I was disappointed that I didn’t get to hear Lord Dryson address the final question (with the 1/5 bad facts vs. 1/10 bad facts analogy). Is there anywhere to get that?

That reminded me of this quote from Richard Feynman. If I had the courage I’d like to use it in one of those boxes in which the Research Councils want us to write about the impact and benefits of our research:

“Science is like sex: sometimes something useful come out, but that is not the reason we are doing it” Richard Feynman

Of course nobody can doubt that something useful came out of Feynman’s work, which makes his point even stronger.

This may be a dumb question – but I couldn’t quite work out why Lord Drayson was so adamant about defending bad journalism. I take his point that more should be done to highlight good journalism, but what does he/Labour stand to gain from a population with poor understanding of science/health issues.

Is it purely that it’s more important to Labour to keep the drug companies/media companies happy? Or is there an actual intellectual point he is making?

It is ludicrous that scientists are being asked to do the job of journalists for them. One of Ben’s main points was that the system is what is at fault, not indiviudal journalists – there are many that are perfectly capable of reporting science acurately and interestingly, the problem is ‘more complicated than that’.
Ben suggested we should all go and start blogs, but, with respect, i think this is a little naive. Would 100,000 new science blogs containing what pedestrian bench work Joe and Jane lab-monkey are up to today really benefit the public understanding of science?

I wish there was half as much pressure from research councils to get more scientists _teaching_! School visits, lab open days for A-level students, undergrad lecturing or even just helping colleagues who lecture to prepare course material would improve the quality of teaching offered at all levels and would be a far better use of scientists’ time out of the lab than tweeting, updating yet-another-blog and preparing sensationised press releases. Leave that to the big names.

But I agree with Ben’s point at the debate that it should be for all kinds of engagement, not just mainstream media.

How can we realistically expect short-term allocation of resources (industry), i.e. “pull the plug if there’s no results after two months”, and short-term research contracts (academia) to lead to the same level of quality research and headway into unbelievably complex problems, such as manipulating the immune system?
One or two companies are now adopting the old academic model of long-term funding & leave to simmer; a few people from my department have jumped ship to them precisely for this reason.

You have to ask yourself why this sudden ‘public accountability’ for science spending (as if you must keep an eye on scientists or they’ll p**s away money enjoying themselves) doesn’t seem to apply to, say, the sports or arts councils? What happened to universities as places of knowledge-generation and learning?

This is rather off topic though; my point is that forcing all scientists to ‘engage with the public’ (i.e. big up your work, or else become less competitive for funding) through such dubious mouthpieces as newspaper and tv journalists (think Ida) – in other words: “go for it, sensenationalise away, young postdoc!”, as Lord Drayson thinks we should be doing – will ultimately lead to the same place as bad science reportage: no will believe the claims of scientists and, like today, you have to go to blogs to get a half-decent explantion, which a lot of people won’t bother to do. And you’ll be wasting a lot of research-hours to attend media days, etc. Everyone seems unaware that, perhaps paradoxically, good scientists can (and often are, in my experience), irredeemably poor science communicators. In short: science has a lot of nerds, why not let them do what they do best, and stop forcing everyone to worry about self-promotion.

Finally got around to listening to you on the radio programmes you participated in before the debate.

Well done to you. And yes, we geeks are ignored by the media. I’m looking forward to the webcast tomorrow.

Good point. Drayson sounded just too lovely and woolly on the radio, just desperate to ignore the problems. I don’t think he really understands science abuse and the consequences.

I look forward to an increase in understanding of science throughout the UK population. Treatments that are not evidence based will just fall off the shop shelves into the abyss very soon! Thought for the day will be replaced with Science For The Day…

Eric Weischaus came out to deliver a lecture to NIH grants administrators on the very same topic more than ten years ago.

His point was that his Nobel-winning work would not be funded anywhere now. Everyone (those of experience and great wisdom) told Weischaus and Nüsslein-Volhard,they were crazy, and nothing would come of the massive effort. Look at the growth in active research in developmental biology now!

But is this really a good idea? Do we really want to have a culture of compulsory ‘showbiz’ in science. Drayson even went as far as to say, repeatedly, that he is fine with ‘sensationalising’ work. Surely history has repeatedly demonstrated that the bulk of scientific works comes from unsexy research, and leaving scientists alone to do it. Is it likely that there will be a long-term erosion of public interest and belief in science will if everything they read and see is ‘sexed up’.

Actively ushering in a system where how much you have tarted yourself all over the newspapers counts towards getting your funding renewed (all research council grant proposals now include such sections).