research grants made by EPSRC from April 2002. They provide £500 per grant for courses covering the skills required for effective communication via the broadcast or written media, and for presentations, lectures, demonstrations or debates for the general public and school audiences.

Perhaps, when these aspiring communicators take up their PCTFs, they should be sent a list of things that really are impossible:

1. Rivers flowing uphill
2. Using yoga breathing techniques for shark protection
3. Absolute certainty in science, and...
4. The total trust of a sensible person.
   
   Envoi
   
   It is easy to see why the issue of public trust matters so much to scientists and the governments who fund and benefit from their work. Governments don’t want to see profitable technologies stymied by mass panic, and taken up by countries who can afford fewer qualms. Scientists want to be free to do what they wish to do. Both would secretly like a return to the good old days of blind faith.
   
   Note secretly. To make such a claim in public would be unthinkable, and anyway, the intellectuals of the process have already declared that the Two Cultures, the Public Understanding of Science, the “deficit model” approach and much more besides are dead and gone. Not so. Not only are these attitudes alive, they are ingrained. Indeed, scientists rather like being misunderstood and unloved. Wallowing in self-pity is, after all, a lot easier than doing something useful, or parting with money…
   
   No, blind faith is not possible when the public is not ignorant of what is happening. When the public is not ignorant (and thanks to the media they are much less ignorant today than they were in the 1950s and 60s) you have to settle for faith of the sighted variety. For that you need people to feel warmly about you, and for that you need public relations. But now I am getting ahead of myself.... time for another Fit.

Fit the fourth: Oh no they love us after all or, why scientists secretly rather like feeling neglected and miserable

"With Oblomov, lying in bed was neither a necessity…nor an accident…nor a gratification. Rather, it represented his normal condition. "

Ivan Goncharov, 1858, (Trans. CJ Hogarth, 1915)

As I mentioned in my previous fit, a much-awaited report by the Wellcome Trust and the Office of Science & Technology (OST, within the UK government’s Department of Trade and Industry) was finally published in late 2001 after a long gestation period when it seemed to emulate the famous Campbells – always coming, never arriving.

There is something about “long-awaited” reports that tweaks a journalist’s antennae, because the reasonable question arises as to why the report was delayed. The suspicion is always that somebody couldn’t believe it, or didn’t like it. Perhaps disturbing conclusions were blue-pencilled, or fatally weakened with cavilling caveats; that committees had rendered its conclusions meaningless; that the strong message of the original writer has been subjected to what ad-men call vanillacide, by many hands.

But whatever the suspicions, when the Wellcome/OST Report finally landed, it was a bombshell. It was the first ever in-depth analysis of public attitudes to science in Britain, and for the first time it allowed us to make deductions about public attitudes that were based on real evidence, rather than the usual assertions based on hearsay or prejudice.

The results surprised and shocked many scientists. It appeared that the British public was not anti-science; scientists were loved and admired for their work; news about their work was a source of amazement; most people (including those who did not care personally) thought science and technology (and even blue-skies research) was important to the country and to the individual and should be paid for out of general taxation. Three quarters believed science offered good career prospects. And university scientists were especially valued for their independence of mind and status.

These revolutionary findings were always destined to take time to sink in, because they ran counter to much (if not most) of the received wisdom among scientists. Yet on the following St Valentine’s Day, at a Parliamentary event organised by a consortium of scientific and engineering bodies in a mass lobby of political parties, it was clear that even in that forum, the OST/Wellcome Report’s findings had made no impression at all. I sat in disbelief as I listened to the short speeches given by senior scientists and Party Spokesmen, waiting in vain for it to be quoted. And if we are to believe it (and I think we are), every single assertion made there by politicians and scientists alike about public and media attitudes to science was false.

However the OST Wellcome report was welcomed joyfully in other quarters. Before it appeared, science PR officers and journalists could only feel that scientists’ suspicions about the way they were perceived were mistaken. Now, at last, there was evidence to back them up.

So, while it was indeed a bombshell, it went with more of a whimper than a bang. There is a particular reason why the report made slow progress among scientists. The fact that they and their work have broad approval ratings that estate agents, solicitors, surveyors (and these days, perhaps even GPs) would give their eyeteeth for was met with incomprehension - and disbelief. The truth is that a lot of scientists secretly rather like being martyrs in their cause, not least because as well as being deliciously isolating, frankly it is a lot easier to feel that way.

For years now, scientists have slowly developed a bunker mentality. This dates from the end of the 1960s, whose death knell were rung – at least for scientists in universities - by Labour Secretary of State for Education and Science, Shirley Williams. It was on the cusp of the dismal 1970s that she launched her so-called 13 Points at the universities, and wrote a major article for The Times urging a new social contract upon scientists and announcing, in her words, that “for scientists, the party’s over”. What she meant was that blind adulation and blank cheques were a thing of the past. The Government knew that chill economic winds were blowing, and expectations had to be lowered. Scientists henceforward would have to justify what they did to those who paid for it, because they (the public) wouldn’t be taking it on trust any more.

The universities appeared to take no notice of the 13 Points beyond a certain haughty sneer of the sort they used to do so well, and scientists felt insulted - but pretended not to notice. Both were actually rather shaken in their complacency, though not enough to do anything.

Science budgets began to decline, but when the gathering economic storm broke, it was worse than expected. The oil shock hit. The miners struck. Inflation took over. The three-day week blacked out homes. Rubbish piled up in Leicester Square. Corpses went unburied. Schools closed. I studied for my O Level Chemistry in my school’s labs at weekends, warming myself on a roaring Bunsen.

Nothing worked; indeed by the end of that low, crushed decade, nothing at all seemed possible. At least scientists had fellows in their sorrow while helplessness, despair and ennui reigned as the prevailing mood. In fact, this was perhaps the last recent decade when scientists have found themselves in tune with the zeitgeist. They had revelled as revered role models in the obedient, hopeful 50s. The often-overlooked utilitarian socialist Puritanism of the 1960s, where anything that was not functional was a bourgeois indulgence and a sin, also suited their natures well. And in the 1970s they could share in despair and impotence. Had they known their Goncharov, they would have recognised in themselves the pure strains of Oblomovism.

Eventually, it was sheer impatience with the prevailing feeling (expressed in language appropriate to the period) that “everything we touch seems to turn to shit” that brought Margaret Thatcher to power in 1979, with a bold simplistic promises to cure the patient with stiff medicine - medicine that might well kill in the process. But by that time nobody much cared one way or the other. It was a time when desperate remedies were called forth, and they didn’t get much more desperate than Mrs Thatcher’s.

Yet, way after the 1980s boom times were rolling, as late as 1988, I interviewed scientists (at University College London, left) who were still shaking their heads and saying “everything we touch seems to turn to shit”. The effect of this anachronism was as shocking to me then as it recently was to hear a child of the 1960s (now retired and affluent) refer to something called the “Establishment”. I had not heard that word spoken with an upper case ‘E’ since about 1974, and even then, the Afghan coats worn by those who spoke it had developed more than just a touch of moth.

But in 1988, academic scientists – unless they had bought sharp suits and Filofaxes and got on the train from Salford to hawk their wares around the City like they were supposed to - thought they were going the way of the miners. And of course, with that attitude, they were - and the good Margaret wasn’t that bothered one way or the other. And neither was anyone else. Self-pity had come to look not only unsightly, which it always did, but – much worse – it had become unfashionable.

Aware that they needed to come out and fight their corner but fearful to participate in a task that frankly bored them, scientists have, since then, used the supposed (and entirely mythical) uninterest and hostility of the public - and various other bogus excuses, such as the myth that all journalists are unsympathetic and sensational - to pardon their own failure to engage with either. Many top-down initiatives were started from the early 1980s, about which I shall have more to say later. But the personal psychic retreat of the individual scientist began even as the sun of their funding’s golden age went down in the west.

Alas for delicious Oblomovism, the OST/Wellcome survey showed there has been no failure in the public’s interest, or the media’s willingness to cover science, or (by and large, despite BSE and the rest) the public’s faith in scientists, or the (quantitative) level of media coverage. The media and scientists’ own press agents have been telling them this for years and encouraging them to stop tearing their clothes and gnashing their teeth in this self-indulgent way. Perhaps, these folk thought, clutching their surveys, there being some real evidence, scientists might believe it. Scientists, after all, are supposed to place great reliance upon data. But it hasn’t happened yet.

Shirl's pearl

To turn round Shirley Williams’s infamous phrase, the party is not over for scientists at all. It never has been, as far as the public were concerned, even during bleak funding crises that soon followed the election of Mrs Thatcher as Prime Minister.

At the time the OST/Wellcome report appeared I wrote: “Scientists have been invited to the party. The public genuinely wants them there, thinks they may even be cool and wants to hang out with them. Now, there really is nothing for it but for scientists to wash and go”.

Unfortunately, the evidence since the appearance of the report is inconclusive at best, and at worst, suggests that those who most needed to read and accept this document ignored it. Partly this is the Oblomov-like laziness I refer to above. Scientists in the main approve of communication because it is in their interests. But they want the coverage on their own terms, and most want someone else to do it for them. They certainly don’t seem to want money diverted from the scarce resources allotted for research, as that would be taking bread they could eat and casting it upon the waters.

If you detect the aroma of a double standard at work, you are right. The only reliable evidence available shows that the British public’s admiration and affection for scientists is not as low as scientists think. However, this result is so at variance with received wisdom that scientists are loath to believe it.

Some very wise scientist whose name I can no longer remember because of that beefburger I ate in 1985, said: “To see a thing, you must believe it to be possible”. The history of science is filled with examples of evidence ignored because scientists simply could not believe it to be possible. Mechanisms really matter, and scientists are generally unwilling to follow the Holmesian thought-process (which says that after the elimination of the possible, the impossible must be true).

There are good reasons for this, and bad. There are many who, for example, believed their senses when they saw the mounting evidence that continents had drifted across the globe, evidence that was much more elegantly explained than by the various lash-up land-bridge theories that were offered in its place. Yet they could not explain how the continents could move and almost none had the courage to say to physicist objectors “The mechanism is your bloody problem”, as one senior British palaeontologist I know did, when (as a young man) he was cornered by sceptical anti-drift Americans.

We have seen how scientists can be as unscientific as anyone else – especially when not discussing science. So it has proved in the case of the OST/Wellcome report. Scientists are very well able to ignore the evidence if it confounds their prejudices – a process not unlike the necessary filtering that all scientists apply to the noisy, confusing evidence that Nature, when quizzed, tends to throw at them by way of an answer.

Although my main thesis is that scientists should be proud of the differences that make them scientists, they are still human. They may have odd personality traits, but they also share the illogic and reasoning defects of ordinary folk – and are doubly willing to embrace them if it means they can sulk effortlessly rather than get off their backsides and do something.

Truth is, though, most still really just want adulation and a quiet life. And who can blame them?

Envoi

Stuck in their Oblomovism, unable to abandon their preconceptions about how badly they are used, scientists conclude that something should be done – though of course, by someone else and free. What they mean is that they need to do some public relations on themselves. What they end up doing, however, is dashing for the last-but-one refuge of the scoundrel – education.

Fit the fifth: Education is not public relations or, why things seem obvious when you don’t know anything about them

“Many people in the world, even educated ones, don’t know much, and it doesn’t actually matter at all.”

Geoff Dyer, Yoga for people who can’t be bothered to do it

Cast your mind back to those schooldays you loved so much. Do you remember how parsing the odes of Horace made you so much more sympathetic to classical scholarship? Did not the revelation of the mysteries of the quadratic equation fill you with human sympathy for the mathematicians who had made it all possible? And did not the act of committing the entire Krebs Cycle to memory engender a lasting respect for the work of biochemists everywhere?

Of course not. Education – at least in the way it is inflicted upon most of us - is torture; one that all sensible persons willingly and joyfully relinquish when the days of their sentence are finally up and they can at last escape the clutches of the whole sorry racket. The “joy of learning” is a myth, put about by those few people for whom it is true. Yet, much of the effort that has been expended in attempting to improve the public perception of science and scientists has been expended in vain attempts to teach the public more about science – to educate them. It is in this sprit that most people hired by scientific organizations to do their PR, are employed. Scientists worry deeply that most people don’t know what they know.

There was a time when a man could mend anything in his house. As life became more complicated, this ceased to be true for most. My own father was perhaps not typical, being a craftsman engineer by inclination. He could not only build beautiful furniture and make window frames with complex mouldings, but dismantle his car and decarbonise its head, and even build a television when nobody else in the street had one, using an oscilloscope screen and bits of war surplus. The denizens of Hazel Road, Swansea in 1955 watched Nigel Kneale’s BBC series Quatermass II in my parents’ front room at number eleven. And because it was an old oscilloscope tube, they also watched it in colour.

Green.

But even my father gradually found that sealed units, computers, software-driven appliances and the visual language of the pull-down menu eventually deposed him as master of all he surveyed. He didn’t like it, and still doesn’t; but the 21st Century has finally put him into much the same position as most people throughout the 20th – one of relative helplessness in the face of technology.

But how, in a scientific age – scientists ask - can people who are not like them possibly be fully functional, fully enfranchised beings? How can they make informed political decisions in such areas as, say, nuclear waste disposal, without being – in effect – educated in science? It’s a monstrous hubris, combining general intellectual snobbery with the scientific imperialism I mentioned in Fit the first. But the answer seems obvious; the public cannot – and something has to be done. The public must be educated.

And should this prove so difficult? After all, scientists know how fascinating science is (to them). Surely these people who don’t like it or don’t care about it were merely the victims of dodgy learning. Scientists set themselves to put this right (for many consider themselves natural teachers and one or two are right). As I have already pointed out, scientists don’t know that they are unusual in not finding facts and ideas about inanimate or non-human things intensely dreary stuff. They don’t know that most people are only interested in people.

Surely once the sheer joy of “knowing what they know” becomes manifest (one presumes, after Mr J. Public peruses a copy of Thursday’s Daily Telegraph on the Clapham Omnibus) then the sweet light of reason will dawn and scientists will again be seen as the wonderbeings they were when Professors Quatermass and Challenger reigned supreme. And then – job done - they can all go back to doing what they like.

This is all very curious, but it is not hard to see where the general attitude comes from, given what we now know about where scientists come from. As I have already said in an earlier fit: everybody interprets the world in terms of what they know. And all intellectuals know education, because they all went through it, their forebears mostly all went through it, and many of them never leave it.

With this approach in mind - namely that the media are a delivery mechanism for information (the conveyancing of fact) and that the purpose of the exercise is education (in a teaching ‘n’ learning sense); that the journalist stands for the lecturer, and the reader or viewer or listener for the eager student - it is hardly surprising that scientists often entertain a low opinion of the results.

