Good evening everybody. Welcome to our Enlightenment lecture for 2016. Our lecturer tonight is Quentin Cooper. The title is Scientists Change the World, Why Can't They Change Their Images?
and I'll say a little bit more about him in a minute, but let me say a little bit about our Enlightenment lectures. They are our flagship public lecture series. in which we invite outstanding figures to reflect back on and then from the 18th century Enlightenment, whose heartland was here in Edinburgh to today. This Enlightenment lecture is also one of our series of public lectures called Our Changing World, which is now in its seventh year. In that series, we typically get colleagues from within.
the university, some external guests, to discuss global challenges that face society, including climate change, food supply, medicine, global health, social identities and ethnic minorities here and elsewhere. And a reasonably significant focus in the last two or three years has been how Scotland fits or doesn't within the UK and the UK within the EU. What we try to do in those lectures is to bring different disciplinary perspectives to bear on those various challenges and to showcase the outstanding work that goes on in this university. So in this semester we have this lecture theatre filled every week with staff, students, members of the public, friends of the university. There are about 60 of them now.
our Changing World lectures available for you to view online. So if your interest is piqued tonight, there's much more available for you there. And one of the, I think, more remarkable features of this series is that it's also an undergraduate course available to students across the university, designed to allow students an opportunity to think and experience beyond their... home disciplines and I think there are 99 students enrolled on that course and a good number of them are here tonight.
I hope all of them are here tonight. This series has been put together by Mayank Dutia from the Deanery of Biomedical Sciences. It's been supported by our Department of Social Responsibility and Sustainability and we have student volunteers from the Edinburgh University Students Association.
So thank you. thanks to all of them. Thanks to Quentin Cooper.
It's great to have him here as this year's Our Changing World and Enlightenment lecturer. Quentin has had a distinguished career as a broadcaster, journalist and science communicator over many years and perhaps most widely known for his acclaimed Material World science programme on Radio 4, which he presented for... lots of years, 14 years through to 2013. He's a regular contributor to many science, technology, arts and entertainment programs on radio and TV for the BBC and other places and I'm delighted to recall that three years ago we gave the due recognition for all of that work with an honorary doctorate for Quentin. for his contribution to the public understanding of science and engineering.
That, as part of our School of Chemistry's tercentenary celebrations. It's one of the younger subjects at this university. Quentin's also received many plaudits and awards for his work, was made an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2012 but my favourite description is the one given to him by The Times which has called him the world's most enthusiastic man.
So, with that to live up to, Quentin, scientists change the world, why can't they change their image? Thank you very much. Thank you, Shelley. So thank you Charlie and thank you Professor Dottier and everyone who's given me a very entertaining day today wandering around, talking to science communicators, seeing what's going on at King's Buildings which I hadn't been to for 25 years, still pretty much the same and it's a real pleasure to be here.
back here also in George Square Theatre where I saw many fine bands. One or two brilliant films and I think at least one lecture when I was here a long time ago. So here's a question for you which we'll come back to in the not too...
There's not much interaction, but there's a little bit here. Just have this thought in the back of your mind, who is your favourite screen scientist? We'll come back to that. And I also want to, being a journalist, I want to be fairly topical. I don't know if you saw last week, just on Thursday, there's a big new launch from BBC Learning in combination with the Wellcome Trust, and there's something called Terrific Scientific to try and get more young children to engage with science.
And I was particularly struck by the bubble way up there, which you probably can't read, but it's an amazing statistic that fewer than 50... 15% of 10 to 14 year olds have any interest in becoming a scientist. And however rambling and discursive and all over the shop this talk is tonight, bear that in mind because eventually I'm hoping to get back to that point as well.
And possibly also to address the majesty that is this man, Michael Gove, and his famous quote, I think people have had enough of experts. Which is effectively saying experts, what do they know? And it's like, how did we come to this situation in the world where people think like that? Yes, exactly.
About expertise. What is it that makes experts and knowledge, and particularly scientific knowledge, that you can embody it, you can know it, but you're somehow seen as not being somebody to be trusted? So, whoops, go back. So, as Charlie mentioned, I present fairly regularly the BBC World Service programme, The Forum, and for many, which is a great discussion programme, well worth listening to, and for many years...
I presented Material World on Radio 4, and Charlie's already plugged that there's maybe 60 previous Enlightenment lectures. Well, if you're really bored, there's, I think, 350 old Material Worlds you can plough through for reasons that really defy all knowledge. Now, as part of this, it has been my great privilege down the years to talk to all manner of scientists.
Most weeks of my life, I've been meeting four, five, six, seven different scientists of all kinds, from researchers at the beginning of their career to people who are world-class scientists. world-acknowledged experts. Now I know what you're thinking at this point, is he just going to be showing slides of himself? No. I'd like you to focus to the person standing to my left in the photograph.
I'm hoping you'll recognise that as Stephen Hawking, who I would say has a major claim to be the world's most recognisable scientist these days. And I've worked with Stephen a couple of times as a sort of double act, playing straight man to him, because he actually is a very, if you've seen him live, he's very funny. But he's also somebody who's very... aware of his media image.
He's been on Star Trek, he's been in The Simpsons. You can also get a Stephen Hawking action figure. There's even a Stephen Hawking Lego kit. Not actually an official one, but a Stephen Hawking Lego kit out there. And there's even this as well, which is an example of Stephen Hawking's image being used to illustrate the inverse square law of gravitational attraction.
two Marilyn Monroe's are four times more attractive than one. Now you might think, is this in slightly dodgy taste? Except it's from Stephen's own book, A Briefer History of Time. There is nobody more aware of the image of Stephen Hawking and its power than Stephen Hawking himself. He's aware that he is a science icon.
And this kind of got me thinking about, well, what is it that we're attracted to? What is it that we think of when we think of scientists? And it sent me kind of scurrying back in time over half a century.
to the work of this woman, Margaret Mead, the great social anthropologist. And she had this very simple idea back in 1957 of getting kids to draw scientists. And this is what became the classic paper, Image of the Scientist Among High School Students. And then it's been evolved into what's now normally known as the Draw a Scientist test.
And obviously, in modern parlance, it does what it says on the tin. You just get usually children, but sometimes adults, and just say draw a scientist and you usually get something a bit like this or this or this. You'll notice An excess of buttons as a feature. I particularly like this one drawn by an American child. I don't know if you can quiet the resolutions high enough, but it says Professor Bob Mad Doc.
And what I particularly like about it is the uncanny resemblance to Robert Winston, Lord Winston. It is unbelievable similarity. And it's like the child didn't know.
So is Robert conforming to a science stereotype? And as I say this, I'm also aware that... Professor Winston is a previous enlightenment lecturer here as well, so I say it with all due deference to the master, but it's interesting to me.
So these images, and you can find scores, hundreds of these things, and I've gone to schools and got children to draw them, and it really doesn't matter where you go in most parts of the world, the same patterns occur. There are variations. In Poland, you often get bottles of bowls in there as a bonus item. In Italy, a lot of scientists they draw have extra arms. I don't know why, but very reminiscent of Doctor Octopus from the Spider-Man cartoons as well.
