Teachers, Careers and Chance

Posted on November 4, 2010 by Athene Donald

What gets one into working in an interdisciplinary field and what form does it take?  A researcher starts off trained in one field but then moves into interdisciplinary working via various routes. One can stay in one’s original field/department but collaborate to introduce the necessary new discipline(s);  one might be assimilated into a new one which is inherently interdisciplinary, such as systems biology; or possibly one could simply jump ship, say, from physics to biology. Is there something about people who take one route or the other that is inherent in their personality, or does it all depend on one’s training/background?

I have just been chairing one of the BBSRC’s grant-giving committees, and this particular one is inherently interdisciplinary, with most people having a foot in both camps of the physical-biological sciences divide. Over dinner we were discussing the benefits for this sort of working when it comes to taking talks into schools and trying to inspire future generations, and my mind went back to why I didn’t do biology even at O Level.  In part, as ever, this was down to the teachers: my physics teacher was on top of her subject and approachable; my biology teacher was on top of her subject and totally scary. She was very much of the ‘old school’ even in the 1960’s and I found her very intimidating. (Just for the record I should state my history teacher was on top of her subject and restless. She would pace up and down the classroom covering a fantastic distance each lesson, which in itself retained my attention. She was also the mother of the Milliband brothers; needless to say it was a state school.)

I have previously written about my work on starch, but at school it was tests on starch and sugars that were one of the things that ultimately sent me scurrying away from biology (the other thing was the test to work out which side of a leaf gave out more water vapour, a question I thought was profoundly boring, so it is ironic that this too is a topic related to recent research of mine in which we watched leaf stomata close in response to stress in the environmental scanning electron microscope).  The standard test for starch is iodine, and I seem to recall experiments involving iodine and potatoes that I successfully negotiated. However, the other test involving starch/sugars was that based around Fehling’s Solutions I and II. For those of you not familiar with this classic test, it consists of taking two solutions – that is Fehling’s Solutions I and II which Wikipedia tells me are respectively copper sulphate (I certainly recall the blue colour) and potassium sodium tartrate – and adding them to the substance under investigation in a test tube and then heating it up.  My vivid memory of the experiment is the sight of the plug of reactant that formed being expelled from the test tube at great velocity and flying across the room. The distaste and disapproval this act of incompetence evinced from said scary biology teacher remains clearly in my mind. OK, I thought, I’m not a biologist, and when O Level choices were to be made that was an easy decision.  There is no doubt that teachers can make all the difference, and on such little matters can so much hang. (It is equally the case that I much preferred French to German because at the end of my first year of French my teacher told me my accent was awful, so I stopped trying.).  Much has been written about the importance of having well qualified science teachers in primary schools, and specialists in the sciences in every secondary school.  However, even good teachers can be a deterrent if their frankness equates to destruction of confidence.

Research careers have a way of taking on a life of their own, and decisions taken at 15 are not necessarily irrevocable unless one is determined they should be. Chance, fate, call it what you will, plays a surprisingly strong part in shaping where one ends up.  Early career researchers reading this, please don’t believe we all had a life-plan when we set out: a certain extremely well-known colleague of mine once admitted his choice of PhD was determined by the supervisor who smiled at him, and from that simple action much has subsequently flowed.

I would imagine most interdisciplinary researchers have learnt that the discipline and topics which excited them in teenage years turn out not to be sufficient to maintain excitement as research evolves.  New skills, ideas and possibly even language (at least jargon) are required to enable the full story to be teased out. It requires an openness of mind so that the fixed views of a teenager don’t spill over into adult life, and sufficient motivation to overcome the hurdles that crossing boundaries into another discipline inevitably throws up.  However, perhaps the person who completely jumps ship to a different discipline – such as I mentioned at the beginning – does differ from the one who is comfortable sitting at an interface. Maybe the ship-jumper wants to commit to something new, but also in some senses to walk away from the old, in essence rejecting their earlier persona.  In contrast the person who is content to stay put but collaborate is keeping their options open, so that in the future other collaborations can take them in a different direction. The positive spin on this would be they are flexible, the negative that they can’t commit and, as I’ve said before, I obviously fall into the group who have commitment problems.  Chance, teachers, people one bumps into or deliberately set out to meet, all will determine one’s research path in ways impossible to predict when making those early decisions about exam choices.  Decisions are not in general immutable and taking risks is often the best way to progress.

