STS Observatory

Modern philosophy of science is “thin, philosophy-lite”, according to a world-renowned academic. Helena Sheehan, who retired last year from Dublin City University, said she despaired of some of the philosophy-of-science papers she is now asked to referee.

Speaking last night in our seminar series, she said: “I am appalled at the lack of knowledge about the intellectual heritage of philosophy of science that I see around me today. It’s so thin.”

Professor Sheehan was particularly scathing about modern fashions that tackle miniscule questions. “At least during the ‘science wars’ of the 1990s, there were some big issues at stake about the reliability of science and the role of social forces in shaping it. I don’t see anything like that today.”

The MSc Science, Governance and the Public option students visited the Houses of Parliament (or rather Portcullis House) to witness the House of Commons Committee on Science and Technology in action.

The topic of the day was ‘The impact of spending cuts on science and scientific research’ and being quizzed were engineer and director of the Diamond Light facility Lord Broers, media star physicist Professor Brian Cox, director of the active lobby group Campaign for Science and Engineering Nick Dusic, ex-Oxford Instruments man and Vice-President of the Royal Society Sir Peter Williams, one of the chiefs of the MRC (Dr Tony Peatfield) and the heads of Technology Strategy Board (Iain Gray), STFC (Professor Michael Sterling), and Research Councils UK (Professor Alan Thorpe). 

So what was learned? Here’s a few memorable moments.

• The £600 million cut in the pre-budget report came as a complete surprise to the head of the Research Councils
• Most of the heated discussion was about whether “impact” could or should be used to decide between research projects
• Brian Cox candidly said that impact can’t be measured, and when pushed to rate impact of research proposals the result was arbitrary and ‘damaging’
• Sterling, chair of the research council that funds UK big science, considers that impact is only relevant ‘at the margins’
• Lord Broers thinks that the best science in the past was done by scientists who have had an ‘interest in impact’. He cited Townes and the maser and Shockley, Brattain and Bardeen and the transistor as evidence
• Cox thought this was anecdotal. He offered Tim Berners-Lee and the web as counter-evidence – the inventor of the web had no thought of impact. He clearly had been watching Aleks Krotoski’s BBC4 doc Virtual Revolution earlier in the week
• The head of the Research Councils UK holds that the biggest advantage of encouraging early and ‘upfront’ statements of impact is that it encourages a certain mindset among researchers. In other words, to go Foucauldian on you for a second, impact is about governmentality. (There’s a social research paper in that insight… one with impact… I’m not joking…)   
• There’s also a paper to be written about how past science administrations have coped in recessions. No-one asked could quite remember…
• It was interesting to see history of science being mobilised to support contemporary policy arguments. It was also clear, as Dusic said, that proper research could inform further debate
• Cox has done his homework. In particular he cited the findings of social science – specifically the SPRU science policy studies of Ben Martin and Ammon Salter – to defend the support of basic science
• Understandably all the panellists resisted the invitation to name fields or projects that might be at the bottom of the priority lists.
• Peter Williams of the Royal Society remained practically mute when pushed for advice about how to reform the STFC or how to prioritise research. The Royal Society, one suspects, prefers to lobby in private rather than offer its conclusions to a committee of public account
• The Haldane Principle lives (so says the head of RCUK)
• The chair of the Committee, the otherwise excellent Phil Willis, had the cheek to ask Brian Cox (ex-Defence: Research Engineering And Mathematics) whether he thought ‘things could only get better’. groans and embarassment followed.

I contributed to the In Our Time series on the history of the Royal Society, which were broadcast 4-7 January. You can hear them again here. I’m in episode four, on the twentieth century.

Melvyn Bragg’s conversation with Simon Schaffer, Lisa Jardine, Keith Moore and myself was recorded around the very large table in the Royal Society council room. You can hear the echoes.

