I was banging on last week about how scientists should use words rather than guns during public engagement. Words are safer — and often more effective. But they are not completely safe. In fact, they can sometimes be rather dangerous, especially when used without due care and attention in England and Wales, where the libel laws take a keen interest in the words of any unsuspecting author.
In many ways Travis Bickle, the disturbed taxi driver in Scorsese’s famous film, is a model of public engagement. For one thing, he really thinks about his audience. He rehearses in front of a mirror so that he will be fully prepared for his encounters with the people he wants to reach. Legs apart, arms folded, his stance is confident — his body language is really very good. Then, with the merest tilt of the head: “You talkin’ to me?
I have Jim Franks of Newton TV to thank for the opportunity to sit around a table with some of the current scientists at the world-famous MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology to talk about the legacy of its founder, Max Perutz. The discussion was part of a video that you can see at The Guardian web-site and is intercut with previously unseen interview footage of Pertuz himself looking back on his scientific life.
On Wednesday last I was fortunate to find myself an outlier among the great and the good at the Wellcome Trust Image Awards for 2011, where hefty glass slabs were being handed out by Adam Rutherford as prizes to imaginative individuals who had conjured a captivating image from their scientific work.
The Science Museum in London is a national shrine to human ingenuity. Its existence is a testament to the value that our society places on inquiry and innovation, its worth paradoxically underscored by the fact that, even in these impecuious times, entry is still free. The museum sits grandly on Exhibition Road, just around the corner from my laboratory at Imperial College.
As Father Ted might have explained it to Dougal, this one is very small: Atom but that one is far away . Mars (NASA) And yet it is the distant planet and not the nearby atom that seems to excite the greatest interest in the public mind. I blame Carl Sagan. And bloody Brian Cox.
“May you live in interesting times”, goes the Chinese curse. Chinese scientists are certainly living in interesting times (as reported today in Nature ) but they are unlikely to see it as a curse. The budget of the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) has increased sevenfold since 1998 and is set — as part of bold plans — to rise 70% in the coming year.
The following is a commentary that has been published today (in a slightly edited form) in Chemistry and Industry . Only the excellent need apply. Such is the message on research funding from nobelist Sir Paul Nurse, incoming president of the Royal Society.
The government is worried about the economy and rightly so. It’s in a bit of a state. When Value Added Tax was raised by 2.5% to 20% at the turn of the year, there were nervous glances to see what impact it might have on consumer confidence. The VAT increase was probably carefully calculated to ensure that people out shopping would not be deterred from their purchases, so that the consumption merry-go-round would keep on turning.
Ben Goldacre wrote a short blogpost today to bemoan the habit of many media outlets of not linking to the primary sources for their reports and headlines. He was referring to stories that have appeared today about Asian gangs abusing white girls (e.g. this form the BBC). In typically trenchant terms he dismisses such shoddy reporting, “If you don’t link to primary sources, you are dead to me.” I sympathise.