Some of them are really beautiful and elaborate, like this drawing by a child from Uganda. I put the flags in to help you and also to make you remember which country it is, although of course then I have to try and remember what flag is for which country, which is interesting. Some of them are really simple, but they often convey the same image.
Not just the weirdness of the look, but something else. I've translated this for you, this is a Norwegian one. Danger. crazy research going on. So it's not just the way they look, it's what these scientists are up to.
They're not just taking risks, they're doing dangerous stuff as well. So I think this is nicely summed up by this one from New Zealand. And if you can read that, I am going to take over the world.
Exploding volcano, and then of course the thing all mad scientists need, a duck. Not entirely sure what that's doing in there as well. Now they're not all negative like that. In certain parts of the world you're much more likely to have a positive image. In Mauritius, it's not just scientists but particularly mathematicians are held in extremely high esteem.
So this mathematician is literally standing on top of the world and that thing in their hand is not a Coke can, it's a calculator. So maths is helping them solve the world's problems. And about once in every hundred drawings you get something extraordinary.
You get a woman. Almost always drawn by a girl, but it's really literally down at 1% of the drawings by boys and girls, men and women tend to be women. And even then, it's not always positive.
So this one from Trinidad, as you can see, basically for this girl, the girl who drew this, science boils down to two things. Filing and nitric acid. And when the filing gets too bad, you drink the nitric acid and you fall over.
Now you can also take this further, people have gone out there and they've interviewed children about their opinions about science. I won't go through all these but there's a couple of very nice ones in here that I particularly like. A scientist bald and has hair coming out the sides of his head.
Scientists live in their own world and the rest of society puts them there. That's from an eight-year-old. You always get this stuff about weird experiments and bottles and chemicals and I like this one in the corner here and then he goes off, he takes a potion, he takes an animal, maybe a mouse.
and transforms it into a hamster, which is amazing. And then he has his hair raised straight because every time he tries an experiment, it goes wrong. And then he's burned and his hair's raised because of fear. So this idea of kind of daring but incompetence, of risk but also going wrong, this seems to run through very commonly. And for those who want it, I think this might be the only graph in my whole talk, which I feel slightly embarrassed about in an Enlightenment lecture, but I'll get away with it.
You can see how it breaks down across far and away what kids and adults draw are chemists. Chemistry may be this new science for Edinburgh, as Charlie referred to, but in kind of hardcore perceptual terms, it's what people associate with science. It's the test tubes, it's that look as well.
And people have done analysis, and these are the recurring themes, glasses, lab coat, funny hair, weird smile, facial hair, robotic features and scars. Particularly common worldwide, but I'm not quite sure why, all these bubbling and curiously shaped glassware, and then my favourite, the men are frequently bearded. So, on a positive note, at least the women aren't. And the strange thing is, here is 1957, Margaret Mead, the scientist, wears a white coat and works in a laboratory.
He's elderly or middle-aged, wears glasses, he's small, he may be bald, he may be unkempt, stooped or tired, surrounded by equipment test tubes. So we are nearly 60 years later and the description she was saying that these things broke down to has hardly changed at all. And the way it is 1950 think about how much the world has changed 1957 that was the year Sputnik was launched round about now I think in 1957 you look now and this is a beautiful image I found the other day this is It is a drawing, but the number of dots is right. These are the current number of satellites in orbit around planet Earth, which I think beautifully shows the way the world's changed.
But we're also aware of how we have changed in relationship to technology. Back to our old friend Robert Winston. If you saw his TV series, How Science Changed the World, but this was various ways. that science has changed the world in the last 50 years. Even in my own sphere of being a broadcast journalist, it's amazing.
So I'm still using a microphone, pretty much like I used to use, but when I started I had a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder with quarter inch tape. I'd go out and... interview people on. Then it moved up to the Sony Pro, so onto a cassette.
Then it moved onto the little Discman carrying a mini disc. So these aren't just new machines, these are new formats. Then onto a DAT, digital audio tape, and currently onto, straight onto a chip, effectively, so you're recording onto a hard medium.
And even then, this is my actual Zoom H4, but this is now fairly outmoded as well. But in one notch, it's a little bit not that long lifetime, to have gone through five different formats. That shows the speed of technological change. We kind of all know this in whatever it is.
You can think about phones, you can think about anything. We even think in terms of ourselves and how we've been changed along with technology. I think this is rather nicely illustrated by this cartoon.
So we're aware that we've changed and yet the weird thing is what people drew back in 1990 or 1980 or 1970 or 1960 is very similar to what kids are drawing today. The image of the scientists has remained fixed. So I want to spend a bit of time thinking about why that might be, why this image is so fixed for various reasons. So we come back to this question, who is your favourite screen scientist?
This was asked at the British Association meeting. a few years ago and they did an online poll. Slight digression here. For those who don't know it, the British Association was the world's first publicly facing scientific body. So you've got the Royal Society and the Royal Institution and other august scientific bodies, but the BA was set up with the idea of engaging with the public.
And here is, I think, one of their first meetings and here's an early book about their meetings called Gentlemen of Science. And it actually highlights a problem that they had. They weren't really quite sure what to call all these people who turned up at the meeting. You've got all these biologists and geologists and physicists and they lacked a word for it.
And what this means is if you actually look in the Oxford English Dictionary and look up scientists, you will find, 1834, a curious illustration of this result may be observed in the want of any name by which we can designate the students of the knowledge of the material world, like the fact that my program is getting a name check in 1834, we are informed that this difficulty was felt very oppressively by the members of the British Association at their meetings, blah, Savants was felt to be rather assuming. Some ingenious gentleman, it was actually William Hewell, proposed that by analogy with artist, they might form scientist. So that right there is the very first use of the word scientist.
And what I particularly like about it is if you think about it by analogy with the word artist. Well, actually, technically then, you should go, if arts leads to artist, then science should lead to scientist. With a single...
but it doesn't. We've become scientists because we back-formed it from artists. So the tea of scientists is on permanent loan from the arts.
And the great divide between artists and scientists isn't as great as you might think. And also, if we're talking about images of scientists, go right back to those early meetings of the British Association. This is a cartoon from Punch in 1865, kind of very much getting the idea of scientists all being in a slightly detached way.
And in 1880, Charles Dickens wrote the Mudfog Papers, not as often serialized. as Bleak House, but it's worth reading and it's a very direct satire of the proceedings of the British Association and of scientists. And it's one of the things that helps set that idea of scientists as being in ivory towers.
So let's come back to this question. Who is your favourite screen scientist? I don't know if it's allowable in an Enlightenment lecture, but it's a good chance if anybody would like to share.
So the BA wanted to know who people's favourite television science presenters were. Anybody got any names who want to volunteer? Hand there. Fine, excellent. And a favourite of my six-year-old.
