{"id":3165,"date":"2014-09-11T20:23:27","date_gmt":"2014-09-11T19:23:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/?p=3165"},"modified":"2014-09-11T20:23:27","modified_gmt":"2014-09-11T19:23:27","slug":"in-which-we-need-more-lab-coats-in-the-commons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2014\/09\/11\/in-which-we-need-more-lab-coats-in-the-commons\/","title":{"rendered":"In which we need more lab coats in the Commons"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like many commuters serving as a captive audience on the London Underground, I tend to read the free Evening Standard<\/em> most nights. I enjoy the op ed pieces by Rosamund Urwin, who has always struck me as both light-hearted and eminently sensible – a good combination for any journalist desirous of keeping the attention of exhausted people trapped in one of the sweatiest circles of Hell.<\/p>\n

Tonight’s offering was an impassioned plea for more scientists in politics<\/a>. You can read her brief piece yourself, but it highlighted the grim stats for politicos in the United Kingdom: just one scientist MP (“A token Beaker stuck in there with all the muppets” – genius); no science graduates in the Cabinet; a majority of Tories polled recently believing that the case for anthropogenic climate change has not been proved; the fact that our Health Secretary, presiding over an annual budget of over \u00a3100 billion, believes in homeopathy. She calls for action to entice scientists to enter professional politics (“more lab coats in the Commons” is her rallying cry), and suggests giving all MPs a science “refresher course”. <\/p>\n

I doubt this will ever happen, but it’s nice to see a demand for it in the mainstream press.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, for all three of you paying attention in the back row, after several weeks of burning the candle at more ends that I thought candles actually had (maybe it’s some sort of cosmological multi-dimensional candle), my big paper was finally resubmitted to Current Biology<\/a> yesterday. Accompanied, I might add, by the strains of “The Final Countdown” blasted out at top volume (but replacing the word “Countdown” with ‘Upload”) as I clicked the button. Where it has remained a stubborn ear-worm ever since. Fingers crossed that my magnum-ish opus finds favor with the Editorial Powers That Be at long last.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like many commuters serving as a captive audience on the London Underground, I tend to read the free Evening Standard most nights. I enjoy the op ed pieces by Rosamund Urwin, who has always struck me as both light-hearted and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-policy","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3165\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}