Science back to school
May I suggest some additional causes for the malaise in science in schools (1 December 2007, p 23)? Despite today’s teenage dependence on iPods, cellphones, microwaves, laptops, lenses, shades, and despite unprecedented health, food security, cheap travel, cheap clothes and many, many other products of science, our teenagers do not have any respect for science as a profession. They take the benefits of 21st-century technology for granted.
So why is it that a youngster setting out to do something significant with their studies and career has such a poor image of science?
True, the start of the problem is in schools, but it must be something wider than that as well: Is it in the media’s presentation of science? Is it from science itself?
One of the challenges lies within academia. I am sure this was not an issue when I was at college, so therefore my generation of academics has presided over this decline in science as a profession, and this fall in respect for science and scientists. So on that basis we have failed. With hindsight I believe that we have unwittingly presided over this failure in science communication, and that the lack of proactive communication and public engagement is the essential issue 鈥� “silent science” is killing science.
For the past 30 years UK scientists, especially in academia, have sat quietly, seeking citations and tenure. They have not moved on into a world of media soundbites, stakeholder engagement and having to sell benefits to keep science sustainable.
Today’s academics and professors are (generally) not prepared to engage the public in proactive justification of science and technology 鈥� unless it is to exploit negative stories. This needs to change. Academic science cannot hide in an ivory tower and still expect to survive. We need to be thinking of “sustainable science” with a proper life-cycle analysis thrown in, and banish silent science. The most obvious communication issue is to engage in a dialogue with its stakeholders on a broad front (the public, consumers, schools, NGOs, regulators, economists, social scientists, industry, government).
Going back to the issues of science in schools, who could be better placed than the universities to influence school teachers and their pupils?
Michael Reiss asks, “Why do so many teenagers in wealthy countries find school science lessons boring and irrelevant?”. Could it be that, perhaps, they are? Many of the biggest unsolved issues we face today do not fall within the remit of the natural sciences.
Take the three “real-life” science questions he mentions. In two of them 鈥� “finding the best site for a chemical plant [and] deciding whether to switch from fossil fuels to nuclear power and/or renewables” 鈥� the remaining uncertainties are predominantly issues for social science. Similarly, we know plenty about the science of growing food, yet many in Africa still starve for reasons that the natural sciences are not equipped to address.
The technology that will most improve living standards in the next two centuries will not be “hard” technology based on chemistry and physics, but “soft” technology based on the social sciences. Of course, we will always need natural scientists. But the idea that all or even most kids need to learn to love that particular branch of science is ludicrous. If schools made room for the social sciences, they could double the number of kids interested in science overnight.
Caernarfon, Gwynedd, UK
Effective unconscious
The tenets of Kate Douglas’s article on the relationship between the conscious and subconscious mind (1 December 2007, p 42) have been in use for some time by creative designers, particularly in engineering. When I was an aero engineer, my technique was to set out a design requirement, with limits and parameters, kick it around on a drawing board, say, for 2 or 3 hours, then forget it for a couple of weeks. If I tackled the problem straight away, much office time would be taken by head-bashing and the result would probably be only a variation on previous work. But after “putting it away” for a fortnight, the solution was much more likely to be simple, elegant, and fall out on to the drawing board/screen.
The classic case for me was the design of a mechanism which appeared to be messy, with complicated geometry, which I kept “putting away”, not having produced an acceptable solution. After a six-month hiatus without further attention, a simple, elegant design, complete with dimensions, fell out on to the screen. Its subtlety was such that even a small alteration caused it to fail. Several colleagues have had similar experiences.
Seemingly, the subconscious is “offering up” solutions, often obscure and at random from the memory banks until something fits, all quite remote from conscious thought until a solution triggers communication.
Another slant on this process is that “deselective” minds, which do not easily hold routes from consciousness to memory areas, often take longer to solve design problems, but are more liable to produce original solutions rather than recycle existing schemes.
Humans are not unique in using design processes. Nest-building birds, and other animals, particularly the beaver, design structures for which the environment and materials are never the same twice, having to be chosen and modified with considerable cunning. Just how do they do it?
Careware
Feedback’s mention of unusual licence conditions for free software (3 November 2007) reminded me of “careware” such as Paul Lutus’s HTML-editing program Arachnophilia. The “buyer” gets something of value in exchange for something the “seller” wants 鈥� which is in general “anything except money”. Lutus, for example, writes: “Here is a payment I will accept for a copy of Arachnophilia. To own Arachnophilia, I ask that you stop whining about how hard your life is, at least for a while. When Americans whine, nearly everybody else in the world laughs.”