Unlike the regular In Our Time programmes, the Royal Society programmes were not live. This one was recorded just before christmas. The editing is interesting. We talked for an hour and this raw discussion is cut down and re-edited.

The main topic that did not the make cut – even though we discussed it in some detail – was the first elections of women FRSs, fellows of the Royal Society, starting with Marjory Stephenson, Kathleen Lonsdale and Agnes Arber. I’m surprised at the deletion, given its significance for the Royal Society in the twentieth century. Note, though, that even now only 5% of FRSs are female.

How do we do something about climate change? At international level, progress is as slow as treacle – although we are waiting to see what might happen at Copenhagen. On an individual scale it seems that small steps are not enough. It’s easy to be despondent.

Which is why Franny Armstrong’s 10: 10 campaign is a breath of fresh air. The idea is that you sign up and commit to a 10% cut in carbon emissions in 2010. The clever bit is that the ‘you’ can be an individual, a business, or an organisation of any scale. And if enough ‘yous’ join in then we – the whole country – can achieve a ten percent cut.

As the 10:10 campaigners say: “By signing up to a 10% target we’re not just supporting 10:10 – we’re making it happen. In our homes, in our workplaces, our schools and our hospitals, our galleries and football clubs and universities, we’ll be backing each other up as we take the first steps on the road to becoming a zero-carbon society. It’s easy to feel powerless in the face of a huge problem like climate change, but by uniting everyone behind immediate, effective and achievable action, 10:10 enables all of us to make a meaningful difference.”

So let’s try to get UCL to sign up!

The roll call of people, businesses and organisations that have signed up to 10:10 is impressive. There are lots of good reasons why UCL should join: UCL is a beacon of public engagement, UCL would be the first 10:10 university and therefore be exemplifying its own commitment to global citizenship by taking a lead, and the 10:10 campaign’s HQ is in Camden and therefore on our doorstep.

Comment below if you want to join the ‘Let’s get UCL to sign up to 10:10′ campaign.

Let’s think of next steps too.

Two frontpage headline stories in today’s Guardian catch the eye. The bigger headline is ‘Drug experts in mass revolt over sacking’. The smaller one is ‘World leaders accused of myopia over climate deal’

Both report controversies over the proper relationship of scientific evidence to political action. In the first story, two experts have resigned from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs following the sacking from the same body of Professor David Nutt by the home secretary, Alan Johnson. Nutt was angered by the fact that decisions on the classification of drugs did not follow the evidence of harm presented by the Advisory Council. When Nutt publicly quarrelled with the decisions he was asked to go.  ”You cannot have a chief adviser at the same time stepping into the public field and campaigning against government decisions”, said Johnson, “You can do one or the other, but not both”.

In the second story, Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which collates and channels scientific advise on global warming, accused politicians of “political myopia”: “I gave all the world’s leaders a very grim view of what the science tells us and that is what should be motivating us all, but I’m afraid I don’t see to much evidence of that at the current stage”.

Why do I feel Nutt is wrong and Pachauri is right, when both complain that politicians are not following a clearly expressed scientific consensus?

In the drugs case, there is a clear distinction between science and politics. I think it is absolutely right that the advisers present their scientific findings and then the home secretary can take a decision on classification that is contrary. The decision is a political one. It would help if the definitions of what the classifications (class A, class B etc) are were clearly political rather than partly physiological, but that is another matter. I don’t believe that the scientific consensus has not been fairly considered, it’s just that the political factors (for example not upsetting the editor of the Daily Mail by appearing to be soft on drugs) are more important. However, Johnson is in the wrong to complain that independent academic scientists, especially those who are privileged to be able to offer direct advice, should not also speak publicly. His reaction was a hot-headed misfire - a worrying one from a politician I had previously identified as future prime minister material. I wouldn’t like to see such decisions made in the heat of anger if the question was whether to declare war or not… 

In the global warming case, I don’t think that many of the world’s politicians are fairly considering the scientific consensus. Therefore, in this critical period in the run up to Copenhagen, Pachauri is entirely justified in speaking out.

