Category: Science and Government
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From dissemination to firefighting: The new reality of science communication?
Three things happened recently in my Bluesky timeline which made me think about the fate of science communication. In this post I’ll use these brief glimpses into science communication activities, science communication research and government science communication to reflect on how science communication might change, especially in the United States. Three snapshots of science communication…
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Science, communication, politics and power
I haven’t written about science communication for a while. It’s a thorny subject. But a few days ago, Ken Rice posted some musings on science communication which made me think. He argues that when ‘we’ (I suppose he means individuals or nations or indeed policy makers) don’t “deal with various societal problems as well as…
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Science, politics and integrity
On 12 October three things appeared in my Twitter timeline: a report, an academic paper and an interview, all dealing with science and politics in the context of the management of the coronavirus pandemic. Most importantly, there was the House of Commons report which showed for all to see what a shambles the UK government’s…
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Post-Brexit gene editing regulation
Some of us are old enough to remember the controversies surrounding genetically modified or engineered foods and crops that raged in Europe (which included the UK) around the turn of the millennium. Some of us are even old enough to remember debates about recombinant DNA in the seventies (for those who don’t, I recommend Matthew…
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Mutant algorithms
I was talking to a friend in the United States. She told me the story of a friend who normally just talks about motherhood and apple pie, but suddenly wondered about algorithms. So, my friend asked me how I would explain algorithms. That reminded me of discussions I had a year or so ago with…
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Science, sanity and sanitation
Lots of things keep happening in this pandemic… Two things, in particular, happened over the last couple of days, which made me and many others sit up and think. The membership of SAGE, the Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies, was revealed at last, and we heard that Dominic Cummings attended meetings. At the same time,…
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If not evidence-based, then what?
In my last post on science communication, I quoted from an article by David Dickson in which he said that “evidence-based decision-making is an ideal that we should aspire to at every level of society, from local communities to the top levels of government”. Evidence – a twitter discussion There was a bit of back-lash…
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Making science public: Taking stock
When we wrote our ‘Making Science Public: Challenges and Opportunities’ research project some six or so years ago, various scandals had rocked the unspoken contract between science and society, universities and their users (BSE, MMR, climategate etc.). This contributed to a widely held perception, and I stress perception, of a lack of public trust in…
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Making science public: The science march
The other day over coffee I was reading a blog post and an article. They made me think. The blog post on …and Then There’s Physics rattled once again the rotten foundations of the ivory tower stereotype of academia, while the article by Ed Yong in The Atlantic was about the March for Science that’ll…
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Responsible research and innovation in the UK university: the politics of research governance
This article by Sarah Hartley and Warren Pearce was first published on the LSE Impact Blog on 14 November, 2016 and is republished here under a CC BY 3.0 licence. *** What is science for? One answer to this might be “to answer questions about how the world works”. Sounds simple, but packed into these eight words are…
Making Science Public 