Are We All Scientific Experts Now (eBook)

In 1951 my parents took me to the Festival of Britain. I stood under the ‘Skylon’ – a vertical, 300-foot, pointed, aluminium cigar, suspended 50 feet above the ground on steel cables. The Skylon seemed to float and it was a thrill for a kid to stand directly underneath, thinking that if scientists and engineers were not so clever the massive object would spear down through the top of my head.

A hundred years after the Great Exhibition, the Festival of Britain was meant to show Britons that they could recover from the war through the enterprise of the people, and the brave new world of science and engineering. Just a few years later, in 1956, the world's first commercial nuclear power station, Calder Hall, was connected to the national electricity grid. A year after that ZETA, the first ever fusion-power reactor, was completed. The radio, the newspapers and the newsreels (the Collins family couldn't afford a television) were saturated with these events. Today, the post-war cadences on old recordings still evoke that sense of a bright future. Calder Hall had tamed the fearsome power of the atom bomb and used it to bring electricity into the home. ZETA was to tame the still more limitless power of the hydrogen bomb – the power of the Sun. In a speech in 1954, anticipating the development of fission and fusion power, Lewis Strauss, the Chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, told the National Association of Science Writers: ‘Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.’ And along with Skylon there was nylon – shirts and blouses so much easier to wash – and jet airliners, penicillin, polio vaccine and new economic theories assuring the end of unemployment. These wonderful things were the products of scientific experts, remote, powerful and few in number.

But it all went wrong. Those nylon shirts were sweaty and turned yellow round the collar, the Comet jet airliners fell out of the sky, the new economics failed to prevent stagnation of the economy even in times of inflation. As for fission power, the more we learned about it the more we saw how it would leave a poisonous and financially crippling legacy to future generations – the vast cost and danger of disposing of radioactive waste. To someone of my generation, the modern idea that nuclear power is the saviour of the human race because it produces energy without warming the planet is a sick joke. What of fusion power? ZETA was an abject failure, embarrassingly closed down in 1961. In the 2010s, the hydrogen atom as a source of ‘limitless energy’ is as remote as ever and will have its own radioactive legacy if it ever works.

Since I was a kid it seems to have been one scientific or technological failure after another, played out before the eyes of every citizen. The future promised by the Festival of Britain soon lost its glitter. The cigar-shaped Skylon would be sold for scrap. Experts – what experts? Let us take a look at more recent events for which the fate of Skylon might be an icon.

In the UK in the 1990s, ‘mad cow disease’ or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), a disease located in the brain, spine and nerve tissue of cattle, took hold of the public imagination. It emerged eventually that it was caused by feeding dead cattle to live cattle. It may be that the slaughterhouses were also contaminated with remains of dead sheep suffering from a disease called ‘scrapie’ and this got into the meat and bone meal. Enforced cannibalism among herbivores is horrifying enough in itself and sinister when done in the name of improving the technical efficiency of farming. Hundreds of thousands of cattle were slaughtered, but still scientists insisted that there was no danger to the public from eating the meat of the infected animals with, famously, a British minister feeding a hamburger to his daughter on television. More than 150 Britons were to die a lingering death from the sinister ‘Variant Creuzfeldt-Jakob disease’ as a result of these mistakes. Science and technology both gave rise to the spread of the cattle disease and then visibly failed to understand it and its danger to humans, with commercial interests clearly swaying the publicly permitted pronouncements of the ministry scientists. Don't Jane Doe and the man on the Clapham omnibus feel they already know that feeding dead cattle to live ones can never be a good way of producing food for human consumption? How can this episode not encourage them to distrust or even campaign against the supposed benefits of science?

Only a little later, in 2002, we had the horrifying spectacle of thousands of cattle being burned on flaming funeral pyres throughout the UK as a result of a foot-and-mouth epidemic. Week after week scientists argued with each other about whether this was the right thing to do; should the cattle have been vaccinated instead? The public impression was of an incompetent government, informed by feuding scientists, squandering our farming heritage and failing to handle another risk to the food chain.

And all over the world, not least in the USA and other Western countries, people keep dying! That is to say, medical science continually fails to keep us alive and find cures for cancer or the thousands of other things we die from. An acquaintance of our family recently died, in a matter of days, from a small cut after it turned into necrotizing fasciitis; there is no treatment except cutting away the explosive invasion of infected flesh until there is no viable person left. And when we do recover from illness or surgery, mostly the body cures itself, sometimes better than others, because of the mysterious effects of mind on matter. We do not even know whether a new treatment works unless we eliminate the ‘placebo effect’ by using double-blind tests – the mysterious mind again. Newspapers are continually discussing the health benefits or dangers of almost anything that can be placed in the mouth or any other human orifice, and none of this builds into a pattern or is in any way consistent. When I was a kid most other kids were having their tonsils removed as a routine matter – no longer. Or is it no longer? Look at this from the Washington Post online on 25 April 2012, reporting from a medical conference:

Medical fashions swing from time to time and place to place – think of circumcision. Is it a science or is it a fashion influenced one way or another by religion or religious prejudice? The prejudice works sometimes in favour of circumcision and sometimes against. What can one do but choose one's preferred surgery oneself?

Or think of the science of economics. Econometric modelling is the most reliably unreliable predictor of national indicators we have. In the UK in the early 1990s, the government appointed a panel of ‘Seven Wise Men’ (econometricians) to advise them about the economy. Read from The Independent newspaper of 7 March 1993:

So which of the seven turned out to be right? None of them! Commissioned and funded to build their most elaborate computer models for predicting next year's rate of inflation and next year's unemployment, they came up with completely different numbers. But surely the group as a whole was telling us something! Surely a crowd of economists do better than the individuals that make it up? No! The actual turnout was well outside the outermost prediction.1 And now, at the time of writing (spring 2013), we are living in the aftermath of a financial crisis which, in spite of all the advice of economists employed by governments and their agencies, seemed to take everyone by surprise, not least the economists themselves.

Middle-aged citizens in the UK are also very fond of the famous statement by a much loved BBC weather forecaster, Michael Fish, who, at 9.30 p.m. on 15 October 1983, said in the course of his weather forecast:

A few hours later eighteen people were dead and 15 million trees had been uprooted as a result of 120 mph winds, the sort of thing that happens in the UK about once every hundred years. But that is short-term weather forecasting and the notoriety of the incident arises because, in general, short-term weather forecasting is pretty good. Long-term weather forecasting is usually accepted as hopeless, however. There simply is no viable science of long-term weather forecasting, though people keep trying.

The list above covers food science, veterinary science, medicine, economics and weather forecasting. Some of these are completely hopeless and some of them are hopeless in parts. Yet these are the sciences that affect our everyday lives in major ways. In...