And my wife, rather more disturbingly. Anyone else? Excellent choice.
Jacob Bronowski. Chris Lintott. Great, I'll stop you there.
Excellent, all good suggestions. Shall we see what we came up with in the online poll? Number 10. Hello.
Dr. Frankenstein. This is a poll of about 50,000 people involving the BBC as well. Number nine. Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers films. Number eight.
Dr. Frankenfurter from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. A film I think I first watched at the Edinburgh University Film Society. Number seven, Doctor Strangelove, Peter Sellers.
You might notice a slight theme here. Number six, hooray! Our first television character rather than film, and also our first female and our first positive all in one, Dr Dana Scully from The X-Files.
Number five, Doc Emmet Brown. Doc Brown from the Back to the Future films. Great Scott.
Number four, Q. I've put both Q's in there just to be safe because they're there. I prefer the Desmond Llewellyn one, but if you like, there's the alternative in the little corner there as well. Number three, Doctor Who.
And again, I've given you a choice of Tennant or Capaldi. I think the others don't really count as far as I'm concerned. So now we're into the top two. Number two, Mr Spock.
Oddly, they're pretty much the only one on the list who's not a doctor, and yet many people often refer to him as Dr Spock, who is of course a genuine real child psychologist. And top of the list, Dr Bunsen, Honeydew and Beaker. Now I would like to point out, if you go back to that top three, Dr Who, Mr Spock, Dr Bunsen, Honeydew and Beaker, they're not even human.
Do we have an image problem with scientists? I suspect we do if the top three are not even human. Now, at the time when they did this, the British Association's president, Dame Julia Higgins, rather sweetly said this. However, it was countered by this. From Kermit.
That's the official Kermit quote. So I think it's a nice extension from that. Now I want to go back.
Number 10 on the list is the oldest film on the list. 1931, the original James Whale version of Frankenstein. It still gives us a lot of the Frankenstein.
as to how the creature looks. But there was another film that just failed to make the top ten that I think is just as important. 1927, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, which features this very powerful, charismatic, but mad scientist, Rotwang. And a lot of people, and you'll find a lot of film books, will say that Rotwang was actually modelled on perhaps the most famous scientist in the world at the time, and the first scientist to really be a global celebrity in his own lifetime, Albert Einstein.
And you can see, if you look at the photographs, there is a little bit of a resemblance there, and that's led to this theory. However, you look at Einstein in 1927, this is a photo from the Solvay conference, and actually he's rather more trim and dandy. dapper and looking rather neater back then. What's known is that Einstein was a big fan of Metropolis. So there's an alternative theory, which I rather like, that actually he saw this all-powerful, charismatic scientist, and rather than Rotwang being based on Einstein, Einstein based himself on Rotwang, which I think is rather nice.
Now, can I just check, because obviously there's an audience of various ages in here. Does everybody recognise, hang on, I'm going to do that, there's a little animation here, so I'm going to let it work its way. Yeah, thank you very much.
Does everybody recognise this figure? This has been the guy who came up with E equals MC squared. If I can just get the lights up for a second.
And can I get hands up? If you do, stick your hand up. If you don't, be honest and don't stick your hand up.
Okay. Oh, camera's coming round to catch an exciting hand-up moment here. Fine.
I don't want to ruin the moment for the cameraman. Fine. Okay, you got it?
Fine. So I'll say the majority of you. Okay. You're wrong.
This is the guy who came up with the equals mc squared. And I think this is a very important thing that feeds into our problem with the image of scientists. The Einstein in 1905 had his three great papers, his Annus Mirabilis.
He was 26 years old. But the image... we always have is of the old Einstein, taken in his 60s when he stuck out his tongue for a press photographer who was there. And that's what tends to be evoked and that's why the image of scientists and people dress up, they dress up, it's old crazy.
It's not the people at the peak of their lives. of their creativity and I think that's one of the things that feeds in. And then going back to the Frankenstein, there's a lovely children's drawing from France here where the two get slightly blurred.
Albert Einstein, Einstein and Frank Einstein have become merged in the child's mind. But they're all things that are there. Now we can go even further. This is not just a gratuitous excuse to get a picture of George Clooney into the presentation. Charlie did mention it, but one of my other lives, I've also been a film critic, and I used to be a film critic on Five Live and Radio 4 and Radio 2, and I still have a strong interest in movies.
And my favourite film guide, sadly... longer published is the timeout guide because at the back of the book you can look up films not just by title or director or stars you can look them up by subject matter as well so you look up scientists you get this So science and scientists, very limited selection, but even then, not all positive. A Beautiful Mind, Russell Crowe plays a mathematician who goes mad and starts imagining people. Bit of a spoiler if you've not seen the film there.
Medicine Man, Sean Connery does unconvincing non-Scottish accent in Jungle and goes slightly crazy. And there's lots of others. What's the other one as well? There's Flatliners, medical students turn off their life signs for kicks.
But you notice it also says, see also mad scientists. But if you look up mad... scientist you get that And that's the problem right there, that scientists represent a very convenient stereotype, a very convenient villain. I think particularly in a politically correct world, Hollywood doesn't want to have a villain who's from a particular country because they won't get sales in that particular country. So often you will have a mad scientist in there because they represent power and difference and creativity and genius, but also not like us.
And of course it's reinforced by that. And you can find... Oh, hang on. You can find... So many movies out there.
Each and every one of the movies here, and I can find you a hundred more, each of these movies has a mad scientist as the principal nemesis in the movie. So it's reinforced again and again and again. And then, of course, TV feeds into this as well.
Much as I'm sure we all love Big Bang Theory, Dr. Sheldon Cooper is not really a role model you want to aspire to be. I would say Breaking Bad, fun as it is. He's Walter White again, he starts off well. Doctor Who, of course, pretty much its stock in trade is mad scientist as baddies.
There's loads of different mad scientist baddies. And then, of course, you've got from The Simpsons, and you've got my favourite of all, Professor Farnsworth from Futurama. And again, they are fun, but they are trading on what we know, and they are reinforcing what they know, so they all feed into it. Now, I'm sure you might say, well, hang on, not all scientists on TV are mad and crazy.
And, of course, there are various examples, but you think about it. think, that kid, why is that kid doing that? That's because he's seen those kind of programs.
And even if you get to the positive ones, you know, your CSIs and your houses and your silent witnesses and your various Holby cities and medical dramas, it's a surprising analysis, but somebody's done this work in the States. They've looked at, this is based mostly on American TV, I should say, but they've looked at them. So even counting medics, less than 2% of characters in TV dramas are scientists.
Actually, I don't think that's so much of a problem because actually mathematics... dramatically, for most countries, about somewhere between 1 and 3% of people could be defined as being scientists. So 2% in drama isn't that bad.
But 10% of those TV scientists get killed. That's not very good. 5% kill others. Also, scientists, warning to you, that's bad as well. And then no other, oh, sorry, no other occupational group is more likely to kill or be killed.