This is frustrating to them, but more importantly it annoys their friends a great deal – these being, of course, science journalists and scientists’ specialist employees, who work in scientific public relations. Professor Richard Dawkins, in his collection of essays A Devil’s Chaplain, spoke of his feeling “that scientific journalism is too important to be left to journalists” and his hope that “true scientists may be better at it than journalists anyway”. And there you have it in one.

This whole sorry cross-purposes fiasco is most difficult for the Public Relations professionals whose job it is to act as midwives for science stories emanating from their institutions. On one side these doughty folk have journalists hungry for entertaining stories, preferably exclusively because most of them are soft news. On the other they have scientists with all their unreal expectations and mistaken assumptions, their hubris and their imperialism. If PR folk dare to tell their employers the truth, they risk being sacked. But if they do their job well and obtain lots of coverage, they will frequently be on the receiving end of complaints – either about the coverage not being sufficiently blanket, or about dumbing down and the subordination of serious scientific matters to the dictates of the trivialising media. Or both.

But the truth whose name its very practitioners dare not speak is that Public Relations is not about teaching people about things. It is about engendering warm feelings.

Knowing how to engender warm feelings takes skills that scientists usually don’t have , find it hard to grasp, and cannot conceive others to possess in greater measure than they do. One thing is certain however – scientists certainly don’t engender warm feelings by strutting around denigrating those who are there to help, martyring themselves on the self-imposed cross of their calling, hectoring people for their ignorance and insisting they learn something they think they don’t like.

Envoi

Which brings us to consider the ways in which scientists, with all the personality characteristics that make them good at being scientists but which may not be universal blessings to say the very least, actually interact with others – others whose professional services they desperately need if they are to be successful in gaining favourable media profile, and thus engendering those all-important warm feelings. I feel another fit coming on.

Fit the sixth: Mayflies and termites or, what makes science different

“In matters of grave importance style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.”

Oscar Wilde

James Turrell, one of America’s greatest living artists, has an ambitious and long-standing dream to create an artwork and exhibition space at Roden Crater, Arizona. Roden Crater is one of a cluster of extinct volcanic cinder cones that encrust the Painted Desert, not far from the Grand Canyon – and which he has been transforming into a "celestial observatory" for the past quarter century. This "great geologic eye" brings the heavens down to Earth in a series of sky-lit spaces excavated from the volcano’s heart. Turrell’s work experiments with fleeting effects of light and space - effects that he hopes create a sensation, he says, "like the wordless thought that comes from looking in a fire".

I am not much given to quoting Immanuel Kant and I promise not to make a habit of it. However, this idea of wordless thought goes back to him. Kant acknowledged that art consisted of a kind of thinking that was concept free, a cognitive play, untrammelled by the restrictions of words and linguistic structures. It is a way of understanding art that is particularly applicable to music and the visual arts, which offer great subtlety of expression while avoiding the limitations imposed by words. Thus the thought invoked by music in the musical have no verbal equivalent, which is why attempts to explain music (witness the inanity of so many programme notes) seem rather like trying to explain a Mark Rothko canvas in terms of the chemistry of acrylic paint.

Like some modern-day Stonehenge, Roden Observatory as it is called – its very name seeming to hint at art/science crossover - possesses the same sense of nameless significance that Stonehenge once had when it merely sat (as it did when I first visited it as a child) in total isolation just off the A360, on Salisbury plain. Stonehenge’s sense of meaning derives partly from a collective cosmic inspiration, defining for an ancient people the place of humans beneath that vast Wiltshire sky. What Roden Crater offers is the impression of being involved in one man’s personal quest to negotiate his relationship with the cosmos. And that, of course, is where art and science unite – each striving, in its own way, to define our place in Nature.

As the text for an ecumenical one-culture sermon, this would all seem very cosy. However those who sit as I do on the cusp of the arts and the sciences have often observed that scientists’ impatience with those who do not share their peculiarly different mind-set damages their chances of bringing the scientific heavens down to Earth. These rather gloomy thoughts recur most often at great science medaifests where their duties bring two contrasting fellowships – scientists and media folk - together. But in what ways do they contrast each other

Effortless

Yesterday evening, I was sitting before a different keyboard, blundering through Beethoven’s Sonata in C minor op. 13. I was doing so in the (vain) hope that the harder I work at it, the more effortless I might come to seem. Effortlessness in execution is the mark of anyone who is any good in nearly all spheres of human activity. You see the same approach among – to choose at random – actors, pole-vaulters, ice-skaters, poets, soufflé chefs - and science writers. It goes for almost every profession because in one way or another, they are all performing arts.

But science is different. Geneticist and science commentator Professor Steve Jones has written that science is the most – and maybe the only – "democratic" field of endeavour, wherein - with diligence and application - any intelligent person can make a genuine and worthwhile contribution to the whole. Science is a group effort, a massive common undertaking, like a great termite nest. The joy of this is that you can be merely a mediocre scientist yet still be useful. Alas, nobody has any use for a mediocre poem or a third-rate performance of the Pathétique.

I am sure Steve Jones would claim no originality for this observation. Sir Peter Medawar made the same claim for it. In fact, in The Limits of Science Medawar used this admirable aspect of scientific endeavour to highlight its great social benefit in elevating large numbers to the ranks of the professions. Likening science to cricket in the West Indes (he might just as well have chosen boxing in the East End) he described science as a means whereby a poor boy of average ability could, with application, lift himself out of poverty: “a certain place in life, a measure of self esteem and a reason for feeling it”.

This sort of thing is straight out of Snow. It gives one, today, that sense of time-warp one gets from reading The Two Cultures, or watching TV advertisements for Meccano from as late as the 1960s, offering boys the chance to get with the romance of mechanical engineering; a hobby today, a passion and a career tomorrow.) It all seems absurd by today’s mores. Engineers frequently bemoan the fact that they are longer to be objects of such admiration – usually just before bewailing the eclipse of this very boy’s toy. In fact, Nobel Prizewinner Sir Harry Kroto FRS (no less) recently went on record to blame on the demise of Meccano the lamentable modern habit of turning taps off too tightly. I don’t know, young people today…

But I digress. Science, that great collective enterprise, is a much more useful occupation for the dogged and careful among us, because at least there they can be useful. Yet alongside this “democratic spirit” (sensu Jones) and the amassing of information, comes a stolid work ethic that views effortlessness as a sin, and renders ephemerality an insult. And thus, at every conference with a media presence, one encounters scientists who - faced with the surprisingly hard graft required to get coverage for even the most newsworthy stories – have become a bit demoralised. "The trouble with this PR game” you can hear them moaning in the bar afterwards, “is that it all has to be done again tomorrow".

Think how odd it would be to hear an actor say that. No, when scientists work, they want something permanent to show for it. Such mighty evidence of years-long graft as Darwin’s monograph on the barnacles, for example, stands as an immortal monument – even, to those who appreciate its beauty, a joy forever. The comic cuts, by contrast, really don’t seem worth the candle.

Some years ago the British Association for the Advancement of Science’s Festival of Science became the launch pad for a new Natural History Museum booklet entitled Amber: the natural time capsule. The Museum’s PR machine was at the BA in force to see that the book’s birth into the world did not go unremarked, and the tactic worked. Jurassic Park was fresh in everyone’s minds. Amber, and the possibility that it sometimes contains perfectly preserved insects, had become familiar. The semiprecious stone was even becoming newly fashionable. The time was ripe.

In the event, media coverage was good, and focused on the poignant case of a mayfly, which had become enmeshed in resin one Tuesday afternoon in what is now Mexico, 25 million years ago. It had but a few hours to live; but it lived even more briefly - and so was preserved for eternity. The public loved the story, which left them with fleeting bits of knowledge and a strong, lasting sensation that science can be touching and fascinating.

I watched newspaper science writers, their copy filed, ending their day satisfied that they had told a good tale, confident that their pieces would make it into tomorrow’s papers, and that they would convey a vivid sensation. Next day I saw the Museum’s media relations folk reading the cuttings and being happy, because people were being left with favourable feelings about science and the Natural History Museum. People at large who read the story would, some moments after finishing it, forget Mexico, 25 million years – and, probably, the mayfly. But they would remember the pleasurable experience – just as an audience remembers the atmosphere of Cat on a hot tin roof but not the dialogue.

I would lay money, however, that some of the scientists involved in that fairly gruelling day may have slumped into their armchairs that evening feeling they had spent a day with nothing to show for it - and wondering why they’d bothered. It happens like this all the time.

But they, after all, could return to South Kensington, and - long after the public’s eye had moved on – take the mayfly, study it exhaustively and compose their deathless scientific papers. Every step of the investigation duly documented, another heavy brick would eventually be placed in the walls of the great edifice of science. Real, permanent, lasting, satisfying – their real reward.

This quantity and solidity are what matter in science. In its culture, less usually isn’t more. In the scientific exaltation of every valley and mountain, every reference and exposure shall be made plain. Every scrap of fact shall be recorded. And the more evident effort, the more stitching that shows, the better - because the stitching (the sacred data) is the point. Small wonder then, that those who work to achieve something as momentary and transient as a newspaper article or radio interview often find their work leaves some of the scientists who get caught up in it puzzled, infuriated – and frequently alienated. Mayflies do not mate easily with termites.

What we do helps define our psychology. Why else would scientists be so obsessively literal-minded? Why would we so often find among them the odd conviction that any form of communication can be evaluated according to its efficiency in coveyancing factual information? Not for them, Turrell’s "wordless thought that comes from looking in a fire".

It is difficult not to love the idea of science as a common, democratic project that finds a useful place for average as well as the brilliant. It makes the arts seem – like Nature herself - horrifically cruel and wasteful. Unfortunately, as Harry Lime reminded us, democracy exacts a price. The Swiss paid for it in cuckoo clocks. Scientists pay for it every time they decline to leave their nest and fly with the mayflies.

Envoi

So what have we learnt so far?

1. Scientists are distinctive people and should be proud of it. But the trouble is, they are a bit too proud about the wrong things.
2. They think they are more important than they are, and expect too much of the public.
3. They confuse what’s possible via the media (public relations) with what is not (education), and hence
4. try to use the media to teach people things, instead of using it to get them on their side.
5. Armed to the teeth with the weapons of the scientific method they assume they can do everything and fight every battle themselves.
6. They underestimate the unique difficulties of other professions and undervalue those who profess them.
7. And when they do engage with others, their very different professional culture, which has reinforced their innate differences of character, militates against their forming constructive relationships with people at large and those who know how to communicate best with them.

Scientists end up frustrated by their misconceptions and unrealistic expectations, and retreat into self pity, despite the fact that the public really do want to know what they are doing – and actually have a right to expect cooperation.

What happens next happened first in the middle of the 1980s, and is happening all around us today. Scientists who know the media game and are good at it just get on with it. Science journalists, whose job it is to tell the public about what is newsworthy in science, do the same. Despite nearly all their protestations, most scientists’ dissatisfaction with the coverage they get (as opposed to the coverage they are getting but don’t know about because they can’t be bothered to look) arises out of unrealistic expectations of what can be achieved through the media, and what the media are there for.

It is at this point that discontent tends to boil over into collective action. This is where the fun starts. For, as you will know if you have noticed the difference between any individual human being and a holiday group composed of their fellow nationals, people in groups rarely present well…

Fit the seventh: Fun will now commence or, the curse of organised rejoicing

“Long experience has taught me that people nagged at by an anxiety to improve the minds of their fellow men are in real life among those least likely to do so.”
Sir Peter Medawar, The Limits of Science

Can there be any grown-up modern reader of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol who does not agree with Scrooge? Of course Christmas is humbug, and the humbuggery gets worse every year. Yet – even independently of religious background - a few Jehovah’s Witnesses notwithstanding – nearly everyone participates because everyone else does.

Dickens was not alone in making cynical appeals to mass sentimentality, and neither - when it comes to forced public rejoicing - do Christmas (or despots) have the monopoly on it. As any journalist or PR officer will tell you - a week never passes that has not been appropriated by someone or other for the celebration of their peculiar virtues. I was pleased to see that, at the time of writing this entry it was (auspiciously) World Mental Health Day, but it could just as well have been just another day in the International Year of Mountains or National Fish and Chips Week, and it probably (almost certainly) was. Some of these mass festivities, such as the UK’s Science Week for example, are state-sponsored; some are charitably inspired, some commercial.

State or international sponsorship brings big budgets, web sites, merchandising, and usually involves the dishing out of cash to enthusiasts to put on events. Their usual function is to coerce the young into doing something uncool - thereby standing in grave danger of making it even more uncool than it already is. Charity events are smaller in scale, and may pool the resources of several organisations. Industry ones are usually the bright idea of some trade association and may be backed by the Confederation of British Industry and a Department of State into the bargain.

Official rejoicing like this is all but unavoidable if you are involved in public relations. Most folk in this game are paying lip service to one or more such initiatives at any one time. My colleagues in the Institute of Physics, for example, had 2005 to look forward to after the International Year of Physics was proclaimed by the United Nations. And in case this sounds smug of me, for my own sins the International Year of Plant Earth has been proclaimed by the UN General Assembly for 2008, with yours truly as Chair of its Outreach Programme Committee. There is, alas, no such thing as innocence. (However, I hope that this initiative may be saved from the failures of others as a result of applying the principles enunciated here... more of which below.)

Apart from generating solidarity among the troops (which organisers of these events nearly always forget about, despite this being the only genuine PR benefit of them) even this rarely goes much further than a warm sensation of having "done something". (That traditional phrase of the concerned but clueless - "getting the message across" - usually comes in about here too. “We must do something to get our message across” really means “We have no idea what our message is, or to whom it should be addressed but whatever it is and whoever they are, it must be got across to them at all costs.”)

But such mass rejoicing rarely gets anything very much across to anyone. In fact, it is a kind of madness. So why doesn't it all stop? A clue lies in another fact about these celebrations – the fact that nearly all have in common the fact that they originate in collectives acting as professional drumbeaters and torch carriers, who then employ commercial PR consultants. The former must be seen to be doing something, else their members will stop paying their subscriptions. And the latter exist to relieve them of money.

The only organised rejoicings that make any real sense in external PR terms are the wackier commercial ones. If well timed, a National Association of Fish and Chip Shops, for example, could easily arrange a photo call for a minister to tuck into a piece of battered cod by the roadside (I see John Prescott carrying this off very well), just when he wants to emphasize how much a man of the people he is. The event satisfies the first rule of good PR - that it should be useful to everyone. Fish and chips are promoted, members of the National Association feel good and renew their subscriptions, and the Mouth of the Humber enjoys his moment in The Sun.

NAG Week

But for the rest, the prospect is less rosy. Imagine a fictitious (but not unrealistic) National Awareness of Gravel (NAG) Week sponsored by industry collectives – in this case I expect it would include such an august body as the Quarry Products Association plus (eyes down for a full house) the CBI and DTI. Picture now a ruinously expensive display at the crossing of the Committee Corridor in the Palace of Westminster. TV monitors glumly play a promotional video for whose budget you could have employed Mr Steven Spielberg. Two suits anxiously patrol the expensively hired area, surveying the face of every lingering lobbyist and researcher, while MPs sweep by at high velocity. Should they attempt to buttonhole one, she will freeze them with her lawyer's eyes, tell them that impeding a Member on her way to a Division is an offence, and threaten to have them thrown out by the Serjeant-at-Arms. Feel free to laugh – I have actually seen this happen.