The conversation with my BBSRC committee colleagues clearly did not cover all this ground, though it sparked this train of thought. We had a convivial evening despite the austerity measures the current financial situation impose. We had a truly dreadful meal, which could best be described as school-dinner-with-pretensions. In tune with my long involvement with starch, I think I can safely say the best parts of the meal were the roll and potatoes, the rest was barely edible.  The BBSRC staff member who sat at our table was rehearsing the long list of complaints she had for the hotel management (there was rather too much drilling and hammering going on for comfort for instance), and thereby she hoped to get even better value for money for the research council.  The taxpayer should be reassured.

Posted in Biological Physics, Education, Teaching | Tagged , | Comments Off on Teachers, Careers and Chance

Breakfast with Evelyn Fox Keller (Science and Gender Part II)

Posted on October 31, 2010 by Athene Donald

The second half of the meeting in Austria on Science and Gender gave me a very different impression, both of the topic and the situation in Austria, than I had garnered from the first 24 hours described in my previous post.  Several points came out that were not initially evident, which could be summed up as

  • What is meant by science/ Wissenschaft?
  • What is meant by gender in this context?
  • What is the status quo for female academics in Austria, and what is the way ahead?

Clearly these are big, sweeping questions which I can only touch on here, and which it would be presumptuous of me to claim any sort of particular prescience about, but I will put down my impressions while they are fresh in my mind.

The first evening was taken up, as my previous post discussed, with a discussion specifically about women in science by two people from outside the Austrian system, indeed outside the Germanic tradition, namely Londa Shiebinger from Stanford and myself.  In retrospect it is interesting and significant that women from outside the Austrian (or even central European) umbrella were asked to speak and I will come back to this point.  The bulk of the second day was occupied with a selection of talks from within Austria covering psychology; the legal framework; neuroscience and biological differences; and stereotyping. All these talks were in German. I followed enough of the neuroscience talk to know that the lecturer was being very ambivalent about the biological differences obtained, verging on the ‘these are tasks women can’t do’, though stepping back from explicitly saying women’s brains made them unfit for science.  (To be fair to him, although his slides gave this impression, his answers in the ensuing discussion were much less disquieting.)  I cannot discuss the other talks because they were beyond me; various attendees have remarked how much they disliked the fact that non-German speakers were invited to present and then excluded from all the subsequent debates by virtue of language. Indeed I have been encouraged to write to the organisers spelling out the inappropriateness of this behaviour. I am not sure I am comfortable in doing this, as my inability to speak German adequately is my own failing and it smacks of cultural imperialism to object to a national society holding its meeting in its own tongue. Nevertheless, this is one manifestation of the anger felt by some attendees about the orchestration of this meeting.

The very last talk of the meeting, by Heidi Digglemann was given in English, in large part at her request so as to be able to be inclusive of Fox Keller and myself (Schiebinger had departed) as she gave an account of her personal life story and the crucial influences and staging posts in this.  Apparently this act of using English required what was described as a ‘palace revolution’ to allow this to be permitted. Very strange goings-on.

However, the evening debate on the second evening was in English involving Evelyn Fox Keller,   Christoph Kratky, since 2005 President of the Austrian Science Fund FWF, Hans Sünkel Rector of TU Graz, and Barbara Alving Director of the NIH’s National Center for Research and Resources.  Continuing with the linguistic theme, it was pointed out that although the English title for this meeting, and therefore the premise on which I for one constructed my own talk, was ‘Science and Gender’, in German the title was Wissenschaft und Gender. In this context, Wissenschaft should not be translated simply as Science, but much more broadly as Knowledge.  Now this has been drawn to my attention, I recollect a long discussion on this very point, coincidentally in In Defence of History coincidentally because this is the book I juxtaposed with Fox Keller’s Developmental Biology book a short while ago here . Indeed I now understand that the organising body, the Öesterreichische Forschungsgemeinschaft, is simply the Austrian Research Foundation and not itself tied to science. None of this was made plain to me in my letter of invitation, nor to the other external speakers I would surmise, based on the way they interpreted their brief.  It does explain why the audience contained philosophers, sociologists, economists etc.  I don’t think in some senses this disconnect mattered, and the material that was presented by the English speakers specifically around science seemed both well-received and to stimulate much debate, but nevertheless it was a disconnect – intended or otherwise.

