‘Science in Action’ is ending. Here is why that matters

The year is coming to an end and with it a radio programme that was a staple of science communication around the world: the BBC World Service’s ‘Science in Action’.

This is rather symbolic, as science itself is going out of action in some parts of the world, especially the United States where science funding is radically cut and where scientists leave for better places. This does not mean there are no longer great things happening in science. On the contrary, there have been fantastic scientific breakthroughs this year and there will be more in the future. But they will no longer be discussed on ‘Science in Action’.

‘Science in Action’ was a weekly radio programme produced by the BBC World Service and hosted by the British journalists Roland Pease and Marnie Chesterton, together with scientist and broadcaster Adam Hart. It was broadcast on Thursdays at 18.32 GMT and repeated twice the following day, at 01.32 and 08.32. ‘Science in Action’ began life in 1964 when things were rather different and talk about science was much more buoyant and optimistic. The last, more pessimistic, episode was aired on 30 October 2025, after the programme was axed as part of a cut of £6 million from the BBC World Service and loss of 130 jobs.

In this post I’ll first tell you a bit about myself and why programmes such as ‘Science in Action’ are important to me and others like me. Then I say something about the last episode and what the axing of the programme overall means to me and to science communication overall.

Science and me

As anybody who has read my blog knows, I come from what I call ‘the deepest darkest humanities’. I studied French and philosophy in Germany in the 1970s and 80s, and I only fell into science by accident. That was at the end of the 1990s when I had to turn myself from a historian of linguistics into an analyst of the social, cultural and metaphorical framings of scientific issues, from cloning, stem cells, genomics, infectious diseases, epidemics and pandemics and nanotechnology to climate change and climate change denial and much more.

To gain access to some of the scientific background knowledge that I needed to understand how advances and controversies in these fields were discussed in public and by policy makers, I turned to popular science magazines and popular science programmes on TV (e.g. ‘Horizon’, the Christmas Lectures) and on the radio (‘Inside Science’ and ‘Science in Action’). These were sources readily available for amateurs like me, who had only lately found their enthusiasm for science and needed ‘input’ – and of course for others who are just interested in science. ‘Science in Action’ provided some of that input. ‘Inside Science’ will fill the gap left by ‘Science in Action’ in the future, but ‘Science in Action’ had a different focus, on what one might call science with a social and global conscience.

I remember listening to one episode of ‘Science in Action’ in 2014 when the programme celebrated its 50^th anniversary. It included the geneticist Sir Paul Nurse, whom I had first encountered in a confrontation with a climate denialist in 2011. I also remember the zoologist and science writer Matthew Cobb, whose book on the history of genetic engineering I had read, contributing to a programme this year on the Asilomar revisited conference … and there were also contributions by Adam Rutherford (geneticist, science communicator and rabble rouser), Philip Ball (pangalactic science writer) and other trusted science communicators whom I used to follow on Twitter (once a good source of science information/communication) and now follow on Blueksy. ‘Science in Action’ was part of a network of trust.

Science under threat

The last episode was called “How Science got Here, and Where Next”. Its summary says: “As anti-science leaves research reeling, does evidence-based policy in a scientific society have much of a future? Michael Mann, Naomi Oreskes, Angie Rasmussen and Deb Houry discuss some of the sources and motivations that perhaps belie the current state of scientific affairs..”

The topics of climate change and infectious disease/public health, which have preoccupied me since around the year 2005, loomed large in this last episode. Listeners learned a lot about what happened between, say, 1998 and Michael Mann’s famous hockey stick graph of global warming – a lightning rod for climate deniers, Naomi Oreskes’ seminal book 2010 Merchants of Doubt, and recent debates around Covid and bird flu to which Angela Rasmussen contributed. Debra Houry’s resignation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in September 2025 was, of course, also on the agenda.

As a bookend to the 1998 hockey stick controversy, I should also mention the book Science under Siege by Michael Mann, the climate scientist, and Peter Hotez, the vaccine expert, a book referenced several times during the programme. Running through it all was a discussion of misinformation and the erosion of trust in evidence-based science.

The conversation between the experts left me with two take-home messages: When it comes to the crumbling of science and public trust in science, it’s all about the money or, as the contributors called it ‘vested interests’, and the well-oiled spreading of doubt. It’s not all about a failure in science communication. ‘Better’ science communication just doesn’t stand a chance in what one my call a bullshitogenic environment. But this does not mean that good science communication should be axed!! Especially now in an age when mis/disinformation is manufactured.

As Australia-based RadioInfo pointed out, it is ironic that ‘Science in Action’ was cut during “Media and Information Literacy week, a UNESCO initiative to make the world aware of how important the media is in communicating truth & factual reporting.” (see Roland Pease here)

Science communication under threat

Before the ‘terminal’ episode, Roland Pease said on Bluesky: “For 61 years the #BBCWorldService has been broadcasting the latest in science via its weekly Science in Action programme. That dies in the next half hour, with this final edition, reflecting on the fall in trust in expertise driven by malign interests over recent years.” And: “It’s the end of the road for BBC Science in Action. But science itself is facing growing roadblocks.”

Dying, end of the road, road blocks…Put this together with ‘science under siege’ and ‘assault on science’… and you can sense a real and metaphorical turning point in science and society. The end of this programme is one of its many symbols.

With not only science but also science communication (and information communication in general) under siege, we need programmes like this more than ever. Axing it is doing the wrong thing at the wrong time and will affect many people like me who are not scientists but rely on programmes like this to get accesses to trusted scientists and trusted science communicators. For me that is especially important as I have travelled a long road from what I call the deepest darkest humanities to becoming a sort of science communicator myself.