Later that night, the exhibit is moved to a desultory reception in a marquee on the Terrace. Five company suits and ten hired-in agency PROs - together with Palace of Westminster catering staff, all compulsory and all on your bill - eagerly await the arrival of one MP so drunk he thinks they represent the National Association of Buffalo Mozzarella Manufacturers - a powerful influence in his East Midlands constituency's Regional Development Area. (Names have been changed to protect the guilty, but I have seen this too.) If said MP ever finds out who they really are, he won't remember in the morning; while the swanky, spot-varnished folder of NAG Week bum-fodder will be left behind in whatever bordello or wheelie-bin said MP decides to set up home for the night.

The people who launch themselves into these orgies of self-promotion are usually suckered into it because nobody tells them what a waste of time they are in terms of what they wish to achieve. They either have no in-house PR expertise, or (as frequently happens) they ignore it. They then find themselves at the mercy of their PR consultants who are there to do business and are never asked the right question. The client says - "Can you arrange NAG Week?" You can easily guess the answer. If it involves getting their hands on large wads of your cash, they can do anything. If they were approached with the same cash and the question "Tell us if it is worth arranging a NAG Week", the result might cost the same - but perhaps everyone else would be saved a load of pointless work, and cupboards might remain unburdened by yet more chipped promotional mugs with ghastly logos, to remind us all of the sad fiasco.

Out and proud

Is there anyone for whom timetabled mass rejoicing is good PR? Well, yes, and the whole tactic can be seen as a misapplication of something that embattled minorities do rather well. It is in fact part of the problem with such events that people at large (more sophisticated than they are thought to be, as usual) recognise the preferred tactic of the soi disant unloved. It takes a leaf out of the book written by liberation movements, for whom the tactic works because liberation is mainly about raising internal political awareness. The promoters of NAG Week, alas, think they are looking outward, not inward.

Gay Pride, a classic example, graces the streets of London in or around June each year. It is about assertion of identity and spreading confidence among the similarly oriented. It is the PR of defiant celebration. But it is unlikely that Gay Pride ever convinced a heterosexual person to be gay, for all that onlookers may secretly envy its participants’ fashion instincts and dancing ability. Indeed in many, the sight of Gay Pride induces apoplexy. But then, that’s partly the point. Being out and proud means not giving a damn for what people think, and showing it. That's fine for Gay Pride; but hardly on-message for NAG Week.

Despite the expense (perhaps because of it), the aggregates lobby ends NAG Week exhausted, with warm feelings of solidarity, post orgiastic glows to do with having spent their money, and a sensation of having “done something” and "got the message across". The rest of humanity (if it has registered the event at all) may well be left with the nagging impression that they have become aware of yet another militant minority to whose special interests and sensitivities they must now pretend to be sympathetic and considerate. The medium of official rejoicing carries an implied message that is out of kilter with the explicit one. To many, NAG Week undoubtedly said: "We are out and proud, digging holes in your back garden. Such is the way of our people. It is what we do. And we don’t care if you don’t like it."

Good PR tries to avoid such conflicts, but good PR is in short supply in science, for all the reasons we have discussed. Scientists think they know all about everything; they think PR is education; they want publicity on their own terms; they mis-define the problem and come up with misdirected false solutions; they resent spending money and cannot believe the answers when they do, because they conflict with their preconceptions. Their collectives are more used to spending money, but are alas no wiser, and suffer acutely from the urge to “do something” to “get their message across” because they are coming with the customers. Consequently they readily adopt the suggestions of those agreeable PR people with the fresh coffee and nice biscuits who stand to make most money out of them.

Nuts

Let me now introduce you to the Tanganyika Ground Nut Scheme (TGNS). In the late 1940s, with austerity reigning still in war-creased Britain, the giant British corporation Unilever was having trouble getting its fats and the problem was expected to get worse. Unilever, then as now, made (among many other things) Lux and Lifebuoy soap, Stork and Blue Band margarine - all of which required a plentiful supply of vegetable oil.

The man responsible for supplying these oils was Frank Samuel, the MD of a Unilever subsidiary called the United Africa Company. Samuel was deeply worried by what he saw as an impending vegetable oil famine. But his experience of Africa had taught him that vast uncleared spaces, possibly suitable for agriculture, lay untended in Tanganyika (now Tanzania). As luck would have it, the British Colonial Government had also been eyeing this land and wondering what, if anything, could be done with it.

Back home, the newly elected post-war Labour Government was trying to allay public fears that it was about to cut the food-oil ration. John Strachey, Minister of Food, liked the look of Samuel’s plan to clear 2.5 million acres of Tanganyikan bush for growing groundnuts. The idea was shown to a former colonial director of agriculture for Tanganyika, who saw in it a convenient plan to solve the mounting economic woes of British colonies.

This man, John Wakefield, spent three months evaluating the scheme - with extensive field visits to different parts of the country. He settled on an area called Kongwa in the central belt. Pedologists said the soil was fertile enough, and native people, it appeared, were already growing groundnuts. (Nothing like successful predecessors, as any barnacle larva knows.) Scientific information on rainfall was inadequate, but there was a railhead nearby - out of Dar-es-Salaam. The almost impenetrable scrub would have to be cleared - Wakefield recommended 3.25 million acres over six years. But how difficult could that be for modern technology? Somebody, they reasoned, would have the equipment and know-how. One Major-General Desmond Harrison was appointed to oversee the task, and set up operations in Kongwa, preparing for battle. By that time, disaster was already assured.

First, the area had insufficient rainfall for growing groundnuts; the small plots of native people were small enough to be irrigated. Also, the soil, while fertile enough, consisted of a mixture of clay and sand - which with a little rainfall set like concrete. Groundnuts are called groundnuts because they have to be dug up. Such matters had not been investigated, because the soil scientists had only been asked to comment on the soil’s fertility, not its setting properties. Last, the bush – whose clearance was assumed to present no obstacle to modern heavy machinery - proved to be as impenetrable as explorer Henry Morton Stanley had described it a century before. Contrary to expectations, nobody had the know-how, and the appropriate machines had yet to be invented. The Government had embarked upon a massive overseas venture of the scale of a Soviet five-year plan, on the basis of practically no reliable information whatever. And in charge they had placed a very competent military man, well used to planning military operations – which differ from all commercial operations in the one crucial respect that their cost is never an issue.

The Government sank £49,000,000 into the scheme - an astronomical sum at the time. No extra food oil at all ever reached the market. Meanwhile, it was left to journalists to expose the fiasco, which eventually became the subject of a book by Alan Wood (1950) and a famous exposé by legendary investigative reporter Fyfe Robertson. (Until the gaff was blown, newspapers had carried wholly fantastic reports cobbled together in London from colourful PR material in an act of laziness and complicity that was frankly shameful.)

Apart from scale, the only difference between TGNS and the variously named Public Understanding of/Engagement with Science (PUS/PEST) circus we see growing up today is that the Government of the late 1940s was wrong when it assumed that the proper expertise existed somewhere. Unfortunately, it does not exist (or if it does exist, has been ignored) among those bodies of whom the Government has chiefly asked the question - which is to say, its own Office of Science & Technology, the Royal Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The result has been that these well-meaning organisations have unwittingly generated (and now wittingly foster) the circus that now surrounds this subject.

The people who report back to government about what has been achieved have no real way of telling whether what they are doing is right. However they do, by that time, have every interest in continued funding - just like the contractors in Tanganyika did. And the people who do know, and who generally haven’t been asked, remain silent (like the journalists writing about the TGNS from what Fyfe Robertson referred to as the drinking dens of Fleet Street) because they do not wish to make themselves unpopular with people they have to work with.

So - where does this leave the International Year of Planet Earth? I hope to avoid the problems inherent in organised rejoicing by the main expedient of allowing ideas for the Outreach Programme to arise from grassroots, and not to impose the usual half-baked activities in a top-down manner. There is simply no way in which a room full of people can decide on $10 million worth of wise things to do that will be equally wise in every country in the world. People working in those countries should know what is needful for them in terms of outreach, and need to be encouraged to apply to the International Year for funding (actually co-funding) to see those plans realised. These then get badged, promoted and listed centrally by the Year, which then gradually accretes more and more activity to itself and achieves visibility by the process known in the trade as "doughnutting" (clustering round a speaking MP in the House of Commons, and thereby making the place look full because the cameras aren't allowed to pan). This addresses Earth science's main political weakness, which is fragmentation into petty subdisciplines (a process I call Balkanization).

Working in just the same way as the Science programme, we shall receive bids for support, and these bids will be evaluated by referees who are expert in those areas of communication specified in the bid - as well as Earth scientists. So an element of appropriate expertise will enter into the discussion, not just a bunch of unrealistic perceptions of worthiness from those who might know a lot about geology, but not a lot about magazines or radio or television.

If you would like to read more about how this (I believe) revolutionary approach intends to work, go to the Web site www.yearofplanetearth.org and download the Outreach Brochure for a fuller explanation.

Envoi

Phenomena like the TGNS arise spontaneously from the following four essential ingredients – of which malice is rarely if ever one.

• the availability of large amounts of (usually) Government money
• the best intentions on all sides, matched only by
• ignorance of practicalities among the interested parties, and
• the ultimately unstoppable dependence of all concerned upon continued spending,
• apparent activity and reports of (imaginary) success.
  
  Let us in the next fit examine the PUS/PEST circus’s main players, and their motivations.
  

Fit the eighth: Waiting in a row or, all eager for the treat

“Now if you’re ready, Oysters dear, we can begin to feed.”

Lewis Carroll, The Walrus & the Carpenter

In Lewis Carroll’s world, oysters were not only able to move about, they could hop, and wear shoes, without having feet. But they did preserve one characteristic common to real oysters, and scientists – the tendency to cluster together in a mob. Who exactly are the bodies who come hopping through the frothy waves and scrambling to the shore to walk with the cynical walruses and carpenters of the PUS/PEST industry?

Government

Governments worry that if the public does not understand scientific issues, then it will oppose those aspects of science that they wish to see promoted for reasons of economic growth, competitive edge and military advantage. It recognises that science is important to its power, and is worried that public opposition and unrest might impede or derail its plans.

Such bald motives would be too cynical to expose overtly. Therefore governments also pretend to be concerned about science as culture, and the image and social standing of scientists within society, and other cosy concepts not likely to ruffle the fluff of Today listeners before they cycle off to campus. This is window dressing. Governments are not interested in anything as culture unless it increases invisible earnings, and science is never very likely to do that in any quantity.

Having perceived that it has a problem if science has a problem, government looks for allies to do its bidding among its appropriate civil departments, and their creatures. These creatures are various quangos and non-governmental charitable bodies, all of whom receive too much Government support to do other than give their paymaster the answers they know it wishes to hear. Herein lie the seeds of the conspiracy that allows the Emperor eventually to go about naked.

Scientific quangos

These quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations with a scientific remit, often get sucked into this process because of their close relationship with the state apparatus that largely funds them. Organisations whose employees are members of Her Majesty’s Civil Service – like the Meteorological Office or the Ordnance Survey, for example, are encouraged these days to be more entrepreneurial but only so that they can become less of an burden on the taxpayer. The independence of thought and action that should come as a fringe benefit from increasing commercial independence is never much in evidence.

Such bodies tend to have a public relations function that is discharged by a special breed of civil servant – the Government Press Officer. Government Press Officers are sterling folk whose first instinct is to do what they are told, and to do it by the book. This is not meant to sound disparaging, though I realise it does. The fact is, they cannot behave any other way. Their operations are usually understaffed, and have far too many responsibilities for them to be very effective at any of them. They find compliance with newfangled Government initiatives tiresome but unavoidable. Their usual response is to take an already existing initiative and “re-badge” it appropriately. Theirs is therefore the most intelligent possible response. No damage is done, no extra time is wasted.

It may perhaps appear paradoxical, but the best reaction to useless initiatives comes from organisations over which government has most day-to-day influence. Only they treat government whims with the appropriate scepticism. Their contribution to the understanding of science circus is therefore usually pretty negligible. The rest on this list are not so fortunate.

Learned societies

Learned societies exist to make their members feel good about themselves. The Royal Society (founded in 1660 to bring scientists together), the British Association (set up in 1831 to bring science to the masses) the Royal Institution (1799) and the other more specialised learned societies (set up mostly in the 19th and 20th Centuries to bring subsets of scientists together and foster their subjects’ interests) are the main - but by no means the only - lobby groups for science. Many are either directly or indirectly supported by some Government money, or in kind. Being clubs themselves, they may occasionally club together (see below for “collectives of collectives”).

New collectives

New collectives sometimes spring into existence when minority groups feel under threat and see no help forthcoming from existing groups - like the learned societies. One such was Save British Science (SBS), now renamed the Campaign for Sceince & Engineering in the UK, which was formed by university scientists in or around 1985 to protest against the way in which the Thatcher Conservative Government was, in their view, underfunding science. There was much academic disquiet at the time (of which more below), because the universities were also being reformed at this time (and have hardly ceased since). SBS replaced a body called AGREF, the “Ad hoc Group on Research Funding”, which itself came into being after a general failure to set up an overarching Association for Learned Societies in Science – both initiatives that sprang from the Physiological Society and Prof. Joe Lamb (University of St Andrews) who was a Committee Secretary there.

AGREF began a noble tradition of trying to understand the figures, a function which Save British Science continues to this day. In doing so SBS did the right thing by finding something that everybody needed and felt themselves inadequate to do, and doing it for them. Thus SBS still provides invaluable advice on Government science funding, clearing smoke from the air and mirrors from the walls in an attempt to discover whether the totals really are going up or down. It had to step on toes to stay in business – the Royal Society, feeling that cannons had been drawn on its lawn and that it was being shown up, complained bitterly that SBS was “unrepresentative” – which was pretty rich. SBS took no notice, and good for them.

Save British Science succeeded in raising the profile of research funding through the late 1980s. It used the classic techniques of the disgruntled academic – it wrote letters to the Times, paid for big half-page advertisements, and got on the BBC Radio’s Today programme. As a result it was tempted to talks by the gently smiling jaws of the then Education Secretary, the late Sir Keith Joseph (left). Sir Keith did what he always did in these circumstances. He looked amazed, complained that nobody had told him this before, and then moved in for the political kill by inviting SBS to regular chats. SBS, to its credit, did not make the rookie mistake of agreeing.