So what did the Gender in the title mean?  I think many of us, myself included, had taken ‘gender’ to mean ‘women’, but of course that is formally quite incorrect, as the gender studies people pointed out. The evening debate was formally entitled ‘Will Science become Feminine?’ and was interpreted by the 4 speakers in rather different ways, in part because of different interpretations of ‘feminine’ and ‘gender’ in this context.  Fox Keller kicked things off by saying feminizing science should mean bringing more women in, not making it ‘touchy-feely’.  She pointed out that school education sometimes served the role of a technology ‘transforming boys and girls into “masculine” and “feminine”’.  And she particularly objected to remarks that had been made to her throughout her life along the lines of ‘you think like a man’, implying thought is gendered; telling women ‘how’ to think is, in her words, ‘offensive’.  Her desire was to

‘Free science from the shackles of gender.’

Next up was Dr Kratky who appeared to say essentially everything was fine, it was all a question of demographics and time since academic posts turned over slowly in the Austrian system and the number of women was creeping up so – nothing to worry about. Furthermore, he had heard various speakers say (and clearly I was included in this category) that some women lacked self-confidence, but he had seen no sign of it in the speakers so he wasn’t convinced that this was a problem. Indeed some men suffered from lack of self-confidence too. Yes, OK, I’ve said before I’m not usually taken as a shrinking violet, but his mode of expressing this was, to my mind, verging on the just plain rude.

Barbara Avling was by comparison very mild and factual, talking about steps the NIH had taken to support women, the need to take the long view and support people when they needed to step back for a period for personal reasons, and the importance of team science and training people to work (and lead) teams. She argued that the economics meant it was not sensible to invest substantially in training people and then not work to prevent attrition. Hans Sünkel was also rather mild, merely talking about the (rather minor) structures that TU Graz was introducing to try to increase the number of women full professors, and recognizing that numbers were slowly increasing, but that science was not necessarily seen as an attractive career choice – for men or women.

The chair, whose name I don’t recall but who was a woman from the Humanities, kept trying to bring the discussion back to ‘feminising’ science, but wasn’t making much headway with any of the panel. Fox Keller insisted that women will not change science, but that it will evolve, and that there isn’t simply a female way of doing things. The contributions from the floor all tended to go the same way, but also begin to hint at the feelings of frustration many of the women present felt. There was no doubt that many interpreted Kratky’s remarks – and recall that this is the guy at the top of the food chain controlling funding – as implying he believed that since there is no fundamental problem, nothing substantial needed to be done or would be done, and the message did not go down well.

Over the subsequent dinner I began to get a better appreciation of some of the underlying tensions, of which the argument over the language of the meeting was one.  The women I sat with clearly felt that Austria was intensely conservative, with hang-ups left over from Freud and the guilt implied if a mother did not devote herself to her children.  Furthermore, that the senior management of universities and funding agencies were doing no more than paying lip service to the problems many women felt they faced. I was told stories of university managers who would look the other way and do nothing when presented with explicit, written evidence of harassment of female staff; of a so-called law about gender equality that went no further than aspiration with no enforcement; of women who were not enabled/ actively hindered from getting full professorships but left in the limbo of lower level posts without clout. Of course these are things that the UK would have recognized ~20 years ago, but our community has moved whilst Austria  remains a rather hostile environment for women academics. Indeed one of the men I had spoken to earlier in the day said Austria was the most conservative of all the European countries on this front.