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** STS Blog Prize 2009-2010 **

A prize is being offered for the best contribution to the STS Observatory blog. The competition is open to all STS students (undergraduate, masters and PhD).

To be considered for the STS Blog Prize, a contribution to the STS Observatory blog must be submitted Friday 30th April 2010.

The website of the STS Observatory is:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sts/sts-observatory/

If you do not already have a username and password then contact Jon Agar (ucrhjea@ucl.ac.uk)

The prize is £50 in book tokens and the title “Winner of the STS Blog
Prize 2009-2010″.

The prize will be awarded in May 2010 to the best blog entry as rated by a panel of judges according to the following criteria (in no particular order):

- informative
- entertaining
- accurate
- thought-provoking
- timeliness

Any questions, contact: Jon Agar (ucrhjea@ucl.ac.uk)

UCL’s upper management likes to taut the idea of “Planck’s Club”. In the words of our Provost “Almost all the great scientific discoveries came unexpectedly from the work of a relatively few pioneering researchers such as Planck, Einstein, Avery, Townes, Crick and Watson, Huxley, Perutz, and perhaps 300 others of similar calibre – the “Planck Club” – whose discoveries usually won them Nobel Prizes or other prestigious awards. However, their modern successors are not as free, and constraints such as peer review in particular inhibit challenges to conventional wisdom.” (19 October 2009 e-mail newsletter to all staff)

This idea has recently been promoted as part of a wide ranging criticism about academic funding. Simply put, modern funding is too bureaurocratic, institutionalised, slow, and focused on tiny bits of routine science. It doesn’t encourage radical and out-of-the-box thinking.

The idea behind a “Planck’s Club” is based on lousy history (meaning, it’s false) and lousy problem formulation (meaning, it’s built on lousy premises). It also perpetuates dangerous biases (meaning, it stacks the deck in favour of certain things and against others). In the end, it’s simply pick-and-mix heritage in which big names are plucked from thin air and put to work by someone who wants justification for a position they already had.

I’m not saying the approach is wrong: benefactors should be able to offer money however they want to offer it. And I’m certainly not saying modern patronage by government agencies for science is the best organised it can be. But Provosts at top universities need to be smarter in their choice of words and not get sucked into somebody’s game of “I’m too good to be bound by your rules.”

Janez Potočnik is a Slovenian politician, currently serving as European Commissioner for Science and Research. The European Commissioner for Science and Research is a portfolio within the European Commission. The portfolio is responsible primarily for research and improving the conditions in the Union for researchers. Potočnik has stated that he believes trading knowledge and the development of an information society to create prosperity is as important to Europe as trading steel and coal to create peace was 50 years ago. He aims to develop the European Research Area. Potočnik is also the commissioner responsible for Directorate-General for Research and Joint Research Centre.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janez_Poto%C4%8Dnik

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commissioner_for_Science_and_Research

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directorate-General_for_Research_(European_Commission)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directorate-General_Joint_Research_Centre_(European_Commission)

As the ministry of defence’s chief scientific advisor Prof. Mark Welland provides direction to the MoD’s research and development, which has an annual budget of £2.6 billion.

http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/AboutDefence/People/SeniorOfficials/ChiefScientificAdviser.htm

Although church attendance has dropped, the Church of England still carries much influence with the Archbishop’s opinions well publicised by the press and evaluated by politicians. As someone who is perceived by the public as standing up for moral rights, his views are important in influencing public views on scientific endeavour. Dr Williams has issued statements about creationism, teaching of science in schools and genetic and embryonal research. In 2008 he said that “Man playing God is not a problem about science. It’s a problem about our decisions about the results of science and we shouldn’t be so much afraid of science as we should about our own inability to have a clear moral perspective on these matters.” This reflects statements made by the Pope about protecting the humanity of individuals.

www.archbishopofcanterbury.org