Although its roots lay embedded in the deep loam of academic cluelessness, SBS eventually defined a very useful role for itself – namely to lobby government on behalf of general science funding (independently of disciplines), and to try to make sense of it all. It has wisely steered clear of the murky waters of public understanding/engagement, and stuck to the honourable work of all pork-barrel lobbyists, namely shamelessly trying to get more cash out of the commons for “people like us”. They have also resisted the blandishments of subsequent governments who, believing they have raised research funding, have suggested (only half jocularly) that perhaps the time was come for Save British Science pronounce the patient saved, and change their name.

Of course, they now have. But timing in these matters is everything and they have kept their old URL, presumably because they know that "Save British Science" is well embedded in the consciousness. (As a historical wrinkle, the office of the Campaign is the very same one I once occupied myself, under the eaves of 29-30 Tavistock Square, when I joined the then occupants of that building (CVCP, now Universities UK) as Science Writer...)

Industrial collectives

Such organisations (to take one example at random, the Association of British Pharmaceutical Industries (ABPI) and many others) carry a torch for science research and teaching, because their members’ businesses depend upon it. They are not beholden to Government and are theoretically more capable of independent thought and action – though because they are run by committees this is not always very apparent. They rarely employ any professional science communicators directly, though they may have press offices of varying effectiveness.

Many of these collectives join organisations in yet another layer of collectives such as the EEF (Engineering Employers Federation) the EC (Engineering Council) and so on, which may from time to time also feel compelled to have an opinion on science communication, or the recruitment problems of their professional group. I call these collectives of collectives.

Collectives of collectives

Collectives have a natural tendency to coagulate into collectives of their own. The Science Council, for example, is a coagulate of learned scientific bodies, reborn phoenix-like from the ashes of the Council of Science and Technology Institutes (CSTI). This is often done in the name of achieving that elusive “united front” – something that many lay claim to, but nobody actually delivers, and as imaginary as the “unified culture” that CP Snow imagined back in the fifties.

Collectives of collectives go via the institutional route, and claim to represent the members of all those societies that affiliate to them, much in the manner of Trade Union block voting. This is a strategy easy to pick holes in, since most of the collectives who join collectives themselves can only barely claim to “represent” their members. But that aside, the more rarefied such collectives become, the more diffuse their constituency and therefore the less obvious their function. So, such bodies tend to spend a lot of time determining a purpose in life, since the question “what are we going to do?” is rarely answered before they are set up.

Collectives of collectives tend to be thinly staffed but have extremely active Presidents – old men (or women) in a hurry, generally - who have formerly distinguished themselves in some other sphere (or spheres). They may well have ambitions of entering the Upper House and are currently looking for some convenient lightweight craft to cling to for long enough for someone in government to see them waving frantically. The institutional hope is that no matter how banal the opinion to be expressed, the President’s (or the collective’s) massed gravitas will carry it (and him/her) into the news without very much work.

These bodies can do little more than any poorly staffed civil service – namely, engage in administrative tasks that map activity and steal other people’s ideas and opinions for use as clothing. The body then tends to publish a report of surpassing dullness – third-hand confections of second-hand data, doubly unreliable, always outdated and immediately forgotten.

However this does not matter because the President gets quoted, and the quote lives on in the libraries of policy organisations and newspapers. Because their driving officers are all parti pris with an appetite for quick and dirty hand-me-down opinions, collectives of collectives are especially addicted to the PUS/PEST circus.

Universities

Universities, (at least the pre-1992 ones) are also collectives, in the sense that they are collegiate bodies, and often hopelessly democratic. These institutions also form a collective, and the one that once represented the pre-1992 universities (the Committee of Vice-Chancellors & Principals or CVCP) used to lobby hard for science – particularly research. However, the political scene shifted dramatically when the “old” universities merged with the former polytechnics. At that point, “research” changed from being a unifying issue (among the “old”) to a powerfully divisive one between the “old” and the “new”. This was because the former polytechnics fondly imagined that their change of name and status would bring with it a level playing field for research – i.e., that all the benefits of the dual support system (as it was then) would be extended to them.

It didn’t happen, to nobody’s great surprise but theirs. As the new universities’ disappointment rankled, research funding was hastily swept under the carpet. Meanwhile the VCs of the research-heavy universities felt uneasy that their main concern was no longer being met by CVCP, so they began to meet in London’s Russell Hotel the night before its Main Committees.

In a vain attempt to throttle this emerging (and now fully emergent) “Russell Group” at birth, CVCP remitted research policy to a special Council subcommittee. Predictably, this move – if it were ever really intended to raise its profile - overtly sidelined research. In fact, Research Policy Committee never achieved very much at all, least of all the stifling of the Russell Group. UniversitiesUK (as the CVCP is now called) is no longer an effective lobby for science (notwithstanding its recent return to the subject with its publication Eureka UK), in universities. The conspicuously unstifled Russell Group lives on, but doesn’t achieve very much (in public) either.

UniversitiesUK, anxious to diversify its sources of income away from its members, operates a commercial company to market the conference facilities in its new HQ building Woburn House, London. Herein lies a final irony because one of the things that company does from time to time is organise commercial conferences about the Public Understanding of/Engagement with Science. Having found it next to impossible to frame any firm opinions of its own that do not split its membership, UniversitiesUK is now able to now earn cash by providing the performers of the PUS circus with a platform on which to air theirs.

Universities doing little or no scientific research of any great significance (which is always bound to be most of them, because you can never have mountaintops without lower slopes) have no great fondness for science because they make more money teaching cheaper subjects. And though they do not admit it, research-intensive universities (the Russell Groupies) would rather research than teach because it is more lucrative - and because most of their staff also feel that way. With such disparity in outlook, it is not surprising that universities collectively can no longer do much to harness science for their collective PR benefit.

Individual universities where research is done have no such problems in using it, but unfortunately, very few universities with marketable science research stories to tell fund effective science PR – about which more later.

Universities reflect the tendency of their members/staff to fret about science – mainly about its not being appreciated or understood. Most fear for their collective future if young people do not choose to study it, or if the public does not vote for governments that tend to support it. They generally have no (or little) experience or knowledge of communication and not enough in-house communication expertise. They are just the fodder for the PUS/PEST industry for they lack the judgement to know right from wrong and the appearance of activity sates their appetite for (albeit futile) action in pursuit of their perceived problem.

The PUS/PEST industry has also brought media profile to several controversial (or would-be controversial) scientific dons and grandees, who are seemingly more often in the media than in the lab. Whenever they are in the public gaze, these pundits talk less about science than about the public understanding of it. This is a shame because science is at least something they know about. They know next to nothing about the public. It was a group of such folk who persuaded the RS to form COPUS, a body that inherited (to its immense detriment) many of their misconceptions, inadequacies and defects.

The grandees

Self appointed science grandees are always fervent top-downers, confuters of education with public relations, of news with teaching, of readers with students. They believe that educating the public about science will make them favour it – a wholly unsubstantiated notion.

As with all prominent campaigners against injustice, they suffer from the “Tutu Suspicion” – namely that they secretly dread the thing they campaign for, since its advent spells the end of their celebrity. Whatever the truth of that perhaps unworthy thought, until that day should dawn, these pundits will continue to write op-ed pieces for broadsheets in which their fretting about science can bore an ever-wider audience, but convince scientists that someone is “doing something” and “getting the message across”.

What these pieces actually serve to do is expose the most undesirable aspects of the scientific temperament to ridicule. Thus their authors become more part of the problem than the solution. This is especially so because the problem they think they are addressing (the alleged public mistrust of and disdain for science and scientists) is not only imaginary, but more encouraged than discouraged by their various arrogances, or their use of the space granted them for this issue, in order to exercise various other personal hobbyhorses.

There is a subset of PUS grandee, however, whose effect is wholly benign - the Arts grandees. Arts grandees like Lord Bragg, Sir David Puttnam and Fay Weldon have begun, since the 1990s, to come out as admirers of science. They also, by the same token as scientists, are rather flattered by the thought (perpetuated by Snow) that arts and science are two halves of one thing called “culture”. But nevertheless, even scientists can see that to have someone from “the other side” sing your praises is very good PR. Almost nothing they say or do can damage science, its image, or its communication.

Unfortunately these grandees stand in danger of becoming wholly swallowed up by the PUS/PEST bandwagon, and not knowing any better, always imagine they are speaking to a representative group of science practitioners and communicators. That they are not is hardly their fault. That they maintain their allegiance to the cause of science despite having to chair meetings at Carlton House Terrace for some of the most repellent whingers of the PUS/PEST industry, is all to their credit. What is sad is to see them paraded about like mascots at PUS/PEST conferences, as though to demonstrate the very death of the Two Cultures concept that they are unwittingly validating (by embodying the other “half”).

How the conspiracy works

The conspiracy began with scientific grandees (harbouring a grudge about what they wrongly imagine to be science’s poor public image) who then wrongly assumed that this came about because the public did not know what they know.

Beginning with the classic “letter to the Times” approach favoured by their ilk, they graduated to writing op-ed pieces for the emerging science pages of that era (the early to mid 1980s). Through a gradual galvanising of uninformed opinion, this group finally was able to persuade the Royal Society to set up COPUS, an initiative which also sucked in the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Royal Institution.

It is important, when dealing with bodies like the Royal – or anything else for that matter - to ensure that one is not afflicted with undue awe. WH Auden, when serving as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, is reported to have leant to his neighbour during some tedious Latin citation for an honorary doctorate and said; “Don’t forget – everybody pees in the bath”.

The Royal Society is actually called the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. I give it its full title in answer to those innocent folk who, when you mention this august institution by its shorter moniker, ask the annoying but understandable question “The Royal Society of what?” It is a club for the greatest and best in science, and because we never had a real one it has become the UK’s National Academy of Science (and actually calls itself that now). As one of its truly deserving Fellows (Sir Peter Medawar) once wrote of it: “not all who are members deserve to be, and not all who fail to get in do not”.

My own impressions and those of the heroic people who have had to do the Royal’s PR over the years, is that of those who do get in, a very small minority deserve it by any stretch of the imagination and the rest have got there by the usual tactic of staying out of trouble and knowing the right people. Medawar, acknowledging much the same thing, added that such shortcomings were to be debited not to the failings of the Royal, but to the account of human frailty, and I would not demur. Fortunately there is an easy test to tell one group of Fellows from the other. Those like Medawar behave with unfailing courtesy and charm to all and sundry. In case you have not had the pleasure, I leave you to imagine what the others can be like.

Anyway, COPUS began life as another fuzzy initiative emerging half-cocked and ill thought-out from the minds of these allegedly great. Born thus from vague notions of malcontent into a state of cluelessness, it was remitted to a dull administrative civil service (the Royal Society’s multitudinous secretariat), which ensured that it spent some time searching for members to give it direction. Subsequently it spent even more time doing what all such bodies always do, namely, mapping activity.

COPUS committees consisted of various interested FRSs, RS committee hacks, recognised pundits, and representatives of organisations thought to be of prime importance in improving the public’s understanding of science (like the universities – which is how I got to be on one, briefly). COPUS was a committee of top-downers intent upon forcing science upon the public and insisting that they should like it. Though they belatedly realised their mistake (to their credit) they proceeded from a wholly mistaken assumption, and having misunderstood the media’s purpose and working, they then determined that the solution was to educate the public about science (turn them into little science graduates) by getting the media to include more science in its news programming. (This is what those who think too much about these things and teach on courses in Science Communication refer to as the “deficit model”.) They also wanted journalists to be nicer to scientists than anyone else because they were A Good Thing.

Despite my abiding affection and respect for many of the people who have given their best efforts to COPUS and the Royal Society’s other works over the years, I fear (and I am by no means alone) that there was hardly a single aspect of the way that COPUS approached anything that was either correct in principle, or practical in outcome (with a few noble exceptions described later). As I have already said, the spectacle of ministers and professors trying to tell the young what’s cool is itself deeply bizarre and shows the level of unworldliness that obtains in the minds of those who try.

Just as bizarre is the puny scientific establishment trying to tell the media how to play its own game – a tactic as likely to succeed as a gnat attempting to alter the course of the Flying Scotsman. And the Royal Society presuming to tell journalists how to do their jobs, as they were still doing as late as 2002 shortly after millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money had been wasted by scientists who mislabelled their specimens and squandered several years examining cow brains when they thought they were examining sheep (or was it the other way round?) just little short of breathtaking. But then the Royal Society is seldom less than breathtaking.

COPUS’s approach set the tone for events of the momentous 1980s. Everywhere science and the universities were being cut. Labour had been thinking about it since the late sixties (Shirley Williams again), but it was the Tories who carried it through. In Oxford, as a protest against government underfunding, a group of petulant dons led by Professor Denis Noble, leading light of the nascent Save British Science, denied Mrs Thatcher the hitherto automatic honorary DCL degree given to Prime Ministers who had graduated there.

This was the unedifying spectacle of dons indulging in student protest, and it achieved the same thing. Margaret Thatcher was once attacked by sociology students at Enfield College of Technology while she was “Thatcher the Milk Snatcher”, Secretary of State for Education. This was (and is) a dangerous job. Both Keith Joseph and later, Kenneth Baker found themselves on the receiving end of student missiles - Mr Baker, I well remember, copped a pot of pear-flavoured yoghurt during a visit to Leicester University. Thatcher loathed social scientists - even commanding that the word “science” be dropped from the name of what we then called the Economic and Social Science Research Council - and was not persuaded otherwise by her Enfield visit. And neither of her successor ministers at the DES was known for their enduring love of university students, though they often flinched at the thought of the power wielded by their parents in the ballot box.

What the Oxford dons achieved was twofold. They achieved a momentary frisson of delicious protest against a political leader that they and their kind instinctively despised. The feeling was mutual. For Oxford, the university system and science, they made an enemy of the most powerful and long-serving PM in recent history. It ensured that any lingering affection she may have entertained for science, research or her alma mater, was utterly effaced. And science went on feeling the pinch, but – O malheur! - nobody cared. Everybody else was feeling it too. The dons rankled ineffectually on.

The Government, mainly through the DTI and subsequently the OST, then began to develop an interest in the perceived problem of science’s “image”, and began to fund programmes fostering PUS/PEST through the British Association for the Advancement of Science. This, after all, was cheaper than actually spending more money on science itself, and as a sop to the twittering classes it seemed to work.

Until the early 1990s, the BA had been pootling along, organising its very successful Annual Festival of Science, which enjoyed, then as now, a firm following among science journalists and an excellent press office staffed (then) by a redoubtable chain-smoking lady called Sue Lowell and her ever-present box of 20 Gitanes. Suddenly, however, the organisation found itself receiving several millions of pounds of State money to organise, on behalf of the government, the first Science Engineering and Technology Week, (SET7).

What this did was turn (bits of) the BA into quite seriously funded organisations. The sudden change in its functions and fortunes demanded restructuring. Personnel changed rapidly. New staff were engaged replace old, and to cope with the new Government-funded projects. For every old oyster that shook its heavy head and left, four young officers seemed to hurry up, bright, resilient, chirpy, all eager for the treat.