But let me return to Fox Keller, whom I had breakfast with on the last day. I had read her book ‘Reflections on Gender and Science’ several years ago, and had reacted very badly to it, interpreting it as hardcore Feminism with a capital F. I have read it again in the run-up to this meeting and wondered what it was that I disliked so much. Possibly it’s that my position has changed, but I actually think it is because I understand the book much better. Far from talking about a feminine way of doing science – which was how I interpreted it originally and which she indicated was a common misinterpretation – she wants a gender-free science. Although she believes she was the one who introduced the word gender into the context of science, it is exactly what she doesn’t want but fears is there. Unfortunately by introducing the word, she seems also to have introduced a hostage to fortune leading to many (my previous self included) to interpret her words as wanting there to be a female way of doing things.  She clearly believes the culture needs to change, to make it less what I would term macho (she called it masculine-esque) but absolutely not to go for simple PC-ness. Nor does she believe there is a female way of doing science, or that having more women will lead to a different type of science.  So, the example of Bernardine Healey cited by Barbara Avling, because she had overseen the introduction of an NIH policy requiring both men and women to be involved in clinical trials for conditions which might affect both, was seen by Fox Keller as an idea whose time had come rather than due to the explicit fact that Healy was a woman.

I have come away from this meeting rather perplexed. I came to give an overview of pragmatic actions I am associated with and familiar with from the UK. I am sure Londa Schiebinger likewise came simply to talk about her ongoing work. Instead I find we were pitched into a political arena where we were being used as external pawns, in the nicest possible way, in an ongoing situation – possibly akin to a war – between conservatives and more progressive academics. A situation where everything including our style, our language and our science was potentially ammunition for one side or the other; we had been given no hint of this backdrop when invited. I am perhaps wiser as a result, but not necessarily happier.

Posted in Equality, Science Culture, Women in Science | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Breakfast with Evelyn Fox Keller (Science and Gender Part II)

Discussing Science and Gender

Posted on October 29, 2010 by Athene Donald

I am currently at a meeting in a very attractive location (including snow) in Austria on Science and Gender, organised by the Österreichischen Forschungsgemeinschaft.  The meeting overall intends to discuss the topic in a very broad sense, with the participants coming from across the academic spectrum.  This obviously includes the full range of sciences as well as gender studies, but also less obvious disciplines including economics, languages and linguistics. I don’t think I had anticipated this when preparing my own talk.  Unfortunately my language skills are not advanced enough to appreciate some of the talks and topics – 40 year old O Level German just isn’t enough to appreciate the nuances of this field – but the first talk was rather easier: Londa Schiebinger from Stanford, giving an international perspective on the issues.  Her talk immediately preceded mine, and we covered some of the same topics, though with a rather different emphasis.

Londa’s background is in English and History, but for many years she has looked at both the historical and the current situation of women in science. Her talk identified three levels of analysis:

1.       Participation: ‘fix the (number of) women’;

2.       Gender in the Culture: ‘fix the institution’;

3.       Gender in Knowledge: ‘fix the knowledge’.

She discussed point 1 by discussing what happens when you, for instance, teach women how to negotiate for better salaries – a particular issue in the US where it seems all salaries are done by negotiation. When such training was carried out at her own institution, it transpired the administrators with whom the negotiations were done simply didn’t respond to the women in the same way as they would to men coming into their offices asking for a pay rise. Consequently the effect was less than had been hoped, and probably just added to a sense of alienation for the women faculty concerned.  My own thoughts on ‘fixing the women’ were discussed here.  The implied deficit model assumes it is the woman who are lacking something, rather than that it is the culture that is at fault. In the case of the salary negotiations, therefore, giving the women the confidence and skills to negotiate failed because the culture – in this case within the management – was not adapted to deal with this change.

Her discussion of ‘fixing the institution’ was where there was the greatest overlap with my own talk, and I’ll discuss this further below. But it was the third topic I found most interesting, because I was least familiar with it. Her point here was that much of knowledge –most, though not all of her examples derived from the field of biomedical research – is done in a gendered way, producing results which may not be equally applicable to both sexes. (Perhaps I should try to spell out the differences between sex and gender as I understood it from the discussion: sex is about biology, whereas gender relates to sociocultural attributes.)