So if you're watching a scientist in a show, the other thing as well is if you watch scientists on TV. as well, it's almost certain that if they're in a show they'll be there to do science. It's very rare they're in there for any other reason.
The medic is in there because at some point they're going to have to save someone's life. If someone's a mathematician, at some point they're going to do the calculation that lets you work out the dinosaurs are about to escape from Jurassic Park. There's always a reason they're in there to be scientific.
In fact, there's only one example I can think of, of a recurring character in a reasonably long running series who is a scientist, who the science isn't really... really important to and who doesn't die. If anybody wants to volunteer that name, speak now.
Go on, be brave. I think Dexter's a little bit naughty, I think you'll find. I think he kills the odd person, so it's good that you, interesting that you hold him up as a positive role model. And if you sidle up to me after the talk, I will sidle away very quickly, but no, I wouldn't. count Dexter.
Now the only example I can think of, so somebody who's... Well Jimmy Neutron again, he's brilliantly creative. I'm trying to say whether science is incidental.
So as a counter example, Hollywood is full of films where the protagonist will be an architect, but they won't at any point build anything or they won't even go to a site. It's just to establish that they've got kind of some sort of solid job. But if someone's a scientist in a movie or TV, they do science.
The only exception I can think of... Is Ross in France? And if your best hope is Ross in Friends, again, you are in deep trouble.
But he happens to work, he's a paleontologist, but paleontology is not critical to his character. And then it's reinforced from other areas. We know these characters, they're not just necessarily mad, but absent-minded professors. So you have Professor Calculus from Tintin, my favourite from childhood, Professor Brainstorm, the brilliant Heath Robinson drawings. I'm still using the trouser elevator to this day.
There's all these kids'books featuring mad scientists. and each of these I've chosen here, and there's scores more I could find, each of these are books from a series as well, so there's a whole series of these stories, where again, you're learning it might be male, it might be female, it might be slightly jokey, but it's still the idea of the scientist as being outside and different from the rest of us, and not entirely to be trusted. Going back to classics of literature, it's there. So Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and it is Jekyll, by the way. Then you've also got the modern ones as well.
The Mad Scientist Guide to World Domination. Lovely series of short stories. And that's in the kind of mainstream stuff. But if you get into the pulp area, well, for 30 years, you know, there were magazines like this one.
Also, all your kind of Marvel comics, your baddies in your Marvel comics were often Doctor Dooms or other kind of slightly crazy scientists. Again, this idea of reinforced from every corner. Oh, this is new.
This is the current issue. You can buy this. This is the autumn 2016 of the Mad Scientist Journal.
It's full of top... tips for being a mad scientist out now. But you know, video games will reinforce it, I won't go through them all, they'll have the nemesis in there, mad scientist. You can get mad scientist kits to go to parties and if you haven't got the money for a mad scientist kit there are websites that will tell you how to make your own mad scientist costumes. There's a Lego, beautiful, expensive Lego mad scientist laboratory you can buy, which my six year old wants.
Mad scientist card games, mad scientist board games, if there are any board games. is in the audience. This one's designed by Donald Vaccarino, who's the guy who also did Dominion, one of the world's most successful board games. But again, all playing off that stereotype.
I discovered recently there's an online mad scientist fruit machine. I'm not quite sure what they're going for there, but it exists. And then this is my little six-year-old Hal. And yes, he is named after the slightly mad computer in 2001, who on his fifth birthday got his very first mad science. scientist kit.
It's only suitable for eight-year-olds, but he's still out there now. But the idea of not just getting a science kit, but a mad scientist kit, of saying the way to attract people towards science is by emphasising the madness. This is only reinforcing these stereotypes.
And these things go back years. This is an advert I found from a 1960s magazine, the Mad Mad Scientist Laboratory. You know, Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hud Frankenstein, be a mad scientist in your own science lab.
And there's loads of examples of adverts. featuring scientists. I'm just going to give you two because I particularly like this one because I like the logic. You don't need to be a mad scientist to create a great lawn.
Has anybody ever suggested you need to be a mad scientist to create? What is the logic here? Is it just that they had an artist who could do quite a moderate Frankenstein?
I don't know what's going on. It's just a very gratuitous image. But my favourite is actually a photograph I took probably 10 years ago at Waverley Station and it just struck me that it but it's all there in this one advert. It's an advert for your cult. So I'll just give you a second to process it.
But it's brilliant because it's simultaneously saying, trust this product because our founder was a scientist, but it's also a bit weird because our founder was a scientist. You know, normality is represented by the woman consumer on that side. So it's like, one level, we trust you to come up with these amazing ideas.
At another level, you're not like us. It's that distancing thing. It's like people who should be kept outside the enclosure.
We want your work, we just don't want you. And this is a part of proper... part of the problem of the image.
And even more simply, just put the word scientist into Google or, my BBC training compels me to say, other search engines are available, although nobody can remember what they are. So just put the word scientist into Google. And this is the very first thing you will find. Seems innocuous enough, the description's fine, but look at that picture.
It's a lot of lab coats and no faces. It's all from the back. This is depersonal.
I'm sure it's quite accidental, but the image they're conveying is not of people, it's of just people, it's of things wearing white coats doing work. Even more striking, do an image search for Google. Now this used to be even more spectacular, but Google have recently, if you've noticed, they now have subcategories at the top of the screen, but it's still quite impressive what you'll find.
Look at what's in there. There's lots of positive images, but there's lots of these stereotypes, lots of these crazy looking guys in there, lots of really weird negative imagery. So you'll see the positives, but they are vastly outnumbered.
I must stop clicking too fast. Thank you. And these things will be there, they're reinforced.
And this is not looking up mad scientist, it's just putting the word scientist into an image search. And what I do when I travel for work is I usually find the local version of Google, and I find whatever that is. language is there and their word for scientist and I'll try and compare. So just by way of example here's Italian scienziato and again even more of the slightly crazy looking people.
There are some parts of the world where you find fewer but generally speaking it's very common. common that the word scientist by itself comes up with these images. Japan, you get a lot of images like this.
Russia, for some reason, you get monkeys in glasses. I don't know what it says about Putin's policy, but monkeys in glasses is very popular in Russia. So let's come back to the BA. Go forward a couple of years, till a couple of years ago.
So they've evolved the question. They made a bit of a goof, they realised. So they get rid of who is your favourite screen scientist and they very specifically ask who is your favourite science presenter on TV past or present.
And the BA has now also evolved to become the British Science Association, which is what it's called today. So here are what they found. I won't go through all the details.
Now I'll stop there on the first four. You should recognise all these pictures. Magnus Pike, Patrick Moore, Carol Vorderman, and the great James Burke. And I'm a big fan of James Burke.
He's one of the reasons I ended up being a science presenter. But just as an aside, since I'm here, I don't know if you know this story. But he was, for those who don't know, he was the kind of king of science presenters in the 1970s, 1980s.