But, sensing their time had come round at last, some rougher beasts were seen lurching towards the BA’s headquarters, then in Savile Row. A raft of (usually) minor communications companies began to appear, brought in on a contract basis to help the BA cope with the many new demands placed upon it. Quite suddenly a large number of jobs, even in the commercial sector, began to hinge upon the continuation of Government interest in the subject of PUS/PEST.

Onlookers

On the periphery of this emerging talking-shop circus (but separate from it) sat (as they do still) three well-interconnected groups – professional science journalists, competent media relations officers (in research councils, learned societies, universities and institutes) and scientists who regularly communicate either directly or, via the second, to the first - and hence to the public. These are the scientists whom science journalists choose to talk to because they hold responsible positions, their research is newsworthy, they put themselves to trouble for the press, and they know how to give a quote.

But science journalists only began to register the existence of the emerging PUS/PEST community and its attendant circus when they started holding conferences and inviting them to come along as guest speakers and talk about their work, or sit on panels and answer questions from the floor. It was rather bewildering, and it still is. What these journalists noticed, however, was that almost none of the good press officers they used, nor any of the scientists they spoke to regularly, and no journalists at all, were ever to be seen in the audience. So who were these people?

Nobody knew.

The inaptly named “Science Communicators’ Forum” held as a kind of fringe event at the BA Festival of Science in recent years by – guess who – COPUS, brought this joke to its climax. At the Festival, a large section of the UK’s (and much of Europe’s) science press meet in one place. Scientists communicate their work to the assembled media from 0830 to 1800 for five days solid. The media (unless anniversaries of September 11 intervene) devote pages of coverage and hours of airtime to the fruits of their labour. Canny press officers from scientific institutions (like the natural History Museum launching its book about insects in amber) organise events to capitalise on the media presence, and socialise after hours with journalists from all over the world. All this works brilliantly, and always has, mediated by the consistently conscientious and often brilliant BA media relations team.

Yet, somewhere on the edges, there was now a “Forum”, charging registration in excess of £100, but at no time attended (except as invited special guests) by anyone who was actually communicating any science to anyone - because they were too busy working. Instead, the assembled endured lectures on the theory of science communications as related to learning theory and such. A straggly audience of mostly young and inexperienced government press officers with no understanding of the media and no experience of journalism listened. And who paid for it? I suspect that eventually, you and I did.

Conclusion

This fit has set out to explain why the predisposing factors we have discussed earlier about what scientists think, how they see the world, and what is wrong with them (and their institutions) have given rise to another Tanganyika Ground Nuts Scheme – the PUS/PEST industry. And it is to this that I return now.

Worthy initiatives to persuade the young to do something they don’t want to do by attempting to prove that it is cool, are not only useless. Like most initiatives, they probably have exactly the opposite effect from that intended. They are the original experiment that, being not worth doing, is worth not doing well. But alas, that wise aphorism goes unheeded and the fiasco continues. It does so because the people who promote the initiatives do not take advice from the right quarter, or do not believe it when they do because it runs too much counter to their preconceptions. And to scientists and technologists, who as we have seen think they can do everything by applying their wonderful scientifically methodical brains (and to whom everyone else is just a “little helper”) running counter to preconceptions is a powerful argument against belief. Scientists view their common preconceptions just as a barnacle or oyster larva views its mature conspecifics, or the attachment scars of its dead predecessors. Unfortunately scientists are deceived and we have seen the general result of this already. However, I want to close with an interesting subset of the deceived, whose motivations are slightly different.

Engineers and other technologists often bemoan the modern lack of interest in courses in their subjects at universities. They find it hard to employ suitably qualified staff. The Research Councils, at the same time, are giving up the funding of Masters courses in things that are, in their view, too “close to market” (ie., of direct business benefit). The industries say: “we are just small firms in the main, we cannot sponsor university courses”. The research councils tend to say: “we don’t believe you”.

At this point, the employers tend to assert that universities must put on courses in - to invent a discipline - Mud Engineering, because those in the mud engineering business need the graduates and therefore the market exists. However in this remark they betray their lack of understanding of modern universities and their market. These employers are still stuck in a world of command economy and manpower planning, and think that universities’ market consists of employers.

This hasn’t been so for about 15 years, since the University Grants Committee finally came toppling down in the 1980s like other hollow, rotten Stalinist institutions that were about to follow across the world. The universities’ market today consists of the people who buy their education (less than half of whom are now school-leavers, incidentally). So if nobody wants to do Mud Engineering, then the market isn’t there. The onus is therefore on those who need mud engineers to make the career more attractive.

And so we are back with more absurd and useless official initiatives. Be a mud engineer and see the world. Initiatives like this are easy and - unlike any solution that might actually work – incredibly cheap. The real answer to manpower supply problems (as with teaching and nursing) is to pay mud engineers a competitive salary, so that bright people will consider it as a career. At the moment, all bright people will become lawyers and advertising executives, and who can blame them? It’s the market, stupid.

Envoi

And so government money, poured into useless pep schemes, going straight into the pockets of website designers and pollsters and conference organisers, creates the PUS/PEST industry. This sucks into a state of dependence not only these companies, but the learned societies and lobby groups of scientists who are prey to all the misconceptions and character defects that we have already outlined. And what we are left with is – conspicuous expenditure, no results, and our nuts in concrete.

This fit has painted a dispiriting picture of a dispiriting episode in the life of science communication. But things are changing. As of late 2002, and after great agony precipitated by a wise report into the matter by the ever-energetic Sir Gareth Roberts FRS (former Vice Chancellor of Sheffield University and Chairman of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors, and recently ex-President of the Science Council), COPUS was killed off. (Though, because its name was well known, the Royal decided to keep it - which was a bit like keeping the name "Enron" because everyone had heard of it. But there you go.)

What’s more, it was killed because those sponsoring organisations recognised, and admitted that they recognised, that its top-down approach was flawed. The bits that worked were salvaged, and the rest scrapped. COPUS had been weighed in the balance and, being found wanting (by one of its own), slain - and its kingdom divided.

But wait a bit (as bluish oysters tend to cry) – is that not the sound of those who, refusing to learn from history, find themselves destined to repeat it? Oh my God, it's not quite over yet - there's another fit in the offing.

Fit the ninth - It’s official! or, the kiss of death

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting”

Wordsworth: Ode: Intimations of Immortality from recollections of early childhood

In 2003, over the barely cold corpse of the old COPUS, the Royal Society established its latest playgroup – to study best practice in the public release of scientific information, and the peer review process. The main motivation for this was the suspicion that the public was being confused by media reports emanating from non peer-reviewed “grey” publications, but reported as though they were kosher. This, the RS thought, might be undermining public trust in science.

Perhaps, they thought, it was time to reveal the peer review process to the public, in the hope that they would then ask the pertinent question whenever they were faced with another story about human cloning, the NMR vaccine, intelligent underpants, or whatever. Perhaps the public would find peer review’s very existence reassuring. Peer reviewed publications, after all, are in a sense “official” science. Surely the knowledge that they were reading officially sanctioned research would reassure the public – and at least help them sort out what they could safely believe and what they could take with a pinch of salt. Then, the thinking goes, we might be on track to "restoring public trust".

More of all that in a moment. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the forest, science as a profession was about to become a little more officially regulated, as a result of somewhat similar instincts.

I am a scientist. You are a gorilla

Who exactly is “a scientist”? What do we in the media mean when we write “Scientists say”? Is anyone who has a degree in a scientific subject “a scientist”? What gives a person the right to be quoted as “a scientist”? Things are OK at the top end of the market - Fellows of the Royal Society have been elected by their peers. Things are OK too if the “scientist” is blest with chartered status under a properly regulated system of professional formation – and carries a title like Chartered Engineer (CEng), Chartered Chemist (CChem), or Chartered Geologist (CGeol), and so on. But is it OK if these people are just paying members of such bodies? Are the election procedures rigorous, or is it just a matter of paying the annual dues? And how can we know, when all these bodies were set up in different ways? Furthermore, many bona fide scientists who are ordinary members of learned bodies either cannot or do not wish to qualify for Chartered status under the rules of their professional body. Yet should this debar them from being described as “scientists”?

Here is a dilemma and a conundrum and a bit of a facer.

In an attempt to address this alleged problem, the Science Council (which sees its role as being an umbrella body in the UK for learned societies) has invented a new designation – Chartered Scientist – which they hope will be popular, conferring official status upon its holders as spokespersons for science, and bringing with it distinct responsibilities that will act as a reassurance to the public that these are decent, legal, honest and truthful persons who can be trusted.

Do you feel the warm hug of a security blanket closing around you? Or does it, perhaps, feel more like a straitjacket? Or, perhaps, the shades of a prison-house closing about the boy scientist, as his clouds of glory thin and vanish? Well, however it makes you feel, the trend towards reinforcing and packaging the peer review system for the public good on the one hand, and towards formal recognition of status of individuals on the other, encapsulate the ‘official’ road to respectability.

Those who follow it are rooted in the belief that, by beefing up professional formation and the processes of scientific sanction over publications, scientists’ status will rise in the eyes of people at large, and their work will benefit - in that if those who report science in the media fully understand the difference between the peer-reviewed “white” literature and the non-peer-reviewed “grey” literature, and mention this distinction in their writings, the public will know what stories and people to believe, and which to discount. Public trust will have been restored.

It is difficult to list the number of flaws in this plan, any one of which is fatal to it – such as, for example, that the chances of any journalist mentioning whether any quoted “scientist” is a chartered anything, are precisely nil. But instead of picking out these little gnats from the apothecaries’ ointment, let’s go for the big juicy fly in the middle.

Ever since the OST/Wellcome report (much quoted already in this blog because it should be the daily reading of all scientists with an interest in public communication) we have known that most of the public put more trust in scientists than in many other professions, and that this trust is subtly modified according to how independent the scientist in question is perceived to be.

Thus, university scientists are seen as more trustworthy than those working for the Government, or commercial companies. Strangely – naively perhaps – the words of scientist spokespeople working for "Green" pressure groups are not seen as being tainted by their employment as much as those working for government or companies. But there are good PR reasons why this is so.

That caveat aside, the public’s attitude to the trustworthiness of scientists is therefore exactly as it should be. The public should not mistrust scientists per se (and they do not) but nor should the public be expected to trust them implicitly – or any more than anyone else - just because they are scientists. The public shows subtlety and maturity in its evaluation of trustworthiness, and makes commonsense adjustment according to where the scientist gets his or her shilling.

What this finding also shows is that what gives rise to suspicion is not "scientists", but "The Establishment" – however defined. The more embroiled a scientist is in government, the civil service, departments of state, commercial companies etc, the less trusted he or she will be. The more apparently independent that scientist is, the more trusted. Universities are widely seen as bastions against such special interest. Their apparent disinterestedness explains why university scientists are relatively more trusted. So what about the Greens?

The perception of the public is that scientists working for Green pressure groups are in some sense playing the role of the underdog. The perception is that they do their work not for love of success, status and money, but because they are passionate in the service of a noble cause – hence they come over as "independent free spirits" rather than establishment goons. This is why they are relatively more trusted. This distinction is important, for a reason that brings us right back to where we started.

Attempts by scientists to bolster what they imagine to be generally flagging public support by boosting their "officialness" (e.g. by professional accreditations of one kind or another such as the Science Council’s forthcoming “Chartered Scientist” designation) are missing the point. In fact, they are engaging in an activity that will have an effect exactly 180 degrees from that intended. Normally, it is wise to leave such spectacular shootings in the foot to Government policy.

So much for that. What about “strengthening” peer review– the sacred vetting procedure that makes scientific publishing "scientific"?

The end of the peer show?

Adherents of this course – and one can see that most of the Royal Society’s review group number themselves among them - pursue the peer review route in the hope that it will lead to the sunlit uplands of public trust. In doing so, however, they take a very optimistic view not only of the system, but also of people’s likely reaction to it.

Let us take public reaction first. The most likely attitude that non-scientists would take to peer review is what might be termed the "King Lear" perception. They will assume, once its mechanisms are explained, that peer review is probably a corrupt system whereby those in authority (the scientific Establishment) stamp on unorthodox ideas and enforce a (probably false) consensus upon their subject; where old men of failing ability sit in positions of power like toads on lily pads, protecting their achievements by suppressing new ideas in print, and perverting the course of grant money away from those they regard as enemies.

Peer review can never be perfect, and surely only the most blinkered idealist would hold that it is not, from time to time, corrupted in just these ways. But apart from that, its track record in preventing fraud or the publication of badly conducted research is far from admirable. Much of the research over whose media coverage there has been such scientific hand-wringing in recent years (take Mr Puzstai’s mice and the GM potatoes, for example), was published in reputable journals. Some of these journals have been recently forced to retract papers that passed peer review but turned out to be completely false. In many cases this has been because peer review is ill equipped to detect fraud; but in others, poor procedure – which is exactly what peer review is meant to spot – also survived into publication.

So - the public would be right to regard peer review as potentially corrupt and dangerous, because it is; and they would be right to believe that it often fails to do precisely what it is supposed to do, because it has.

Fortunately, however, people at large will never wish to engage with peer review sufficiently to form any strong opinion of it, even assuming they have not lost the will to live half way through the explanation. Peer review is not likely to excite much interest among any body of people, except scientists and publishers, and it is expecting far too much to think otherwise. Moreover most journalists, and certainly all science journalists, fully understand peer review already and do not need to be lectured further about its importance.

Perhaps scientists should turn their question around. Forget “strengthening”, in the sense the RS means. Perhaps it needs changing. If the peer review process could be changed in such a way as to render it less obnoxious to public instincts, this would have to involve removing the cloak of secrecy that often surrounds reviewers. (This practice varies from journal to journal these days, but in the classic process, the identities of those who comment on submitted papers are withheld from the author.) The invisibility cloak is, in any case, a lot less effective than Harry Potter’s, since most researchers always have a very shrewd idea of who their reviewers are.

If there were a genuine case for anyone in the peer review process to be anonymous, then surely it should be the author. Such anonymity could be defended on the ground that it would allow the reviewer to form an unbiased opinion of the work – for the same reason that in orchestral auditions applicants play behind a screen, so as not to allow extraneous factors (like age, gender or physical beauty) to influence their peers’ judgement. But of course, this would be about as unlikely to work as the current situation is, and for the same reason – the world of science is too small.

From the PR perspective, peer review would be more defensible and excite more respect if academic publishers and reviewers adhered to the axiom that governs the rest of those who scribble for a living – namely, that they should never express any opinion that they would not, if necessary, be prepared to defend in public. The reasons given for allowing reviewer anonymity are rarely strong, and serve only to conspire with, and give oxygen to, natural pusillanimity. Worse, anonymity lays peer review open to corruption, and will always appear odious to the general public. Moreover, it rarely works even by its own criteria.