To take a specific example, in fact from engineering practice, that of crash dummies i.e. those objects used to test the consequences of crash impacts on the body. The first such dummies used were in studies in the US (ca 1949) by the military to study the effect of ejection from ejector seats from planes on the human body. The model built was that of a rather tall male.  These studies were subsequently adapted to study the optimisation of seat belts in high speed car crashes. There have been modifications to the dummies, but it is only very recently that Volvo, if I recall correctly (in other words, in Scandinavia, which I think is telling in itself) have started to study the effect of seatbelt design on pregnant women, using computer simulations.  This despite the fact that foetuses are known to be damaged by the pressure induced by the standard 3 point seatbelt.  This is a clear example of a case where the standard ‘male’ model is assumed to cover all situations (although I presume there have been separate studies on children of different ages and sizes; this wasn’t mentioned), and that simply isn’t adequate.  Despite the obvious shortcomings, US law isn’t requiring any changes until 2011 to ensure the safety of pregnant women is factored in to safety design.  Another obvious example, that is probably more familiar to readers, is the case of symptoms associated with incipient heart attacks in men and women. These present differently. Since doctors are not always trained to recognize these differences, and alert to the variety in symptoms and the location of where pain is felt, many people are not given the appropriate treatment in time.  Response to drugs may also be different, which has significant implications for drug trial design.  All these sorts of effects Londa referred to as requiring ‘gendered innovation’ and this has become a major theme of her team at Stanford,

For my own talk I was originally given a title of  ‘Science and Gender in Academia – a Reflection of Society’, but I felt completely ill-qualified to discuss this and chose to concentrate not on the social or sociological but on the practical and pragmatic steps I am familiar with both locally, through WiSETI, and nationally through the Athena Forum.  However I began with setting this work in the context of the so-called leaky pipeline, and this was where there was most overlap with Londa’s talk.  Issues such as unconscious bias and stereotyping – as manifest in how people (male and female) evaluate CV’s, write reference letters, or judge people at interview –  are so prevalent within our culture we are going to have to work incredibly hard to overcome this. I said that I would like to see senior managers to take some of Project Implicit’s tests – I have mentioned this Project before here – so that they are at least aware of the baggage they, and all of us, carry into the selection of candidates for instance.  We also need to consider the obstacles female scientists may face due to their low numbers, such as isolation, lack of mentors and lack of role models.  However, rather than rehearse the whole of my talk I attach as a separate page a first draft of the paper that will be submitted to the proceedings of this meeting (and the accompanying powerpoint presentation).  This manuscript will be updated in the light of the discussions over the next 24 hours, so should not be considered as the finished article.

I am particularly looking forward to the panel discussion tonight, which will feature Evelyn Fox Keller in (I presume) her role as author of Reflections on Gender and Science, rather than as the mathematical biologist and author of Making Sense of Life I discussed in my last post.  The Discussion is entitled ‘Will Science become Feminine?’. Should be interesting!

Posted in Equality, Science Culture, Uncategorized, Women in Science | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Too Much Interdisciplinarity? From Cliometricians to Mathematical Biologists

Posted on October 25, 2010 by Athene Donald

I have recently been reading two apparently vastly different books: In Defence of History by Richard J Evans, a Cambridge colleague, and Making Sense of Life by Evelyn Fox Keller. Despite their widely different topics and approaches, reading them in juxtaposition brought out some striking similarities.

In Defence of History is a book written to defend the discipline of history against some of the more extreme manifestations of post-modernism. As the blurb on the back cover of my edition says ‘under the influence of postmodernist theory, the profession of history is in crisis, its assumptions derided and its methods rejected as outmoded.’ I am not going to comment on any of this, as I read it simply to get some handle on how postmodernism has impacted on the field and am clearly no expert. Likewise I am no expert in developmental biology, the main theme of Making Sense of Life:  the book concentrates on how approaches to embryo development have changed over time, along with what constitutes ‘knowing’. Fox Keller refers to this as a discussion of ‘variations in epistemological culture..[that] are both temporal and interdisciplinary.’ And it is this common strand of interdisciplinarity that both these books  touch upon, that I want to explore in this post: how, in fact, there are some overlapping ideas despite the very different provenances and motivations of the two books. I should add both are books I very much enjoyed reading.