He was the lead presenter on a lot of all the moonshot stuff. He was on the original Tomorrow's World. Brilliant presenter.
James Burke Connections, really one of the great TV programmes that started. stands alongside Carl Sagan's work. But there was a plan back in the early 1980s, I think, to de-centre the BBC and move their science up to different parts of the UK, possibly Manchester, possibly Scotland. James Burke was somewhat resistant to this. So here's his great line.
Which I think is rather nice. Just a nice little bit. Edinburgh Physics versus London Physics.
If there are any Edinburgh physicists in, you might argue that there is a difference with Edinburgh Physics. I don't know. But it's why it never happened. So let's get back to our countdown.
So the various people named, I won't go through the details, David Attenborough was number one. But what's significant about this poll, remember you were asked, favourite science presenter, past or present? was all the people who went, I don't know, I can't think of anyone.
53% of people could not name a single science presenter past or present. Now if you think of the quality of science... presenters we've got at the moment.
There's some brilliant TV science presenters around. You'll recognise most of these. Hannah Frye. Thank you. Hannah Frye.
It was worth doing that animation I think. Hannah Frye, Jim Al-Khalili, Dallas Campbell, Alice Roberts, Mark Miodownik. and of course the smiling Brian Cox.
There are some brilliant science presenters, but yet these people could not at the moment think of them. And my pet theory, which I've got no data to substantiate, is that unless they actually conform to the stereotype, even if people are giving a good presentation, they're not necessarily registering them as being a scientist. It's one of the reasons why Brian and Alice in particular always insist that when they present programs, they are addressed as professor. They're not just saying, look at me. saying that's to remind you that I'm a scientist and try and change the stereotype so I think these things are actually helping but if we still got 53% of people who can't spot it when you've got a scientist on TV and can't remember anybody clearly something's not right so what do we do about this final part of my talk you'll be glad to know is about a few ideas and I was delighted to see earlier today the quote I'm about to show you emblazoned on a wall in the Joseph Black Building at King's buildings.
While our knowledge is imperfect, it is apt to run into error, but experiment is the thread that will lead us out of the labyrinth. So it's a slight stretch. I thought I ought to have one Scottish Enlightenment figure in an Enlightenment lecture, so that's it Joseph, thank you very much.
But here's a few suggested experiments, and experiments that are currently running that I think are helping change the situation. For starters, Hollywood is actually helping now. There's still films that reinforce the stereotypes and plenty of villains you can think of.
of that do it, but we've also started to see more positive scientific role models. Big Hero 6 for kids is all about developing software and hardware and engineering and coming up with ideas and the joy of actual development. There's a lot of really nice imagery in there.
Obviously in your Marvel universe you've got your Bruce Banner who is the Hulk but he's mostly when he's not being the Hulk he's being a scientist. You've got your Tony Stark being the engineer. These are positive role models.
Probably biggest of all is Matt Damon as Mark Watney in The Martian. If you've read the book again... I've seen the film. Lots of really good, genuine science in those movies you can latch onto. I must have done six or seven different science radio pieces off the back of the Martian.
Even Sandra Bullock in Gravity is shown as being a scientist who is resourceful and cool. So it's a different kind of image of scientist. A scientist who is a member of society and you can empathise with, not the scientist as the outsider. Then there's things like this. There's all the websites and blogs and channels that are out there that are giving people more direct access to science.
science. The very act of having a website that tells you about how things work, that cuts out a lot of the middle stuff. You know you're not going to get the theory, you're going to get the explanation. IFL science, which given the seriousness of this lecture I will not de-acronymise, but IFL science has attracted a lot of people who would see it very directly as a way of getting straight to the science without any of the boring bits in between. So they've helped.
Even little things like Twitter. Now we've mentioned Jim Al-Khalili a couple of times. and this is an exchange on Twitter I particularly like.
So Jim tweeted this recently. Right, now that laughter may be from somebody who's got a mathematical... So somebody tweeted a response. Factorial 4 is 24. And Jim tweeted back...
Oh yeah, maths was never my strong point. No, I think this is really nice because it's three things. One, for the first time you have a level where you can have that level of interaction between the people you think of as being the starry science presenters and the general public. Secondly, it's Jim, he's starting, he's not doing something about physics, he's doing something about music, it's showing his interest. Jim is also a huge football fan, although tragically a fan of Leeds, which is very sad for him.
And third, but thirdly the fact he says maths was never my strong... point, that also helps shake the image of the all-powerful, all-knowing science. Jim is just a guy, he tweeted something, he made a mistake, big deal. I think that is helping humanise the science. For all the stereotype bits that we have about the glasses and the hair, one of the most dangerous, I think, is the bit that scientists sometimes cling to, the genius idea.
Genius is very off-putting, genius is very hard to aspire to. Being good at something, because you've worked hard, you can aspire to be. But being a genius, we think, I'm not a genius, so you're less likely to empathise.
of being a scientist. The imagery of scientists as well is very important. This is a slight tribute to the great Sir Harry Crota, who died early this year.
But this was his original, this was the image, the very arty shot he used to have as his publicity photo. And again, he's obscured by all the bits of lab equipment, as is traditional. And a few years ago, the National Portrait Gallery had this idea of taking scientists and taking them out of that context and shooting them in a different way. And there's lots of examples I shall just show you one that we see.
this is Harry's, but Harry wearing a short sleeve shirt, surrounded by little models that look like Christmas decorations, these are the C60 carbon buckyballs that he helped discover the format for. And even as much as you can see in the light there, it's as close as Harry ever gets to smiling. So again, change the image by using a different representation. Now even this can go slightly awry. A couple of years after that, there was an exhibition, pretty much the same idea, but to do it for young people.
younger scientists, so rather than the big stars. So let's get people show that scientists are actually young as well as old and female as well as male and we'll take them out to the lab, we won't shoot them in lab coats, we'll shoot them doing things that are vaguely to do with their research. So on the left you've got somebody who's working on wind turbines, in the middle, I don't know if you can see that, but they're in a wind tunnel because they're looking at acceleration and on the right looking at tensile forces in bubbles.
So the idea was to do this and it was a really nice exhibition. lots of young scientists shown in a really lively way. And the exhibition came to the Cheltenham Science Festival, which I'm on the advisory board for. And I was asked, would I like to write something about it for the Daily Telegraph? And I wrote this piece here, which, take it from me, brilliantly written, witty, incisive, all the things you'd expect from me.
But the key is the caption here, which I will blow up and blow up again. Remember, this is a piece about the problems with our perception and image of scientists that I've been asked to... to write and it appears in the Daily Telegraph and the caption is, a fresh look, youngsters examine the science of blah blah blah. So the picture editor for a piece about the problem with the image of scientists had looked at the pictures of scientists, could not compute that these were scientists and relabelled it as youngsters. So a piece that was meant to help only reinforced the stereotypes.
And I'll give you one more example of things that have gone wrong. This is the only video I'm going to show you. A couple of years ago, very well-intentioned, so it's a European directive, Women in Research and Innovation Unit, big project, which was called Science is a Girl Thing.