Inherent secrecy – however strongly it is believed to be beneficial in particular circumstances – is anathema to any chance of lifting the peer review process’s – and hence science’s - public image. Perhaps it is time for scientists and their reviewers to call for an end to what remains of the peer show’s futile and odious secrecy, grow up, be mature, and most of all, be prepared to defend what they write to an author’s face with humour, humility and humanity.

Envoi

Let me now attempt to sum up the argument of this blog so far.

Scientists are not like everyone else. They are excessively interested in things and ideas over other people, but tend to live in a ghetto and make the mistake of thinking everyone else is like them (and hence that they are like everyone else). They have obsessively literal habits of mind, and believe meaningful communication can only involve the conveyancing of fact. They tend to see only one reality – the factual reality of nature, which is their area of special expertise.

They see science as the only valid way of interpreting the universe, and everything in it, including every aspect of the human experience. For the rest they reserve the technical term "bullshit" (see Fit the first).

Hence it follows that the world is divided into scientists and everyone else, people who are not scientists, but have to be found something to do, and hence become little helpers.

Scientists tend to undervalue their expertise, because these folk are not scientists cannot have anything special to offer that scientists couldn’t themselves provide if they had the time or could be bothered to give the matter in hand some processing time (Fit the second).

It is therefore with a large measure of conceit that scientists face their position in society. They are unaware how rare they are in terms of percentage of the population, though they are only too well aware how powerful their subject is, and how it affects our daily lives. They become distressed about what they see as general ignorance, and make the mistaken assumption that it is impossible to function in a world that science made without being a scientist – without knowing everything that scientists know (Fit the third).

Their habits of mind also make it difficult for them to understand that governments, in framing policy, must balance the demands of science against others – this being their job. Scientists think this means that Governments don’t understand them. Actually, Governments understand them very well, and accord them much more influence, in recognition of science and technology’s central role in our economy, than any similar-sized group could expect (Fit the fourth).

So scientists, usually acting collectively, decide that they need to do PR on themselves and their work – or as they would put it, “do something” to “get their message across” - two expressions always used by those who neither know what the message is that they wish to convey, nor how to convey it, nor to whom. Everyone tends to interpret the world in terms of what is familiar to them, and as intellectuals, scientists interpret the whole world in terms of education (the conveyancing of fact and idea). They misunderstand the limitations of the media by misinterpreting it as a means of education – this being a peculiarly British disease that we may also call the "Curse of Reith" (Fit the fifth).

Like any other interest group, scientists want media coverage on their own terms. However they are not sympathetic to those whose expertise might be employed on their behalf, because their mindset is basically that of a termite where media folk think like mayflies (Fit the sixth). Scientists often imagine they are in a position to tell other people how to manage their affairs. Typically then they do not believe what they are told when they do consult people in the know about such matters (because not being scientists, nothingthey have to say can possibly be of any worth). And so they blunder on, complaining about any coverage they do get because of factual inaccuracy (usually) – as though a newspaper article were a textbook or a set of lecture notes. They have no idea that Public Relations (which is what they actually stand most in need of) is about engendering warm feelings. Alas much of what scientists say and do – and particularly the way in which they say and do these things – engenders quite the reverse kinds of feeling.

This is not a linear sequence of events – all of these things are happening all the time. But the “next” stage in the process is that scientists complain to Government.

Governments too worry about science, but not out of concern for science as culture. Rather, governments are anxious for economic reasons for the public to accept all potentially profitable new technologies. Unfortunately as the population becomes more aware of the interconnectedness of things, they begin to assume a measure of consumer responsibility. This is limited, however, because the most of the public’s conscience is easily assuaged in cases of technologies that are of direct personal benefit. The problem applies only to technologies that appear to benefit only businesses.

Governments cannot do very much. However, one thing they can do is launch national and international initiatives, attempt to improve awareness and recruitment, boost interest, foster links, map activity, and set up Web sites. Most of these are designed to persuade the young that something they think uncool is cool – and are for this reason completely counterproductive. The use of “official rejoicing” is as internal PR; but the hopes scientists have of the technique (all of which are located externally) never materialise (Fit the seventh).

Such things tend to be organised by governments, either through the Department for Trade and Industry, the Office of Science and Technology, or by recruiting the various semi-official non-governmental bodies that represent science to Government (Fit the eighth). Thus these bodies become sucked in to the “official” (see below), a black hole whence nothing – least of all light - escapes, and where the gravitational attraction is money.

Wads of cash (trivial in Governmental terms but irresistibly large to those to whom they are offered) are handed out, which then tend to do all those largely ineffective things listed above – and who need to recruit contractors to help them do them. This industry goes by different names, but it used to be called the Public Understanding of Science and is now dubbed Public Engagement with Science and Technology (PEST).

The other “something” that collectives and Governments tend to “do” is seek to regulate (Fit the ninth). Many scientists also see this regulation as a route to reinforcing what they believe (falsely) to be a general diminution of public trust in all scientists. Scientific bodies instigate (under national or EU frameworks) systems of official professional accreditation – known in the UK as Chartership. They also look towards Peer Review – the process whereby scientific literature becomes scientific – as a bulwark against media scare stories and other examples of dodgy science that can run like brush fires through the popular press.

Unfortunately these attempts are completely misguided because we know that the public is not suspicious of science, per se, as much as it is suspicious of authority and the Establishment. By tying themselves into the Establishment ever more closely, scientists will achieve the precise opposite of what they wish.

So what now?

This is how things go wrong. I must repeat one thing - we must not think of this as a linear process – all parts of it are happening all the time; the more so because in not understanding their history, scientists are doomed to repeat it.

But cheer up - everything is not going wrong. In fact, there is more to be joyful about than scientists believe – it’s just that they can’t see it…

Fit the tenth: Getting real or, why it’s really a lot simpler than we imagine

“Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas except by being overstated.” Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder

“Success…in music like all art, involves a skill in making things that is not necessarily given simply because one has strong feelings” Julian Johnson, Who needs classical music?

Necessary distance

One Friday night many years ago after a very long evening in the drinking holes of Cardiff, I found myself eating a curry in one of those low dives that used to – and perhaps still do – grace the thoroughfare known as Caroline Street. I was there in the company of a number of other research students, though whether they will be able to vouch for this tale, I could not say – for this conversation did not involve them.

At a neighbouring table, alone and (also) somewhat the worse for drink, sat a lady of the night. (Ladies of the night and PhD students seemed to be this restaurant’s main clientele after a certain hour on non-rugby days.) On several occasions she attempted to speak to me, but I am afraid to say I rudely took no notice. I was a young man, and more modest then than now.

However, sensing perhaps the reason for my silence she suddenly said, “It’s all right, darling, I’m not working. In my line there’s not much you can do after a chicken Madras.”

As the full import of this remark sank in I apologised for my rudeness and conversed with her for much of what remained of the evening. She regaled me with her rather unedifying and somewhat predictable life history, ending with a remark that has served me as an axiom in public relations ever since. She said that she would stay on the game for as long as she turned a profit on a bad night, or until she started "coming with the customers".

Unfortunately for science, many if not most of those responsible for promoting it (at least from the inside) have not learned this crucial lesson. They carry a torch for science. They are, in other words, coming with the customers. Once you have circled the PR block a few times, you come to understand that it is always a lot easier to promote something in which you have no personal stake than it is to face journalists on an issue on which you feel strongly. Maintaining the necessary distance from the subject allows you to think more clearly and frame defensible answers to the questions you will be asked by professional sceptics.

A Chief Executive for whom I once wrote speeches was very fond (perhaps over fond) of quoting George Burns’s famous quip – “Sincerity is everything – if you can fake that you’re made”. I used to discourage the inclusion of this bon mot lest it give her game away, because Mr Burns was right – as was the poet Hugh MacDiarmid when he reminded us: “Deep conviction or preference can seldom/Find direct terms in which to express itself”.

Proficiency in the black art of fluent advocacy tends to bear an inverse relationship to depth of conviction. I would go further and say that successful advocacy demands the suppression of personal feelings, which have nasty habit of blinding you to opposing views, so weakening your argumentation and even (on occasion) rendering you speechless. Which brings us back to scientists, for whom the idea (what they would call “substance”) and the word (what they might call “style”) tend, as we have seen, to lead separate existences, so that they give all their thought to what is being said and very little or none to how, in a dichotomy unthinkable in other fields.

Successful advocacy requires that the advocate first understand the reality of what is being promoted. In science’s case this means realistically assessing its position within contemporary culture, and being clear about why we are performing the advocacy in the first place. If I were training people to become advocates for science I would urge them to forget science for a moment and look for analogies. In terms of social impact, I see science as occupying much the same sort of role as, and sharing many of the characteristics of, double entry book-keeping and jazz.

All what jazz?

I borrow a title from the poet Philip Larkin, who was not only the world’s most famous university librarian but also a noted jazz critic.

Like science, jazz is an immensely influential world movement and constitutes the United States’ main 20th Century contribution to high Culture. Though it is not itself jazz, just about all the music listened to by most people every day all over the world, owes its existence to jazz. Despite this, within our everyday culture, jazz itself remains almost entirely elusive.

Talk to any jazz cat of the 1920s and 30s and he will tell you that things have never been much different. The music most people listened to in the so-called jazz age was in fact “corn” - the jazz-idiom dance-band music of the time (and worse). Even in its heyday, when people thought it new (because it was new to them), jazz was never popular. It was fashionable for a moment, just as science was fashionable in the 1950s and 1960s. But popular? Widely understood? Never.
This is to me an interesting and significant distinction. It will by now be clear that I believe most scientists’ attempts to educate people are cynical and completely misguided attempts at gaining popularity. However what I really think scientists want is to regain their fashionableness, which is the only thing they have actually lost. They think they have lost trust, respect, comprehension. What they have really lost is that buzz of being in vogue.

In our society (which is the only one we’ve got), this is to some extent the same thing, because those in vogue are automatically accorded popularity, trust and respect, for no good reason at all. Here lies a moral dilemma, one of wanting the “right” thing for the “wrong” reasons. Ever tried to tell a vegetarian that you always eat humanely-reared veal because it tastes better? I have always maintained that, once you cut through the high-sounding ideals of public engagement, education and Reithian mumbo-jumbo, you get back to the same old thing. What scientists really want is to regain their former fashionableness - and be allowed to get on with things unhindered.

Like unpopularised science, jazz proper demands a lot - too much, probably - of the average listener. But despite its extreme rarity, nearly everybody indulges in and is influenced by the musical culture that has been spawned by it through interpreters - the people who took jazz and made it popular by making it easier. Some jazz musicians can do this themselves, just as some scientists can write popular books about their subject. But they are not many. Most cannot bear to. Most leave it (quite properly) to others. And so we are left with an almost universally fecund and powerful form, practised by almost nobody, understood by a few, turned into popular versions for the mass market by others, and actually accessible and enjoyed in this marketable form by almost all.

This is one analogy. However, jazz is art - and as such exists to give pleasure and to communicate, so it is unlike science in these respects and as an analogy may be misleading. Science does not exist to give pleasure, nor is it a form of communication – somebody has to communicate it. So let us consider another activity that, like science, was not designed with pleasure in mind.

Held to account

Double-entry book-keeping originated in Italy, the cradle of modern accountancy, where the first recognisably modern accounting records are found in documents dating from the early 13th Century. These earliest accounting notations relied on a formal syntactical (sentence-based) system for recording who was creditor, who was debtor, and by how much.

Double-entry book-keeping is first known to have been applied around 1340 in communal account books of the City of Genoa. However the first description of how the system works is contained in a manuscript of 1458 by Benedikt Kotruljevich of Dubrovnik (whose name is more frequently written in the Italianised version, Benedetto Cotrulli/Cotrugli). The same technique was recorded by mathematician Luca Pacioli (picture) in his De Computis et Scripturis, printed in Genoa on a Gutenberg press in 1494. This work was subsequently translated by Domenico Manzoni and published in 1540 under the title Quaderno doppio col suo giornale, or the “Double ledger with its journal”. Historians of accounting in the 20th Century identified the adoption of this system as a key step in the emergence of a modern, capitalistic profit-oriented way of thinking, where the enterprise came to be seen as a separate entity from the person of the merchant entrepreneur.

But what exactly is double-entry book-keeping? Although it – like science, alas - has become a symbol for all that is difficult and arcane, it – again, like most science - is actually rather easy to understand. It is a simple system for monitoring the income and expenditure of a typical small company, in a way that allows a check to be kept on accounting accuracy. Entries are divided into debits (on the left) and credits (on the right). Debits record transactions relating to purchases made, expenses incurred and increases in the firm’s assets. Credits record transactions relating to revenues, and an increase in liabilities. Recording any transaction requires both a debit and a credit entry. If both entries are correctly written down and both columns correctly added up, the totals in each side of the ledger should be the same.

In subsequent centuries this supremely useful technique has helped make financial institutions reliable, and company finances sound. Yet people at large are happy – nay, delighted – to remit actual knowledge of double-entry book-keeping to those who make it their business. And this is what makes it similar to science.

We can know it for you wholesale

Like science, people at large can be made aware that double-entry book-keeping is good for them, and be made to feel glad it’s there (both achievable through effective PR), but be even gladder that people better educated in its intricacies are looking after it for them. From time to time, they may enjoy hearing a tale or two about life as a double-entry book-keeper, such as might perhaps be engineered by the Institute of Accountancy to reinforce the noble image of their profession. Such a tale might be written by an accountant, but is more likely to be successful if it is written by a journalist who has interviewed one.

If Mr J Public feels the need to know more – perhaps because he thinks his accountant is robbing him blind – he can take the trouble to learn the detail he needs; at which point he will find that such information is everywhere, and not that difficult to mug up, especially when you have the motivation. Ask any journalist who has written about families suddenly struck down by unusual life-threatening disorders. They know as much about them as their doctors in months.

But for most people, most of the time, and for much the same reason that makes most science "soft news" in journalism terms, science is non-essential knowledge. And like so much else, people at large are content that someone else knows about it so they don’t have to. Now - this is an example of a warm feeling, and you achieve it by doing good PR – yesterday, today and tomorrow – because as the man said, it’s always there to be done again. It is scientists’ duty to keep this continuous feed of information going. Otherwise, a basic understanding of the limits of scientific knowledge (which should be taught to everybody at school and I fear isn’t) and a feeling for how big a pinch of salt to take with what scientists say (which grown-up people have instinctively) – is enough.

This is not cynical – it is realistic. At any given moment, people at large – and I include myself in this category, by the way - are almost completely ignorant about everything around them and – as Geoff Dyer has pointed out in his Yoga for people who can't be bothered to do it – it really doesn’t matter at all, most of the time – that is, until you actually want to do something with knowledge. Then you really do need to know about stuff, and given that the world is vastly overloaded with information about everything scientific, this is not hard.