Evans writes an interesting chapter on whether history can be treated as a science suggesting that ‘attempts to turn history into science have been going on for the best part of two centuries’ but on the whole coming down on the side that it can’t. For instance he states that history is not well placed to make predictions about the future because ‘life, unlike science, is simply too full of surprises’. I happen to think science is full of surprises too, but I think it is clear what he means. He also discusses the argument that history cannot be regarded as a science because ‘while scientific knowledge is cumulative, historical knowledge is not’ and that very often different historians will dispute each other’s interpretations and judgement may also come into play.  Well that also will apply to scientists but again, I think it is clear what he means.

However, the main thing that struck me was his comments about the fragmentation of history as a discipline, the spawning of sub-disciplines that then claimed to be more real than the original. In particular, this is discussed in the context of social history.  History – at least in the UK – used to be concerned solely with great men, the nation state and the ensuing politics. The vast majority of people were regarded as unimportant (‘peasants’ if you like) and didn’t feature.  This led to the need for the parvenus who wanted to study social and economic history to set up separate departments and to ‘claim that their own specialism constituted a separated discipline entirely distinct from history proper’, to quote Evans.  So-called cliometricians in the 1970’s wanted to transform the discipline of history by introducing a proper ‘scientific’ basis, particularly with regard to demographic and economic history, using quantitative methods such as those borrowed from econometrics.  Readers of this blog may see why I think this argument is not a million miles from what happens in interdisciplinary science, as I discussed previously, where new disciplines may be spawned as if to replace existing traditional ones.

So where does Fox Keller fit into this?  Her own background is in theoretical physics, but over her career she has turned into (to use her own words) a mathematical biophysicist . In her book, amongst an analysis of many topics, she discusses the emerging field of mathematical biology. She takes exception, for instance,  to how external funding agencies view bringing disciplines together at this maths-biology interface, quoting with displeasure from a press release associated with the formation of a new programme in theoretical biology at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study in 1998:

‘The use of mathematical ideas, models, and techniques in the biosciences is a rapidly growing and increasingly important field. Applied mathematicians have traditionally used mathematical methods to address a wide range of problems in the physical sciences….However, several areas of biology have gradually developed an understanding of the important role that mathematical approaches can play. Such approaches are often in the hands of people who collaborate with experimentalists, but do not themselves work in the laboratory.’

She sniffs at this because it smacks of belittlement of biologists who work in an apparently ‘undeveloped culture’, with theoretical physicists ‘seeking to impose the cultural givens’ of their twentieth century history on biologists.

Likewise she refers to an earlier report from 1992 for a workshop on ‘Mathematics and Biology: The Interface Challenges and Opportunities’  which had stated in patronizing voice:

‘This is the stage in which biology finds itself today, poised for the phase transition that comes with the total integration of mathematical and empirical approaches to a subject. Many branches of biology are virtually devoid of mathematical theory, and some must remain so for years to come. In these, anecdotal information accumulates, awaiting the integration and insights that come from mathematical abstraction.’

The solution this 1992 report made, smacks of the transformation of the discipline the cliometricians were wanting to make in the case of history: explicitly to develop new research strategies (and new funding routes) rather than simply a ‘physics of biology’.  I think Fox Keller approves of this, wanting mathematical biology to be sui generis rather than a spectrum of approaches which is flexible enough to accommodate many different facets.  Her book, written in 2002, really predates the explosion of systems biology, let alone synthetic biology – both of which obviously represent different overlaps between physical and biological sciences. (The earlier manifestation of synthetic biology, as constructed in the early 20th century, forms a separate chapter in the book, but is a completely different subject from that conveyed by the phrase nowadays.)

Herein lies my concern. The mathematical biology she was flagging up was discussed in 2000 by Peter Dearden and my Cambridge colleague Michael Akam; since then times have changed again, the approaches needed for solving cutting-edge problems have likewise changed  and it is  madness to keep trying to create new departments to keep up. It is bad enough trying to keep abreast of new journals. Meanwhile funding becomes distorted to try to follow these new hot topics.