On soldiering
When Jamie Wilson suggests that the way to “validate” war veterans’ experiences is by placing a psychiatric label on them (8 December 2007, p 24), he exemplifies the way society now medicalises, or “psychiatrises”, virtually everything. Contrary to his implication, my article (17 November 2007, p 56) did not suggest that people who are psychotic should not be considered psychotic. It was rather that being depressed, enraged and devastated by war is an understandable response to its horrors, and should not be automatically considered a mental illness. Diagnosing all upset veterans rarely helps, and usually burdens and isolates them even more.
Paying for drugs
In her article on the high price of cancer drugs, Rachel Nowak uses emotive phrases like “inflated prices” and “most profitable industry” and “patients denied drugs” (1 December 2007, p 8). New biological drugs are costly, largely because they are really, truly, deeply more expensive to research and manufacture than previous therapies. And other countries are looking at the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence () as a model for delaying new drug arrivals to better manage budgets.
It can take 10 to 12 years to develop a new class of drug, and the resulting product has a fixed patent life of, typically, 20 years. If patients are denied drug finance, or fewer drugs are licensed because of regulatory risk-averseness, the unit cost per patient per drug licensed inevitably rises.
Add inconsistency between funding bodies, and pricing planning becomes nigh on impossible. Perhaps governments should think about extending patent life in return for curtailing entry price.
True, while blockbuster drugs are still in patent they make their owners a great deal of profit. But the financial markets know this can’t last: in the six years to 30 March 2007 the FTSE Global Pharmaceuticals Index rose only 1.3 per cent compared with a 34.9 per cent increase in the general Dow Jones World Index of share prices. We are now seeing significant cuts in drug research. We should all be worried by that because diseases of our ageing population are not being properly or safely addressed and infectious disease continues to break through. Rather than denigrating pharmaceutical companies, you should exhort companies and governments to find long-term strategies to speed up processes, and to increase patent term so that the cost of drugs can be held in check.
Science back to school
Attitudes at this school are very different to the glum picture of school science painted by Michael Reiss (1 December 2007, p 23). Pupils enjoy science and a quarter of our 16 to 18-year-olds choose to study physics. We have our own Science Action Centre, a smaller version of the London , which is enjoyed by our own pupils and available free to local schools.
I am not sure whether it is the centre that is making science so popular with our pupils, or the attitude and philosophy of those who created and maintain it.
As Michael Reiss indicated, and to borrow from former prime minister Harold Wilson, the “white heat of science and technology” which powered the UK economy half a century ago has passed to other nations. The UK now has to earn its living providing the puce warmth of media services and insurance.
A key reason for our slump in innovation and manufacturing lies in the way the National Curriculum was implemented, from 1988, for science teaching.
Before that, science had only been taught in secondary schools, from age 11, and was optional from age 14. Unfortunately, when it was made compulsory for children from age 5, the government provided no additional scientists, nor extra labs, and many teachers of infants and primary-age children were expected to become expert science teachers overnight.
In secondary schools, those of us who had been teaching exam candidates who had chosen science because of their interest and aptitude now had to spend less time with those pupils in order to stand in front of children who hated the subject.
East Preston, West Sussex, UK
Michael Reiss starts with the research result that a country’s economic development status is inversely correlated with the desire of its teenagers to become scientists. Alas, he then wanders off into suggesting that more UK teenagers might be lured into science by a “context-based” science curriculum, “out-of-the-classroom” learning, or “assessment regimes [that address] the skills we want the next generation of scientists to develop”, rather than mere “factual knowledge”.
My own (admittedly anecdote-based) sense is that western kids think that a science career, no matter how interesting, means investing years and money in a post-graduate education in exchange for long hours at low pay, with little room for advancement. Plus, if they don’t do science, someone else 鈥� perhaps from China or India 鈥� will do it for them.
Claremont, California, US
Biofuels or forests
While cutting down rainforests to grow palm oil for biofuels may constitute “madness” (1 December 2007, p 50), burning other vegetable oils is no more sane, nor less damaging to Indonesia’s rainforests. Indonesia is expected to increase its palm oil production by more than half over the next 10 years. This is driven, in part, by China, which used to buy rapeseed oil from Europe for food and for industrial uses, but is switching to Indonesian palm oil because Europe’s cars and trucks now burn the rapeseed oil as a biofuel. Subsidy for biofuel producers in the European Union is increasing its local use, and the story is similar in the US.
The greatest barrier to finding incentive schemes that discourage deforestation in Indonesia and in other tropical countries is the rising demand and prices for the commodities (especially palm oil, rapeseed oil and soybean oil) that such subsidies encourage.