But being unknowledgeable about science is no more shameful or disabling than being unknowledgeable about double-entry book-keeping – or how the legal system works, or how the model for Shakespeare’s The Tempest is rooted in European dramatic tradition, or how the British constitution came to be framed by its history. If you need to learn about these things, you can. And being made to learn about it so as to train your mind - and then forgetting the pub-quiz crap so you can make room for something more useful later - is wonderful and good, and the whole purpose of education. But you don’t need to carry it all about in your head all the time. Expecting people to do that is just ludicrous.

So much for the “deficit model”, as it has been dubbed, based as it is on the mistaken idea that if you educate the public about science they will be on its side, or that the public needs to know what scientists know to be fully enfranchised in a modern society (and that you can use the media to deliver these educational materials). It is undoubtedly baloney. Whether it is dead baloney, however, is another matter. I find it to be alive and well among scientists. As with those diehard Two Cultures, there is nothing so alive as an idea that intellectuals all claim is dead. Such notions are too easy and attractive – too robust - to die when some egghead says so.

As we have seen, the old COPUS, which embodied this idea, was abandoned in late 2002. By that time the initiative was co-sponsored by three august bodies, who issued a joint statement on December 9. In this document, Roland Jackson, Chief Executive of the British Association, Baroness Greenfield, Director of the Royal Institution and Stephen Cox, Executive Secretary of the Royal Society, announced that they had come to a decision.“We have reached the conclusion that the top-down approach which COPUS currently exemplifies is no longer appropriate to the wider agenda that the science communication community is now addressing. We believe it will be more effective to allow organisations to seek their own partnerships and develop their own activities, within the strategic framework outlined by the British Association in its report.

“We have decided not to appoint a new Chair for COPUS and to stand down the Council as it is presently constituted.” It was the end of an era.

And thus, in place of top-down prescription and the deficit model, we got engagement. Among science’s professional cheerleaders, engagement is now firmly embedded in place of deficit. The public needs to be more engaged in decisions regarding the future course of technology and science, they hold. Having moved on from Public Understanding (PUS), we must now, they say, recognise that with greater knowledge and awareness comes greater ethical responsibility. The public must make informed choices, based on negotiation and mediation. Scientists must talk to the public and learn to understand their fears, engaging them in the process in a two-way discussion about the future. Above all, there must be debate.

The Royal Society recently did just this over issues connected with genetic modification (GM). Nobel Laureate Sir Paul Nurse FRS told me how useful this exercise had been because when asked why they would not buy GM tomatoes, their sample responded: “because it might contain genes”. The idea that people at large were unaware that all food is stuffed with genes and always has been, plumbed a level of misunderstanding at which Fellows of the Royal had never even guessed.

This is all very laudable, and useful education for the Fellows; but unfortunately the engagement model is a sham.

First, the evidence simply does not exist that the public wishes to engage in any such debate. Those who think there is, are either making the mistake of believing the polls (according to which everybody also watches Panorama every week) or are mistaking the audience of the BBC’s Today programme for the general public.

Second, scratch a PEST and you find old-fashioned PUS. The deficit model is alive and well, I fear, even among those who proclaim its death. Although it is valuable that the Royal Society now knows how uninformed people are about matters genetic, their answer to this will be more education. Which is where we were before.

The PUS lobby thought that "knowing what scientists know" was the answer. What you detect with the PEST lobby is the insulting (but familiar) implication that if people can only be more informed and induced to think rationally, then they will end up agreeing with scientists. This, at bottom, is what scientists hope the engagement circus will achieve – in other words, the same thing. Fancy "consensus conferences" and on-line discussion fora and all the rest of it are just, in their minds, yet another way of saying “seminar”.

Though science may be internally rational, scientists are as gloriously irrational as anyone else and they have absolutely no right to appropriate rationality to themselves. This is one of the many arrogances that alienate the non-scientific among us (nearly everybody) and jeopardise scientists’ chances of doing what they need to do - which is to convince people that what they (the scientists) want is, on balance, good for everybody, and not just good for them or the Establishment.

So how do you do that?

In many ways the world is a simple place – it works on self-interest. When scientific issues run into trouble with the public, it is because someone has first made them aware of it (probably some damned journalist, for that is their job), and pointed out negative implications (probably because some anti-science lobbyist got their act together first).

Hence the trouble with GM foods. People can see what’s in it for supermarkets and manufacturers and farmers, but the rest of us? People may object to mobile phone masts hundreds of feet in the air, but not to the mobile phones millimetres from their brains because they feel the benefit of one and not the other. The phone is small, yours, useful and cute. The mast is big, ugly, and belongs to The Authorities in ways that make it inherently suspect.

These are, in principle at least, relatively simple PR problems and can be countered most effectively by the usual PR means, based on the principle that no member of the wider public will support anything unless they can be made to see what’s in it for them. For science, effective public relations must be aimed at explaining benefits and creating an affective bond between science and its consumers and major funders (i.e., people at large) so that more of them will feel happy about making a free choice in science’s favour.

This freedom that is my freedom is your freedom

As Shirley Williams pointed out all those years ago in her 13 Points, the freedom that allows scientists and technologists to pursue their activities is a social contract between them and the rest of us. But it is also, like all freedom, indivisible.

Even assuming you could engage people at large in a debate that only you want to have, the logical conclusion of such a dialogue (about future directions in science and technology) must surely be this. After “the public” has heard and understood arguments in favour of, say, GM foods; even after it has taken on board the pros and cons, weighed carefully the benefits (fewer pesticides, possibly) against the potential dangers (The Day of the Triffids), and had everything explained in such a way that even scientists are happy, people at large are still free to say "no", just because on the whole, they’d rather not, thank you. If the people who pay for it and will have to live with the consequences simply don’t want the science or the technology, then no matter how "irrational" scientists might think their reasons, then they will just have to accept it.

Meanwhile other publics in other countries might decide otherwise – but then, their freedom is indivisible too, and it includes the freedom to make their lives better by adopting technologies that wealthier countries can afford to be sniffy about. Western countries are now in just the position of those fictional louche arty folk, so deplored by CP Snow, who could afford to hold their noses about science and progress, but only because they accepted its benefits.

Is this really the situation scientists think they are getting into with engagement? I don’t think so. And the furious reaction to a suggestion along similar lines made by Lord Winston some years ago suggests that I am right. The avuncular professorial peer has moved from being the most widely known fertility expert in the UK to being a TV celebrity – the latest thinking woman’s crumpet. Preceded as ever by his trademark Groucho Marx moustache, he has fronted several high budget science series, and is noted for his willingness to swim with sharks (protected by a cage, rather than yogic inhaling) and other acts of didactic derring-do.

Speaking to the Times Higher Education Supplement in December 2003, he suggested that scientists must recognise and abide by public opinion on issues such as GM crops. He also said that scientists risked tarnishing their reputation by associating with governments, and cited the rumpus over the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, when the scientific backing for Government policy made little headway – probably because of this baleful association. “We have to recognise that it is unwise to get too closely associated with Government. Government has a different agenda” he said. How right he was.

Perhaps because his words were barbed with arrows of truth, Winston was roundly lambasted by a wide range of other science pundits and a bunch of cocky politicians. Mostly his critics feared that if we lived in their conception of Winston World, popular opinion would dictate scientific research directions. Oh horror. Basically, they said, the public were not (and could not) be qualified to make such determinations.

Well, if the purpose of engaging the public in debates about science and technology cannot, theoretically, lead to just such an outcome - what is the point of it? How sincere is a process of engagement in the ethical dimensions of research when one side says that any outcome is permitted except the one they don’t want? I am not suggesting that it would be a good idea to do as Lord Winston says. However by suggesting it he did us all a service - by laying bare the whole empty, useless charade of the PEST industry, which is frankly conning everyone.

Scientists are being suckered into it because, while it is sold differently, in reality most really think of it as another way of educating people (and thereby persuading them). The public are clearly being conned, because the engagement on offer is a one-sided sham. No scientist is prepared to let the public determine the direction of future research, or future applications. Some make hay with the difference between applications and research, but if they understood the history of science better they would realise that this dichotomy – like so many others - is nonsense. So – let us ask: who really needs public engagement? Who really stands to benefit from it? The answer is – the ones who are buying and selling it – namely government and those who conduct the process.

It is absolutely true that society needs public consultations on certain scientific and technological issues important to public policy. Recent issues that have excited enormous public disquiet, including GM foods and cloning, nuclear waste repositories, power generation, global warming, the looming energy gap and so on, are matters on which Governments need policies. And yes, the social contract with scientists dictates that the public should be informed about these matters. Those who wish to debate them should then be able to do so - for example, through consensus conferences where concerned volunteer members of the populace examine evidence from all sides and, with the help of professional mediators, produce ethical guidelines with which they feel comfortable, and within which successful policies could be framed.

This is highly useful to policymakers, who may live too closely to their subjects to be thinking straight about them, or to be capable of conceiving the full depth of natural ignorance. It is educative, in other words, for Governments, and its chief scientific creatures. That it has taken so long for governments to come round to this idea is startling. That such models for consultation are still more often seen among recommendations from Select Committees than in the observance is a matter for regret. But it is all marginal, and nothing to do with the real business of the media.

At the moment, the PEST industry is elaborating itself into endless conferences about just this sort of public consensus-forming debate. But the fact remains that as scientific proselytisation, it is largely ineffective, at best involves a few tens or possibly hundreds of motivated people, and is more a means of covering policymakers’ backsides than anything else. Science needs these forms of consultation a lot less than governments do. Governments need to know what policies might be acceptable, and why others are not. Governments want to make sure that profitable technologies are not lost to the country. They need engagement because it is the first step towards framing policies that we will vote for – and towards softening us up.

By holding out the prospect of large wads of cash, governments have succeeded in persuading many of science’s most senior representative bodies that they should be doing it. This is the central irony. Science is therefore now colluding with government – and as we have seen and as Lord Winston has said, it isn’t science that people are most suspicious of – it’s authority. If science is ever seen as being state property, incapable of kicking politicians in the arse from time to time, it has had it with the public.

There is no doubt in my mind that PEST is better than PUS. But I doubt if it is going to do science any good. Meanwhile it will divert the time and resources of scientific organisations into running focus groups for government.

Edjerkashun, Edjerkashun, Edjerkashun

I do not deny the importance of science education – I merely deny its efficacy in PR terms - the attempt to do it by stealth through the media. The place for scientific education is in school, college and university. After that stage, what learning people at large choose to engage in is up to them. Anyone who tries cynically to force education upon an unsuspecting public by consciously manipulating the news media and other legitimate forms of entertainment deserves to be drowned in their own ink. Also, of course (and why is this so easy for scientists to forget?) science journalists are journalists. Like any other kind of specialist reporter, they are there to be informed, independent, and above all critical commentators on their subject, not its lecturers, mouthpieces, cheerleaders or spin-doctors.

Without engagement, which I believe is not going to achieve what most scientists think it’s for and isn’t going to persuade anybody in any significant numbers, the only thing science communication is left with is public relations – which is, as I have said, the only thing that can work through the media. And it is on this subject that I would like to end this final Fit.

Meanwhile, scientists must have faith; faith that if education performs its task properly in laying its facts and ideas before everyone, and if scientists remain diligent about maintaining public sympathy through effective PR, then the public will remain more likely than not to award the proper victories to science in the realms where it, and only it, hold sway.

But scientists should not expect any victories to be total. They never will be. Being right, that scientific obsession, isn’t everything. In fact, insisting on always being right is a mistake scientists make all the time when defending themselves against the cruel and uncaring world that doesn’t love them enough. What they forget is that nobody likes a smart-ass.

Doing it right

There can only ever be one innocent reason for communicating anything to adults via the media, and that is the possibility that some of them might enjoy it. Moon landings and decoding the human genome apart, nearly all of what scientists have to tell other people through the media is inessential information. It has to be topical (in order to be news) but it is nearly always “soft news” – news which, if it is not in the paper, does not make the paper look incompetent, and doesn’t get the science correspondent sacked.

The only genuine excuse for burdening the world with even more of such information is that by doing so, someone else passes a few moments less dully than otherwise. If the result of your communication is dull, however, the world is not improved, and it had been better not to try. If your communication fails this crucial test - that it has transcended mere teaching and become entertainment - then what you have done is no better than commit the sin perpetrated upon university students every day (but there absolved because the victims are volunteers). By attempting to perpetrate education upon the unwilling you commit a cynical attack upon freedom - the right of all free adult citizens not be bored against their will by special interest groups.

The interfaces

The only real route to the hearts and minds of non-scientific folk lies neither through consultation nor education, but public relations, and for that alone, scientists need the media. There are not very many interfaces that really matter in science communication. They are:

• Scientists directly to the public as authors
• Scientists directly via journalists
• Scientists via journalists through the medium of institutional public relations.
  

The first is a real growth area in publishing today and is probably in its best state of health ever. The second relies mainly on science journalists doing their jobs, and in the UK, science writing is not only in a better shape than anywhere else in the world, it is in better shape today than ever before, with more writers feeding more space in more outlets. More science makes the news than ever before, more scientists are themselves doing science writing; there are more scientific documentaries on TV than ever before. It is boom time.

The problem lies in our institutions, and the way they promote themselves.

Few UK universities with marketable science research stories to tell fund effective science PR. All is by no means darkness, and there are pockets of bright, effective talent. But to my knowledge few UK universities employ a science writer on its PR staff, solely dedicated to finding and marketing stories either for news releasing, or for sale to individual outlets. In the USA this is the standard model for science-strong universities, and (moreover) one that I proved over 20 years ago works here in the UK. One has only to look at Penn State, for instance, for a PR office based on this model that clearly works and actually results in real coverage, promoting the university’s reputation through its research, and promoting public admiration for science as a by-product. I pick that example almost at random. Ask any science journalist about the quantities of science stories that come out of US universities.

The Warwick Experiment

In the late 1980s, Warwick’s former PR supremo Geoffrey Middleton and I researched and proved this very model for university PR officers to promote their science and scientists. I have frequently held up The Warwick Experiment, as I have rather pompously named it, to conference after conference of PR officers from universities and learned societies. While its practical success was undeniable, it has never really been duplicated because it depends on two factors that occur together in almost no university press office:

1. sufficient in-house journalistic training/experience to recognise news (a knack that may be learned, but can never be taught)
2. time to devote to interviewing scientific colleagues in the university and writing story ideas based upon those interviews for offer to local freelance science journalists, contactable through the Association of British Science Writers (ABSW).

Geoffrey Middleton, as a sometime contributor for The Guardian, and with a reasonably well-resourced external relations office under his command, did have these things. For the purposes of the experiment I acted in the role of “available freelance” to whom he offered the ideas, and who then went off and sold the ideas in turn to newspaper editors, returning when successful to interview the scientists.

In a rather similar vein – though differently organised – another successful means of promoting a university through its science involved commissioning independent science journalists to write the university’s annual research report. I sold my services in this way for a number of years and wrote annual research reports for a number of science-strong universities and medical schools, including Newcastle, Salford and the Hammersmith (a postgraduate medical school) in London.

