Frances Cairncroft reflects on her time as President of the BA

Way back in September 1971, I recall trying to locate my parents to tell them that I had decided to marry a young journalist called Hamish McRae. I eventually ran them to earth in Swansea, where they were taking part in what was then called the Annual Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Why there? Because my father, Alec Cairncross, the Master of St Peter’s College, Oxford, was that year’s President.

I would have loved to be able to tell my father, who sadly died eight years ago, that I am now also the head of an Oxford College (Exeter, which is older – and wealthier – than St Peter’s). And this year, as President of what is now called the BA, and at an event now called the Festival of Science, I will deliver my own address on the other side of Britain, at Norwich in early September.

Like my father, I have found the presidency a fascinating and rewarding experience. It has been a chance to meet many people with a passionate interest in science. Two groups stand out: the interested lay-folk who thronged to the BA’s last two Festivals, in Exeter in 2004 and Dublin last year; and the school students who exhibited their projects as part of the CREST Science Fair in the spring. Both groups showed how deep an interest there is in science, outside the academic and professional worlds of scientists.

But I have also been aware of how much more needs to be done to extend public engagement in science. Three issues have dominated my year, and the first two of them will be the themes of my presidential address.

Global warming
The first issue has been the need for greater concern about global warming. I believe that the past year has seen a clear shift in public perceptions of the prospect of climate change. I say ‘prospect’ rather than, as I would have done five years ago, ‘possibility’, because the accumulation of evidence seems so powerful. Not only is the sort of temperature rise predicted by the best climate modelling already apparently under way. Last year was the second warmest on record.

The speed of the rise seems to be exceeding expectations. There seems to be a growing and alarming possibility that the rise may trigger sudden and dangerous events such as a sudden release of methane gas from warming soil. That would accelerate the rise. The prediction of the Met Office, which has done world-beating research on the subject, is that the temperatures we experienced in Europe during the blisteringly hot summer of 2003 will look normal by the 2040s and cool by the 2060s.

Cooperation between social and natural scientists
Predicting climate change is a task for natural scientists; changing people’s behaviour is a job for analysis by social scientists. Few policy challenges are greater than persuading the main energy-consuming countries to work together to restrain their use of fossil fuels. All too often, natural scientists and social scientists work in separate spheres. The second issue that has dominated my year has been the importance of persuading natural scientists and social scientists to work more closely together.

I chair the Council of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Throughout my presidential year, I have worked to persuade these two important organisations to work more closely with each other. I’m glad to say that neither needed much persuading. The social sciences have often seemed to me to be the poor relation of the natural sciences, and yet often the social scientists ask essential questions about how to turn scientific findings into public policy and how to analyse and understand their economic and social impacts.

Luckily for me, both Ian Diamond, the Chief Executive of the ESRC, and Roland Jackson, Chief Executive of the BA, have been keen to explore ways for their two organisations to work together.  For example, this year for the first time the ESRC became involved in the BA's CREST scheme, as part of its increased engagement with schools. That provided a chance to emphasise both the social and economic aspects and implications of work in the physical and natural sciences – but also the quantitative nature of much social science research.

BA collaboration with ESRC
In addition, a lot of joint planning went into ensuring that this year, the BA’s flagship National Science Week (NSW) and the ESRC’s Social Science Week (SSW) coincided. As a result, they were able to work together to publicise the challenge of climate change. In March, the BA and the ESRC got together with CRed (the Carbon Reduction Programme at the University of East Anglia) to mount a programme called Click for the Climate.(1) This allowed people to see by how much their pledge could reduce their carbon-dioxide emission and how much had been promised across the country. I pledged a contribution to Tree Aid, a charity that plants trees in developing countries. That seems a way not just to offset some of the emissions created by all the airplane trips I take, but also to give people in poorer countries a source of fuel, food and protection against soil erosion.

The BA and ESRC collaborated on a number of other projects and are now working together on the evaluation of the week. I very much hope that NSW and SSW will continue to run in parallel. As a consequence, there is now a more explicit acknowledgement of the role of the social sciences in terms of the BA's activities and also more opportunities for synergy between the social and the physical and life sciences. This is a wonderful and extremely encouraging result.

Publicise research results
The third issue with which I have been concerned is the need for scientists and social scientists to take seriously the publicising of the results of their research.

I have been a journalist for most of my life, mainly on The Economist magazine, and am conscious of the difficulties that academics often face in conveying the core of their research findings to a general audience without oversimplifying or caricaturing their results. But the dangers of failing to communicate emerged vividly from a radio programme that I did in June.

The programme was about Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian obstetrician of the 1840s, who discovered the reason why women who gave birth in hospital attended by doctors  were far more likely to die than those attended by midwives. Doctors came straight from dissecting cadavers to conducting internal examinations, with disastrous results.  Semmelweis persuaded them to wash their hands in chloride of lime, and dramatically cut the death rate. But his intemperate personality and reluctance to write about his work meant that his findings were widely ignored, and thousands of mothers continued to die.

Many academics are still reluctant to publicise their work, though usually with less tragic consequences. But only by doing so can they intrigue young people and persuade them to pursue scientific studies or even careers. And unless people have some scientific literacy, they can hardly be expected to grasp the key arguments in scientific debates. In the past few years, some of the most important public debates have been on scientific issues: whether on genetic engineering of crops and other organisms; on the rights and wrongs of cloning; on the MMR vaccine; or on the need to generate more nuclear power.

Better maths teaching
At the very least, people need some understanding of risk. Many of the public policy issues that involve science boil down to questions about how willing people are to tolerate risk in exchange for various benefits. And understanding risk requires some sense of numeracy. People may be bad at arithmetic, but they need to realise that – say – a billion is a much larger number than a million, or that a substance measured as parts per thousand is likely to be more densely concentrated than one measurable only in parts per million. If such concepts mean nothing, how can people engage with science?

So at the very root of the task facing both the BA and the ESRC may be the need for better teaching in schools, and especially better teaching of maths. No subject opens more doors. When youngsters abandon maths early, or fail to take maths A level, they exclude themselves from many of the most interesting and demanding degree courses and careers. And they also jeopardise their chances of understanding what scientists are really trying to say.

Engagement requires two parties, not one. But in one year, not everything is possible – and it will take another presidency to persuade more young people to study maths. My successor, Lord Browne, the head of BP, cares passionately about the education of engineers, and so I bequeath the task to him!

Reference
1. See http://www1.the-ba.net/climate/movie.html

Frances Cairncross is Rector of Exeter College, Oxford. Previously, she was on the staff of The Economist, most recently as management editor. She is also chair of Britain’s Economic and Social Research Council