Competition between growing fuel and food is manageable if countries like Indonesia and Brazil expand food production to replace food that is no longer available from Europe and the US 鈥� which means taking more land into agriculture. But food will become scarce and expensive if world leaders attempt to expand biofuel production and save the forests at the same time.
Food prices and land rents are the main determinants of the cost of protecting forests from agriculture. Before the biofuel boom, programmes to protect rainforests would have offered an extraordinary opportunity for farmers in Europe and the US, because crop-land expansion in the tropics endlessly undermines the prices of agricultural goods.
Perhaps it is not too late to recognise that protecting rainforest and savannah offers a more rational and lasting solution to farmers’ commodity price worries than subsidising biofuels does.
Laughing matter
You report Igor Suslov saying that “humour is the brain’s way of dealing with errors” (24 November 2007, p 6). The “false alarm” theory of laughter proposed by V. S. Ramachandran in 1996 suggests that people laugh to communicate that some misperceived event is harmless: so when an object misidentified as a snake is recognised as a stick, people laugh.
This would explain why people laugh more in the presence of others. It also explains why most jokes involve misdirection, then surprise and some unexpected outcome that causes a feeling of superiority in the listener.
Ramachandran, like Suslov, speculates that humour also developed other functions, such as promoting social cohesion.
Reason or religion
You conclude that “the idea that science can simply replace religion in the public consciousness is not only fanciful, it’s also bad for science” (10 November 2007, p 3). Mary Midgley strongly concurs, and from an epistemological point of view her argument cannot be faulted (1 December 2007, p 24).
Other correspondents who berate you for apparent lack of moral fibre in defending reason and rationality (same issue) are on the right side of this argument, but the issue is not whether science can replace religion, but whether scientists can protect themselves from those who wish to replace science with religion.
The indicators around the world are worrying. In the US, science and scientists are being harassed, intimidated or bought by a coalition of extreme religion and corporate hooliganism 鈥� a coalition thought by many to have President George W. Bush in its pocket. In the Islamic world, according to an , the 57 nations of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference have 8.5 scientists and technologists per 1000 population, compared to a world average of 41, and 139 per 1000 in OECD countries.
Meanwhile, a well-funded Islamic campaign of anti-Darwinian propaganda, under the title The Atlas of Creation, is being mounted. Similarly, the Catholic Church, through its worldwide network of nuncios and concordats and its connections in the European Union, United Nations and other international bodies, continues its campaign to impose undemocratic controls on science and medicine.
This is a crucial issue for scientists, but it is political in that it can only be resolved through political action to curb activities of religious organisations inimical not just to science but to democracy and free speech.
Religion is not a homogeneous entity: precise targeting might be a good start. The problem lies with the proselytising religions, especially Christianity and Islam.
For the record
鈥� It is not certain that the extra inertia of a heavier, humid baseball (as compared with a dry baseball) counters its slower speed as it leaves the bat, as we suggested (15 December 2007, p 15).
Name of the feast
I’ve never written a thesis. I’ve never pretended to create cold fusion. Even with your help, I still don’t understand string theory. I don’t have a PhD (I don’t even have an A-level). I will never have another amusing thing to send to you, and in any case this letter will probably disappear into a quantum something-or-other.
I’ve had my one chance of fame in New 杏吧原创 and it was cruelly torn from me at the last moment. I had a little mention in Feedback (1 December 2007) and you spelled my name wrong!
Effective unconscious
Psychoanalysis is, Kate Douglas says, “now discredited” (1 December 2007, p 42). I hardly think this is fair. Psychoanalysis created a revolution in the way people view themselves. Freud’s cousin Edward Bernays applied its principles to business, creating both an economic boom and the public relations profession.
Psychoanalysis may deal with phenomena which cannot be easily measured 鈥� but it does deal with them consistently and provides a framework within which patients can begin to gain objectivity. Its place in the history of science should not be denigrated.
Drugs win prizes
James Love’s proposal to replace patent protection for new drugs with prize money (10 November 2007, p 24) seems to have a fatal flaw. What happens when an innovative drug to tackle a specified illness enters a market 鈥� and takes the prize money such a breakthrough commands 鈥� but then, some years later, the drug proves lacking in some respect?
Awarding the prize to the first on the scene would remove the incentive to seek variations, such as the “me too” drugs that sometimes prove superior to the drugs that inspired them.
鈥� The Sanders bill does provide for rewards for follow-on inventions, and can even reward the economic value of a redundant product. The prizes would be paid out over 10 years 鈥� about the same as the effective monopoly time under the current patent system.