And very much trying to encourage more women, and particularly teenagers, to get into science. And this was how they did it. Oh, like that, but longer, I think.
Feet don't film me now. We'll go back and see if it was going to do it. What a spectacular own goal.
I particularly like the H-hydrogen. It's like I know a science word. It's in there. And it's well-intentioned. It's there, but in the end it reinforces stereotypes.
It's trading off all these old images. It's not doing any good to change these. I can see why they did it, but I think it was self-defeating and it's now quite hard to find that video.
you online. But other things that work, another good example is Centre for Life in Newcastle. It's something I'm very fond of. I don't know if you've ever been there, but it's a major research institution right in the middle of Newcastle that also has exhibitions.
exhibition space where they'll have very popular exhibitions about the science of Wallace and Gromit or dinosaurs or Doctor Who and even an ice rink some of the some of the year obviously when it's cold which it is most of the year in Newcastle and Hang on, I'm in Scotland, I can't do that joke. But it's great because actually I've gone up and chaired debates in Newcastle over a long period and I genuinely think you can feel a difference in the quality of Debates and there's a sense of ownership because in normally in most places if you go out into Edinburgh and suspect you say to people where's the nearest scientific research institute they don't know they might know where the roslin is they might have heard of something but generally speaking they're not going to be aware of where there's actual though they might point vaguely towards the university but newcastle's the sense that there is cutting edge work on stem cells and other things going on right there right close to the railway station and taxi drivers whoever are will talk about it in a very positive way so that's a great thing that i'm not dissing by the way of course the wonderful our dynamic earth which is great any kind of science center where people get to but having that thing where you get the scientists themselves right in front of people is really important. Then I also want to big up something I've been involved with now for 10-12 years which is Cape Farewell which is a project to get artists and scientists together to respond to climate change. There's also a youth element to it as well taking teenagers. Now what normally happens is you go on a voyage to somewhere where you can see the effects of climate change at first hand so often it's areas like we can see anywhere but particularly pronounced so you'll go to to bellwether areas like Greenland or Svalbard.
First voyage I went on, we tried to circumnavigate Spitsbergen at the wrong time of year. We had artists on board, we had scientists on board who were trying to make a point because we were going around Spitsbergen in a wooden two-masted light ship that if we got stuck, we would be crushed by the ice. And there was a point on the voyage where the ice started closing in and one of the artists was sort of talking to me and they kind of divided into groups at this point. The artists tended to be quite lean and wiry and smoke quite a lot.
And the scientists tended to be slightly larger, less prone to smoke, more prone to eat. And one of the artists took me aside and was saying, I'm slightly worried we're going to get marooned here. And I said, well, if we do, we do. And he said, well, if we do, we're eating the scientists first. But actually, after a while, as we got further into the voyage, they began to actually realise, the artists began to realise...
scientists weren't just people being creative and creative, they were having to be incredibly creative to get their equipment to work in these sub-zero temperatures, trying to get measurements of salinity and temperature when the boat's rocking in a force-eight gale. And the scientists began to realise that the artists were also listening to what they were doing and picking up ideas. One of the projects on that first voyage I was on was somebody had been listening to one of the geologists talking about what happens when glaciers retreat, and they were saying about the land that was exposed. He said, but what if the glacier goes into the... into the water like it does round here sometimes.
Well, sometimes they said it can expose a bit of land. A little island. So you're saying that on this voyage we might find an island?
that's not on any map. And they said, well, I suppose so. And from that point onwards, this particular artist, whose name is Alex Hartley, was determined to find an uncharted island.
And he eventually found one that was probably about the size of this room. And he made a big point of landing on the island and claiming it, taking photographs. He dressed up in full mountaineering gear to get lots of nice imagery done. And he turned it into a full-scale, I think half-million-pound Arts Council-funded project called Nowhere Island, brought bits of... the land back to the UK, exhibited it, asked people to become members of it and did a lot to raise climate change.
Now the scientists had just seen that as a data point. He saw it as an artistic opportunity. It's very interesting.
Then of course one of the most basic things you can do, which I think is really useful, a café scientifique. Just getting a scientist into an environment, preferably where the audience isn't just all people who are pro-science, people who just happen to be in the café or bar and ask questions. I've chosen this particular example.
This is Sir Michael Atiyah. And as you possibly know, there is no Nobel Prize for mathematics. There's a long and hilarious story that Nobel's wife had had an affair with a mathematician, so he set up the whole prizes just deliberately, but it's apocryphal, I think. But anyway, a couple of years ago, the Norwegians decided that since there wasn't a Nobel Prize for mathematics, they'd create one. So they created something called the Arbel Prize.
It's the world's biggest prize for mathematics, bigger than the Fields Medal. And one of the first recipients was Sir Michael Atiyah. And I was asked over to kind of do a café scientifique with him in a... bar in Oslo and I said fine and I talked to Michael beforehand and I rang him up and he said it's great but I can't possibly talk about my mathematics, it's far too complicated. I said Michael I'm a very experienced broadcaster, journalist, I think you'll find we can talk to me a bit and I'm sure we can find something and he talked to me for about half an hour and yeah he was right, we just could not, we couldn't talk about his mathematics, it was way too complicated.
I thought we're in big trouble, we're going to be a bar in Norway with him but actually once we got in. there I asked a few basic questions about what's a day like for a mathematician. How do you know if you're the world expert?
How do you know when you've got something wrong? And then other people started joining in and actually people were really curious and it's an example of how this works. People just don't get a chance to meet some mathematician and when they do get a chance you actually realise human curiosity often takes over from the human fear of the unknown and we begin to get this. And by the end of it, you know, he'd made friends in the bar. According to Michael there were people there he then met up with in later life.
as well. So things like that can really make a difference. FameLab.
Some of you here will know it but I've been involved with FameLab since before the very beginning. It's now the world's largest science communication competition. There are versions of it in over 30 countries. NASA runs its own version of FameLab.
CERN has its own version of FameLab. There'll be a Scottish final of FameLab on January the 7th which I'm coming back to Scotland to host. And it's brilliant because people have to stand up, they have to talk about science for three years.
minutes and then take questions from judges afterwards. But what's great is they have to do it without PowerPoint and without props apart from what they can carry on and they will talk about anything. And as a result of this, and because it's always filmed, there's now a vast body of videos out there of people talking about every subject under the sun for three minutes.
And they're almost always young and they're from every country, well not every country, but loads of different countries. It's helping change the image of scientists by showing this is what scientists look like, young, old, male, female, from from all over the world. Even more simply, just before I came here today, I was out in King's Building, and I was talking to someone who has just won this area award for this, and this is called, I'm a Scientist, Get Me Out of Here.
I don't know if Megan, you're with us, are you? Okay, well, she might have come. She's a scientist, she's got out here.