The experience of conducting back-to-back interviews for three or four days solid is gruelling; but in the course of collecting material for the official publication that I was contracted to produce, I also stumbled over many stories that could form the basis of news that I could then sell into the pages of national newspapers, or of op/ed pieces ideal for New Scientist or the then multiplying science sections of the nationals.

After these experiences I realised that all a university needs to do for this process to happen universally is to develop a relationship with one or more freelance journalists, and give them similar work. The subsequent steps in the process will take care of themselves and need little or no further management beyond the occasional helping hand. Everyone does what he or she does best, and reasons of self-interest will ensure it gets done. No extra staff need be permanently employed. If the university is nervous that the journalists thus let loose upon them will sniff out (or invent) embarrassing scandal that will damage the university, then it needs a good slap, which it is the press officer’s job to deliver. Freelance journalists would be failing in their duty if they ignored a true scandal, but universities are just not that interesting, frankly. And few freelances could afford to bite the hand that feeds them for anything other than a very good public interest reason.

However The Warwick Experiment, in which everyone worked to their own strengths (and self-interest) to the wider benefit of science and the sponsoring institutions, will only ever work when universities employ journalists as PR officers, and (crucially) resource and manage them appropriately. This happens in the USA. It does not happen here - and shows little sign of doing so because those who might do most to help it along are wasting their time engaging people in debates they largely don’t want.

So has PUS/PEST all been a waste of time?

No. A few initiatives have been successful and have resulted in benefits to real science communication.

Media fellowships

COPUS began the media fellowship scheme, which takes scientists into newspapers, magazines, radio and TV to work as journalists, so they get to understand news and how it is made. Some go back to the lab and spread good practice there. Others use it to escape the bench. Both outcomes are wholly beneficial to the cause of science and its communication.

Expert finding

It can be very hard indeed for journalists to find appropriate experts at the drop of a hat on any subject and to help them, various organizations now run expert-finding services. Such services, one of which I was instrumental in setting up for UK universities, have made journalists’ lives a lot easier (which incidentally is the key to all good media relations).

The Royal Institution Science Media Centre

The Royal Institution’s (independent) Science Media Centre has addressed the central problem of how you deal with science stories that escape the grasp of professional science journalists, and end up at the tender mercies of the general news hack. This was a body, like COPUS, born without very much idea of what it would do or how it would do it, and credit for pushing it through seems to belong to the RI’s energetic Director, Prof. Susan Greenfield.

But instead of remitting the centre’s ultimate purpose to those who knew nothing about the problem (the “OST/Royal Society model”, you might say) the RI appointed dedicated and talented people to run it, who then took good advice before acting. They identified what was needful and are now successfully supplying it, much against the initial expectations of the cynical hacks at whom it was, and remains, principally aimed.

AplhaGalileo

AlphaGalileo is a science news Web Site (and expert finding service) for Europe, aimed at journalists, who register with the site and then have access to embargoed information. It was initially set up by the research councils (NERC) but is now funded by the EU. It has been a fantastic success and has effectively extended web-based news distribution to organisations unable to countenance paying the American Association for the Advancement of Science for the privilege of using EurekAlert, its US forerunner.

Whither science and the media?

Science communication through the media, like all public relations, is like clearing the drains. It is only a problem when it doesn’t get done, or is done badly or infrequently. In the UK it is done, and by and large, better than anywhere else in the world. You can always do more of it, and how much you do depends on how much you care, and how much you want to pay people to do it. It is not a problem – except for our institutions, who persist in not doing what they should.

If the question is – “how do we get more science coverage in the media?” we have known the really important answers for years, and in the end the only thing that matters is to employ talented people with the appropriate skills and let them get on with it.

However, if universities, research councils and institutes employed their own science writers to work up research and sell on stories about their institutions, with no other functions to clog up their lives, then any communications deficit (in quality or quantity) they feel they suffer would be swiftly redressed. There is no shortage of suitably trained people, now that universities themselves are busy churning out graduates with masters’ level qualifications in science communication.

This model has been known in the UK for at least 20 years, and practised in the USA for much longer. American journalism may occasionally be a subject for scorn from its hard-bitten UK observers, who may think their US counterparts impossibly academic, boring, and lacking in news sense. But US public relations practice by contrast stands before the UK as a living reproach.

In the end, no amount of education can make up for lack of talent, which is why educators often try to deny talent's importance: namely, because they know in their souls that beyond a certain point, those who have it don’t need much educating. What they do need, however, is training in craft. And ah, wouldn’t you know it, there’s another no-no. Thus the two things of which we stand most in need, “talent” and “training in craft” have become politically incorrect even to name. For which reason I am pleased to name them.

Doing science communication right means employing talent that has been properly trained. This means reasonable salaries and pensions and National Insurance and (horror!) spending money on something other than science when the stuff’s in short supply. To nobody’s great surprise, the rub consists of money and priorities. Not all US universities can wear that one, and certainly none here. It also means admitting that scientists need professional help, and we have already seen the inherent obstacles to that. So we come back to the twin evils not spending money properly, and scientists’ refusal to admit their shortcomings.

Why does the endless agonizing continue?

The agonizing does not stop because those bodies who are asked for their views on science communication are either scientific ones, where cluelessness prevails, or others that are already sucked in to the whole self-serving PEST morass. The few lone voices who see the emperor’s nakedness do not like to speak out, because so many of their friends are caught up in it. They may also be caught up in it themselves, of course.

A few days after writing a response for The Geological Society of London to the Office of Science and Technology on matters concerning science communication I went to a meeting of the Association of British Science Writers committee, on which I then sat and which I currently chair. I asked my colleagues, who sat there sweaty and exhausted after a hard day spent actually communicating science on TV, radio, newspapers and journals, whether they were even aware of the OST consultation. Sure enough, they weren’t – either as individual journalists or as officials representing their profession. Consulting actual professional communicators of science was evidently not part of the OST’s programme. My colleagues on the committee looked at the BA/OST document I put before them, shrugged their shoulders as they passed it back and (with a smile) said “Nothing to do with us, surely?”

How right they were. Precious little to do with reality at all.

Coda

One of the most hairy-arsed scientists of all time was my hero and great Victorian, Thomas Henry Huxley, who combined scientific insight with great controversial talent, eloquence and force of character. Much though I admire him, however, I do not hold him to be a saint, nor do I agree with everything he said. Nor would I dream of taking him out of his historical context.

Huxley had a huge battle on his hands to force science into the curricula of the ancient universities, which he held to be bastions of anti-scientific philistinism. He would have agreed, as I do, with the Isaiah Berlin epigraph to this chapter, and was not afraid to overstate his case when political necessity demanded. Huxley held university education (as exemplified in Oxford and Cambridge) to scorn - not only for its scientific shortcomings, accusing them of confining their learning to “showing how and why that which the Church said was true, must be true”. Then as now, though for different reasons, it seems that education was a deeply anti-intellectual process that bore to learning the same distant relationship that the church bears to religion, or medicine to health.

The criticism was well made and had a germ of truth, but as an overstatement it raised the ire of that great High Priest of Victorian high culture, Matthew Arnold. Arnold sought to respond to Huxley’s claim. If it were true that “conceptions of the universe fatal to the notions held by our forefathers have been forced upon us by physical science”, would “humane literature” really be thrown out of the curricular bathtub along with the baby of true education?

One senses in the exaggerated posturings of these two polyphemes - their one-eyed argumentation only making sense even to them because each covered his other eye for the duration of the joust - something of the coming difference between that age and ours, the age that science has made. For Arnold, the Earth still metaphorically sat at the centre of the universe, and at its centre, Man in all his perfectible glory. At the centre of mankind sat England (and at the centre of England, Matthew Arnold).

The extraordinary importance Arnold placed on the effect of education upon the individual, and of the power of literature upon the senses, seems a little absurd today, now that – as science commentators are always gleefully pointing out – science has dethroned humanity completely, and relegated it to a cosmic accident in a galactic backwater.

However, such was not the worldview of Matthew Arnold. In his 1863 Letters in Criticism he defiantly wrote: “It is not Linnaeus or Cavendish or Cuvier who gives us the true sense of animals, or water, or plants, who seizes them for us, who makes us participate in their life”. That role, he said, was reserved for Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats, whose words convey the essence of the thing; its natural magic, and its moral profundity. For Arnold, “seeing the world as it is” meant something very different from what it meant to Linnaeus, Cavendish, Cuvier - or Huxley. And it was a world where the way in which things were expressed was inseparable from the idea that was being conveyed – the very separation that, in the scientific mind, has today become almost complete.

In the Victorian world, science was making its way; the spirit of the age (as expressed in literature) was becoming outdated, as CP Snow pointed out in The Two Cultures. It was to stay that way long into the 20th Century. What English poet before W H Auden really felt at home in his own time? But that has changed. Nostalgia, thank God, isn’t what it was.

Arnold was clearly rattled. He found himself in the same embattled defensive position as scientists think themselves in today; but in his answer to Huxley’s (supposed) assertion that humane literature would be ousted from the curriculum before the juggernaut of natural science, (Discourses in America, 1882) this son of a great Rugby headmaster wrote something perhaps truly prescient. Somehow, despite having his hand over one eye, he managed to keep s a sense of perspective.

“What will happen will rather be that there will be crowded into education other matters besides, far too many; there will be, perhaps, a period of unsettlement and confusion and false tendency; but letters will not in the end lose their leading place.

“A poor humanist may possess his soul in patience, neither strive nor cry, admit the energy and brilliancy of the partisans of physical science, and their present favour with the public [my emphasis], to be far greater than his own, and still have a happy faith that the nature of things works silently on behalf of the studies which he loves, and that, while we shall all have to acquaint ourselves with the great results reached by modern science, and to give ourselves as much training in its disciplines as we can conveniently carry, yet the majority of men will always require humane letters….”

(You do not have to look to the Victorians to find scientists in the psychological and fashionable vanguard, rather than the doghouse. In Sir Peter Medawar’s Essay on Scians (published in 1984 but by then well out of date since it was written many years before) he drew an analogy between the view taken of academic scientists by their academic peers, and the view taken of the nouveau riche by the aristocracy. “It is in the same mean-minded spirit” he wrote, “that our brethren in the humane arts avenge themselves on scientists for being so busily and to all appearances happily employed and for getting so big a cut of the government grant… [my emphasis again]”.)

But what Arnold’s view of things displays is precisely what today’s scientists and those who fret about science on their behalf always lack – confidence, and a sense of proportion. Arnold believed that the humane arts would survive the worst that science and the hoi polloi could throw at them. Arnold’s faith in human need for the things that only humane letters could deliver was unshakable. The same is undoubtedly true today for science. Scientists need to learn this confidence, and know how to distinguish it from strutting, priggish arrogance, of which they demonstrate far too much, far too often, already.

Science is not and cannot be everything to Society (which has to balance other claims with those of science) or to a fully rounded person, who is likely to demand more of experience than science alone can provide. Science cannot even be one quarter of something called "culture", let alone a half.

As Arnold said, and as a diverse rather than a unified culture, we shall continue to acquaint ourselves with modern science - most of us to the degree that we find it amusing to do so and otherwise, to the degree that we discover it to be necessary. And yes, we shall give our young as much training in its disciplines as we can conveniently carry - to the extent that students find it compelling and society requires such expertise and is prepared to pay for it.

But this is all. Everything else is the madness of scientists.

End of the final Fit

Things worth reading

• Science and the public: a review of science communication and public attitudes to science in Britain. A joint report by the Office of Science & Technology (OST) and the Wellcome Trust. ISBN 1 841290 25 4. Available free as PDF at www.wellcome.ac.uk or from the Marketing Dept., Wellcome Trust, 183 Euston Road LONDON NW1 2BE. Tel: 020 7611 8651, FAX 020 7611 8545, Email marketing@wellcome.ac.uk.
• Baron-Cohen, Simon 2004: The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain (Penguin) ISBN: 0141011017. This study reveals the scientific evidence that female-type brains are better at empathising, while male brains are stronger at building systems, either concrete or abstract. It also theorizes that autism and Asperger's Syndrome are examples of the extreme male brain.
• Parry, Vivienne, 2002: Scientists as communicators: how to win friends and influence people. Journal of Molecular Biology 319, pp973-978.

Acknowledgements

This is a blog about homes – choosing them, escaping them, and interpreting the view from outside in, and inside out.

Thomas Mann, author of the epigraph to the Introduction, managed to outrage his bourgeois Lűbeck hometowners with his first great novel, Buddenbrooks. I fear that I too may be accused of fouling the nest, so perhaps I should first record my indebtedness to the Geological Society of London and my editor-in-chief, Professor Tony Harris; not least because they have allowed me space in the magazine Geoscientist wherein many of the hobbyhorses that follow were first ridden. Not many organisations would allow one of its staff to rant regularly at its Fellows on matters connected with science and the media.

I should therefore extend my thanks also to my fellow Fellows for their forbearance, and to those others who from time to time write to my Editor, suggesting I be encouraged to find alternative employment with The Sunday Sport. I wear their disapproval with pride. I should also thank two other organisations: the Higher Education External Relations Association (HEERA), which I helped to found when I was the last chairman of one of its predecessor organisations, the Standing Conference of University Information officers (SCUIO), shortly before the merger of the universities and polytechnics in 1992. I should also thank the Science, Technology, Engineering & Medicine Public Relations association (STEMPRA) on whose committee I sat for a number of years.

For critically reading the bits and pieces that will appear here, and discussing the themes, I must thank my former school chum Dr Jeffrey Williams (Bureau International des Poids et Mesures, Paris), my old student buddy, Professor Michael Ellis (variously of the University of Memphis, ETH Zurich, and now of the US National Science Foundation) and a newer pal from the 4th Estate, science journalist and doyenne of communications pundits, Vivienne Parry.

My experience of science policy in Higher Education context was gained while working at the Committee of Vice Chancellors & Principals. I should therefore like to thank Auriol Stevens (subsequently Editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement) for hiring me and for teaching me so much. The usual disclaimers apply – these persons are entirely innocent of my overstatements, gross generalizations and errors – all of which I own completely, though with different degrees of enthusiasm.

I should like to thank the British Association for the Advancement of Science for its Annual Festival, and for its Media Suite from which I have reported on science for various organs for most of the last 20+ years. The BA remains one of my favourite organisations, and its media relations offices through the years have been consistently miraculous. I hope that they will forgive me when I josh their employers’ policies from time to time.

Lastly and mostly, I must thank my wife Fabienne; not only for being blest with the glorious self-confidence natural to the French, but for wisely never having anything to do with science, or its alleged communication woes. What possessed her to ruin this impeccable run of sound judgment by marrying me under a casino in Reno, Nevada, I shall never fully comprehend.

ENDS