So, be it cliometricans, social historians or mathematical biologists redefining a ‘traditional’ discipline or claiming that their particular way of doing things must overtake any previous methodology, this approach is, I think, ultimately unhelpful.  These two books, tackling utterly different fields and with totally different motivations, reinforce my suspicion that identifying new fashionable fields carved out of an amalgam of old ones is a dangerous ploy – much better to let natural synergies develop for particular purposes. This suspicion would appear to align with Evans’ position, if not Fox Keller’s. However, the reason why this idealistic approach may fail, the reason why individuals want a new hook to hang their hat on, comes down (of course) to funding and job opportunities. Sitting uncomfortably on the fence between disciplines, rather than inventing new ones, always has the danger that whichever way one falls off it is into a hostile environment which fails to appreciate the synergy one is hoping to achieve.

Posted in Biological Physics, Interdisciplinary Science, Science Culture, Science Funding | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Too Much Interdisciplinarity? From Cliometricians to Mathematical Biologists

Eureka! – the Influence of Scientists on the CSR

Posted on October 20, 2010 by Athene Donald

The Eureka reception – hosted by the Times – was buzzing last night. This reception was to celebrate the 1st birthday of the Eureka Magazine and many of those named on the 100 most influential people in science a couple of weeks ago were there at the Science Museum. But beyond that pleasant feeling of well-being that comes with a couple of glasses of champagne (and I’m sorry if that makes me sound like Nigel Dempster) there was an additional buzz doing the rounds, as word spread about the CSR announcement for science. First it was just a hint, that the Times had been briefed, but then it began to gather momentum: it was flat cash for science; the science money was ringfenced – both the Research Councils and the QR elements.

My own ‘best moment’ because it’s when I really believed it was true, was when David Willetts walked in looking happy. Would he have come if things had been as bleak as we all feared? After all, it was only a few days ago the talks were all of 20+% cuts and that the Research Councils were talking about the dire consequences to the grants portfolio. So many people have done so much to make sure science did not get forgotten, despite the absence of a CSA within the Treasury. The list of people who have brought us to this much-less-discouraging -than-one-had feared position is long and many people deserve our thanks. People like Adrian Smith who was present last night, looking thoroughly exhausted but ultimately pleased that the news had leaked (but not at his hands); but there are many more including just the ground swell of opinion from the scientist-in-the-lab and the Science is Vital Campaign. One should not forget the CSA Sir John Beddington, the impact of the economic report by Jonathan Haskel and Gavin Wallis, and the Royal Society’s report The Scientifc Century, plus all the associated contacts and briefings. The media have done their bit, including the recent leaders in the Times and the Guardian in the last couple of days. The message from both Adrian Smith and David Willetts was plain, both said this to me personally, now scientists need to stand up collectively and say loudly and clearly that we are delighted, that this protection for the science budget is welcomed; that we are pleased and satisfied – and then of course to deliver the goods that the arguments have promised. Willetts made it clear we should appreciate what ‘George’ had done – a remark that caused temporary consternation in number 69 on the Eureka list George Efstathiou who was standing next to me at the time, until he realised the remark referred to Osborne.

The devil will be in the detail, of course, it is far too early to know what the reality is – of course as I write the CSR hasn’t even been published. But I for one slept better last night just knowing that the future for us and our scientific successors – those young who are planning a career in science, even if not knowing how they will finance themselves through university since we cannot forget the university budgets still face a slashing today – is not as bleak as I thought this time yesterday.

1745 October 20th 2010 I have now updated this with links and a few more acknowledgements to the people and bodies that have made such a difference in reaching this relatively happy state. The details of the CSR are now known, and there will be many wise deconstructions of what it all means. In keeping with the Eureka spirit, I will point you to Mark Henderson’s view of things, since he was the one who first (I believe) broke the story. But if the paywall just irritates you too much, try the CaSe analysis here – CaSE too played a large part in today’s outcome

Posted in Research, Science Funding | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments