Despite the current mantra about evidence-based policy-making, politicians are inclined to base policy on anecdote, some of it alarmist. Elspeth Hyams considers some outcomes of the six-year Science in Society research programme, which set out to establish the truth about British attitudes to science.
The idea that the British public are anti-science and resist innovation is not borne out by the evidence, according to Professor David Edgerton of Imperial College, speaking at the Science in Society conference in London in October. Nor is British science in decline, even if many scientists working in Britain are not British.
The Labour government built the election campaign that brought it to power in 1997 on the claim that it would only implement policies supported by evidence.
Like many governments before it, Labour worried that failure to invest in scientific research and development would lead to terminal economic decline.
In 2002, Prime Minister Tony Blair asked the then Department for Trade and Industry to investigate through the Economic and Science Research Council (ESRC) whether there was an anti-science and anti-innovation culture in Britain.
It was to mark the close of that programme, and publish its outcomes, that this conference took place.
Blair and many in the political establishment - remarkably few of whom are scientists - feared that, if public attitudes were indeed negative about science, this would affect the supply of ‘home-grown’ scientists and, therefore, the economic development of Britain.
This concern about the relationship between innovation and economic growth has featured throughout Labour’s 10+ year term in office, according to Steve Raynor, Director of the ESRC’s national Science and Society Programme, and James Martin, Professor of Science at Oxford University.
One of the researchers’ tasks was to establish whether popular antipathy to science would affect ‘the social licence to operate’ in the UK. Would, for example, public attitudes affect scientists’ ability to do research in controversial fields like transgenics? And would this affect Britain’s ability to compete with emerging world economic powers like India and China, whose approach to scientific research might be governed by different ethical principles?
The researchers also wanted to know if capacity in research and technology drove economic development, as is often assumed.
Specialist projects in the programme looked at a wide range of topics, such as farmers’ perceptions of and attitudes to genetically modified crops, or the ethics of embryo research, and how the issues, scientific and ethical, were perceived and communicated to the public.
Public attitudes complex
In almost every instance, the social scientists’ findings were much more complex than the sometimes simplistic hypotheses about public attitudes which prompted the Science and Society programme in the first place.
They also scotched some of the biggest myths. They found no direct correlation between the performance of the economy and the amount (or lack) of spending on R&D. And, far from there being a crisis in the public’s attitude to science, the researchers found that 80 per cent of the public agreed with positive statements about science. Their concerns were not with science as such, but with the current pace of change, and with whether scientists might ignore some of the risks.
The perception that the public lacks confidence in science may be a result of scientists conflating 'a reduction in personal deference with loss of confidence in scientists’. Researchers found that university scientists are trusted most, government scientists less, and private sector scientists in industry least.
Science investment can be a magnet for economic activity, but the researchers found ‘a tension between national excellence and the regions’. The nine English Regional Development Agencies all aspired to having their own centres of excellence ‘in the same fields of endeavour’. Achieving them all was ‘an unlikely prospect’, given Britain’s small size and population.
The researchers found an emerging global market for scientific and technical labour. Skills and expertise followed science investment, but increases in capacity for science and technology were as much a response to demand as a stimulus of it.
And migration did not necessarily have negative consequences - a brain drain. Many assumptions needed re-examining.
Levels of education
Another speaker, the economist Frances Cairncross, former Chair of the ESRC, now an Oxford academic, challenged more received wisdom. Being good as a nation at science did not automatically lead to innovation. Nor did innovation automatically involve science. It could involve high-level mathematics. The UK, for example, led the world in innovative financial instruments. Innovation had to be useful, and there was evidence that Britain had ‘an extraordinary ability’ to adopt technologies that it thought would be.
She was concerned, though, about the future British science base. Half of the A Level 'A' grades in science, maths, physics, chemistry, economics and modern languages were produced by sixth-formers in independent schools, although only a quarter of all students attended them. This was, she said, ‘probably the single most important problem in terms of social access, and in terms of keeping Britain’s scientific community fed with brilliant youngsters’.
She also worried about the relationship between the scientific community and the public, from three points of view. The first was levels of education. The public needed a fundamental level of numeracy, and better understanding of risk and probability. Too often they emerged from school with insufficient understanding for scientists to communicate scientific truths effectively.
And scientists were often hampered by their failure to use plain English. This was important because ethics were ‘about to become hugely important’. A public debate was needed on many issues because ‘scientists and philosophers don’t have a monopoly of wisdom’. She worried about the rise of creationism. ‘The battle to get people to think clearly about science is just beginning.’
Outdated ideas
According to David Edgerton, reality and the perceptions of government are often ‘staggeringly different’. We still see Britain through the eyes of the scientist C. P. Snow, who argued in the 1950s (?) that the post-war decline of Britain was partly due to its failure to invest in research and science. But, according to Edgerton, if there has been economic and industrial failure, it is not because of lack of investment in science and technology. The idea that government should ‘overcome the British public’s phobia is ironic - the evidence just isn’t there’.
'We need to open the debate about the kind of science and technology we are investing in.’ Policy has been hampered, he argued, by the perceptions of the governing elite, which has too often based its views on anecdote, not evidence.
One of the first things to do is ‘ban the terms “science and technology” and talk about … terms that mean something intelligent - academic research, industrial change, knowledge, expertise. It will allow us to think: What do we want from innovation? What direction would we like to go in?
‘We have a deep set of problems in the elite’s understanding of science and technology that stands in the way of the adoption of new policies that could do something about climate change, health, and so on.’
As for that other concern, getting more people to study science at school, there is some evidence that the most effective strategy is simple: pay post-doctoral researchers more.
* The ESRC and Research Councils UK (RCUK) are to launch a pack in January promoting public engagement with science. There will be rewards and incentives for public science activities. And, thanks to new funding, future research programmes will look at topics such as how the rising economic powers such as India and China deal with the research governance of the old economic powers. The programme will try to anticipate the risks of, and create governance for, new suites of technology, such as nanotechnology and neuroscience.
'Science in Society: innovation culture or anti-science Britain?' was organised by the Said Business School, Oxford, for the Economic & Social Research Council. There are nearly 50 individual research projects in the programme. You can view or download the reports at www.sci-soc.net/SciSoc/Projects/AllProjects/
Updated: 21 January 2008