But she's just won this thing, and it's very much, it's kind of done as a, kind of very much in the model of these kind of game show talent shows, but you get scientists to. talk to kids in classrooms and answer their questions and relate to them and then if you succeed at that you get a prize and get to go on and do more science communication work. And again it's getting young kids to realise, oh god that's what a scientist is like, it's changing their perceptions. And then finally, finally you'll be glad to know, a slight bit of deception on my part, those images I showed you right at the start of the talk, those drawings by scientists, drawings by children of scientists, what I didn't tell you was that only a few years ago somebody had an idea. What if we get children to draw scientists, and then we get them to meet scientists, and then we see what they drew afterwards?
Some of the drawings I showed you, there is a before and after. This is what I'll finish with. This one evolves into this one. I don't know if you can quite see it, but he's saying, Hello, I am a regular person.
Which is maybe trying a bit hard. But at least it's an improvement and a change of colour scheme as well. This one, I like this one. It's a slightly blurry drawing, I'm afraid, but I love it because this one turns into this, which is very Van Gogh.
But it's an astronomer out looking at the starry sky at night. This one becomes this one. The shocking realisation that a scientist can be not just a woman, but a fairly smiley, happy woman.
This one, the one I showed you, is a rare girl one. Into this one. This is very important.
One of the part of the stereotype of scientists is always the loner. And one of the great strengths of science is it's collaborative, that you work with other people, that there are teams. the great joy of science is being part of a gang.
But the perception of scientists is the loner. It's the lone, mad genius, not the fun team player. And I know, obviously, when I say scientists can have relationships, I realise it's not compulsory, and there are probably people who don't, so I'm not trying to have a go at you, but often scientists have relationships.
And finally, this one became this one. Good reaction. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Have you seen the movie Still Alice? No. I think that it might meet all of your specifications because it's about Julianne Moore playing a character who's it's about her emotions and her science is incidental to the plot but it is in there and she's the main character.
Right, okay. Yes. This is the one about what yes, it's about somebody who's dementia.
Yeah, sorry Alzheimer's I think yeah Yeah, I'll look I'll look up for that one Okay, who's next Yeah other movie suggestions also appreciate it's fine So there's probably a bunch of scientists in this room or people training to become scientists. What can we do apart from just communicating our science to a public audience to change the perception? Do tell us what you are.
What kind of scientist I am? I'm a climate change scientist and ecologist studying climate change in the Arctic. I honestly think it is a very simple message at the end, but actually going out there and being whoever you are, whatever your interests are, and showing the image is of a scientist is somebody who just does science. And not only just does science, does science often does a whole range of science. One of the problems is this word scientist itself.
Most people here aren't scientists. You will be a climate change scientist rather than a broad spectrum scientist. But you will meet people, if you say you're a scientist, and they'll say, oh, I've just heard there's been an earthquake in New Zealand.
Can you explain that to me? Or can you tell me about genetics? And actually, scientists are allowed to be ignorant about other areas of science, and quite frequently are. But the public's perception is the all-purpose scientist.
I've seen it, and I've had situations myself when I've been on radio programs. and people have asked me a question about areas way beyond my area of knowledge just because I'm a scientist. And I've seen very skilled professionals, including Robert Winston, occasionally being dragged away from their area of expertise because the perception is you are a scientist, you are all-knowing, I can ask you anything about science and you will know it.
Now, that's not an argument for saying I am an expert on the three-spotted leaf butterfly and you've asked me a question about the four-spotted leaf butterfly. How dare you? Obviously, you have to be able to be a little bit flexible, but I think that idea that scientists go way beyond their areas, we need to snuff that.
We're allowed to know things and not know things, and to go out there and talk about relationships, talk about interested sport, talk about other things as well. One of the things I could have shown you more of the kids'drawings, but one of the things that regularly occurs is they'll show somebody wearing a football kit or something like this because the scientist has talked about how their deep and passionate love of Grimsby Town. He said picking his hometown team for no particular reason. Follow-up? Following on from that previous point, some of us are part scientists, but we're also lots of other things.
For example, I'm a medical writer, so I'm a scientist, I'm a writer, I'm an editor, I'm a project manager. And there will be lots and lots of people who have jobs that involve science, but people probably don't think of them as specifically scientists. And some of those jobs involve fairly boring looking things like sitting in front of a computer. So there's nothing very... exceptional for people to draw if you ask them to draw a scientist.
Do you think part of the problem is that people latch on to the unusual or the weird rather than the kind of normal type things that... would be associated with lots of things other than science? Well, I think the start is, you know, we lead busy lives. It's not like people's priority out there is going to be trying to correct their misperceptions about science. This is something nice and easy, it's very convenient, and we're lazy.
reinforce it, we feed on it. And the media then lazily reinforces it as well, so it carries on. To try and change it, the more interactions we have with real people who we can show, yes, you're part artist, part scientist, you're part medical writer, you're part this.
Why can't we actually show who we are in all its wonderful... wonderful glory and a complexity. We don't have the same kind of problems. If you ask people to do it, there are versions of this where people try and draw architects and people try and draw shop workers and they're a bit kind of woolly, but scientists, they've got a very strong idea.
I'm trying to get us to a state of enhanced woolliness. I want a bit more randomness in what people are able to draw because the problem is when they have this strong idea, anything that doesn't fit the stereotype gets rejected. Further to that, I'd also say I think there's a problem with science. itself that most people a lot of people say I'm not interested in science. You say, what are you interested in?
I'm interested in football. Okay, let me talk to you about floodlight technology, underpitch technology, football technology, tactical movements, manageable. There's loads of science in there.
I'm interested in opera. Right, let me talk to you. Whatever you're interested in, there is a scientific element. And people will often know a lot of that stuff and they'll think it's interesting, interesting, interesting.
When they get to the tough stuff, they'll go, oh, that's the science. Science is the bit that's hard. And we need to get them to understand science is the bit that's easy and the bit that's hard. don't want to get rid of the hard stuff, that's an important part of science, but we want people to be able to relate to the whole spectrum of it and see that the fun stuff is science as well.
Please. Hiya. I was wondering if you took a look at this from the other point of view of a member of the public who has that inkling of curiosity and would like to go and seek out scientists.
What advice would you give to someone like that? Oh, what? You mean somebody who's a scientific stalker? Perhaps not. More along the lines of a kid who heard about something in school and wants to go look it up.
up more or find an expert in that, what advice would you give that child? Okay, okay. I kind of get the idea.
So I'm straight, but I'm sci-curious. Right, okay. I think there are various routes out there. So things like we saw the I'm a scientist, get me out of here competition that helps. There are loads of events.
There'll be a lot of people in this room who are involved in outreach work of various kinds, and there are various opportunities. Again, part of, I think, one of the problems we have is we talk about how do we get chickens... excited about science. It's like, no, no, no. Kids are excited about science.
They're born excited about science. We manage to put them off by a combination of the way the media portrays science and by sometimes boring them through bad lessons and bad teaching and bad curricula. And then we remind them about why science is exciting and we have to reinvigorate their interest later on in life.
So if we can just keep them engaged, I don't think it's that hard. Science is a never-ending journey into the unknown. We are always attracted to the unknown and we're also slightly scared about it. the unknown.
If we can play them off the stuff that's exciting. We don't know this. I think we should talk more to children and maybe even to adults about the unknowns in science.
If you tell them, I've just discovered a new way, a new property of mitochondrial DNA, you might get them interested. If you can say, I'm trying to find out this, they can go, oh yeah, I don't know that either. It's a bonding thing if we talk about the unknown.
My great belief is it's not that hard. After 13, 14 years, I've been able to do it. I've years of doing the material world every week we had people say to us, why do you have a science show at 4.30 it's no point giving a plug for it now, it's not there but 4.30 on a Thursday afternoon and it's like well actually where else would you put it what was great was it wasn't there to be a science show, it was there to be a programme that was on after the programme before it and before the programme after it if you made it interesting people would listen and we didn't say every week here's your weekly ration of science, we just said here's some interesting stories and every week week there would happen to be interesting stories about science. If you tell them right, science has an unending supply of these stories and that's the way you get to people. Over here in the middle, please.
A horrible feeling one of our mic bearers is going to be injured horribly. Do you have any advice for dealing with controversial topics? So it's all great trying to convince scientists to get out there and talk about their work, but I wonder if in some situations that's actually... has the wrong sort of effect. So I have a friend who does a lot of behavioral work and works with a lot of rats and stuff and she's too afraid to sort of discuss with her friends the things she does because she doesn't really think they're ready.
So how do we kind of know when the public is ready? for us and meets us halfway. This is something I could talk about for a very... Obviously, there's a whole separate thing about this and about communicating risk and about dealing with danger. But what I would say is there was a great belief in Britain for a long time and there were genuine concerns about talking about animal experimentation.
And I've got friends who were threatened and I've got one friend who had a bomb planted under his car because there are some people who take animal rights extremely seriously. However, the general perception was that this was the extreme end of a widely... held public distaste for animal experimentation and that the best way to deal with this was to not talk to the great British public about this very much.
When they finally got round to polling the British public they actually discovered if you ask the questions in the right way more people understood that actually if we're going to do some work and we're trying to get these kind of results and we're trying to avoid experimenting animals as much as possible and we're trying to keep them safe that they were actually prepared to do this and they understood and every time they've polled people about this at any length they've discovered that people are not so repelled by this. this. They actually understand that this is a reasonable sacrifice to make.
There will always be some who make a different decision on that. But I think the way, you don't engage with a problem like that by running and hiding, you engage with a problem like that by saying, this is what happens. So I know people who make a point of saying, you want to come and see the labs?
Do you want to come and see the paperwork that we have to fill in to do this? We will do anything we can to avoid experimenting on animals. We don't choose to. We look after our animals, we care about our animals, but there are certain kinds of research where we believe this is the best way.
working on alternatives, and they need to actually deal with those things. If you kind of say this is controversial, it's going to be difficult, some people aren't going to like it, so we won't talk about it, that I think only fed into the idea that scientists were trying to hide something. So whatever the topic, my belief is the best way is to engage with people.
And it's also not impossible in that engagement that the people who are opposed to it might come up with suggestions that could help. It's not that science has all the answers, but dialogue with the public can help the scientists, and it can also help the public as well. Okay, one last question.
Last one, just please. Big finish, no pressure. OK, given that you started your talk with Michael Gove's alarming and very damaging quote during the referendum, given also what happened two weeks ago in the States, without getting political... I thought we got well to not mention that. I thought I would give you a night off.
Without getting political, what are your fears? Or more constructively, what are the extra challenges that scientists have to face, given what's happened? OK, well, on a positive note, I will start, since we have had a sort of slight movie... theme here. I'll start with a line from one of my favourite movies, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which is the John Houston movie with Humphrey Bogart that you might remember made in 1948-ish.
Basically, for those who don't know the plot, it's a bit of a spoiler again, they think there's some gold, they nearly find the gold, they overcome all series of obstacles, right at the end when they think they've succeeded, it all goes horribly wrong and they end up destitute and back where they started. Tim Holtz, who's one of the guys who's been on this chase all the way through, kind of looks at the other guy and says, you know, when the worst thing you can possibly imagine has happened, it's never as bad as you think it is. And I take great solace from that as a line, because that's the only hope we've got now.
And also, as a sort of televisual analogy, I'm also cheering myself up by, I'm a big fan of the West Wing. And if you like the West Wing, they had seven years with an amazing liberal regime run by a president with a Nobel laureate in economics. And yet, at the end of those seven years, nothing really had changed.
You weren't in a parallel universe America. So... I'm kind of hoping that what Trump is able to do is less limited. That said, am I deeply concerned that we live in a world now where, you know, Boris Johnson being Foreign Secretary, we ought all to be running around with our heads in our hands going, how did this happen?
But we've got Brexit, we've got Trump, we've got far bigger stories to deal with than this. I do think we've had a great statement in the last 24 hours from the Prime Minister about continuing support for British science and very serious... Now, I know there are questions about exactly how that's...
funded but it's better to have that than not have that there. I do genuinely believe that when the worst possible thing has happened it's not going to be as bad as we think it is. But are there going to be some difficult times ahead?
I suspect there are. Is there a greater chance of somebody pushing a button when they really shouldn't be pushing a button? Oh yes there certainly is. But those are situations that are not within our control.
So I choose to deal with what I can try and control which is hoping that the image of science is because one of the reasons you could say this is allowed to happen is because we have this disconnect between the people who have the knowledge to help society and society at large. The more we can narrow that gap so the people, I'm not suggesting a kind of technocracy where scientists are all the never-ending font of wisdom, but if people have actually had more faith in the people who actually know what they're talking about, maybe we wouldn't have gotten into quite such a mess in the first place. Thank you. I think we're going to have to...
On that bombshell. On that bombshell. On that bombshell. I'm going to say a word of thanks in a moment, but I forgot to say something at the start, which I was meant to, which was at the little event we had beforehand with Quentin, somebody left their... phone behind and it's with security if you are feeling bereft of a phone.
Let me get to the thanks. Wonderful hour and a half I think. We've had a fantastic debate. depiction of the mad, bad, dangerous scientist and how that imagery has been reproduced over many decades. I thought it was a great social science lecture, because you were talking about how we socially construct images of things and then they become real and guide actions and make other things possible, because I think that's made Gove possible, it's made it possible for Michael Gove to do that.
to say that we've had enough of experts. And it's made Donald Trump possible and, you know, climate change, Chinese hoax. What really heartened me, though, was the set of antidotes you came to towards the end.
My favourite was IFL science. There were many others which give us hope that these will be passing episodes and that we... we will indeed manage to produce a different image of the scientist and harness that for all the good we know it can do. And you were the most enthusiastic man in the world. So thank you very, very much indeed.
Thank you for having me. APPLAUSE