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The Doing of Science

Posted on 25 February 2026 by Athene Donald

In my retirement I have more time to read than ever used to be the case, and I enjoy reading books about science, scientists and the way they have, both in the past and currently, approached their science and their lives. There are comparatively few autobiographies out there; I understand ‘memoir’ is not a popular genre with publishers right now, so we aren’t likely to see a flood of these hitting the shelves any time soon. Few books like Venki Ramakrishnan’s personal account of unravelling the ribosome, Gene Machine, or the somewhat harrowing account of her early life by Lindy Elkins-Tanton, A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman, describing how she surmounted many odds. Nor others like the sad story of Erin Zimmerman essentially being forced out of science by circumstances beyond her control in Unrooted. I find these books fascinating reading, but clearly publishers feel there is no money in them so, for scientists young and old, there are few accounts to get their teeth into, nor narratives to impart to non-scientists about how scientists go about their life and work.

I like picking quotes out of these books that either resonate with me or strike me as telling. This proved very helpful for quoting in my own 2023 book, Not Just for the Boys. In Venki’s book there is the wonderful description of the excitement and joy of research going well (in this case placing a protein in the 30S subunit, for those fascinated by the ribosome), that it was ‘like eating crisps. Once he did the first one, he couldn’t stop.’ Visions of a tube of Pringles spring to mind, to keep one going while dealing with some knotty problem. Or Donna Strickland’s slightly tongue in cheek description after winning the Nobel Prize:

“It is truly an amazing feeling when you know that you have built something that no one else ever has and it actually works. There really is no excitement quite like it — except for maybe getting woken up at 5 in the morning because the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation also think it was an exciting moment for the field of laser physics.”

Looking to a much earlier literature, I am currently reading the book Gary Wersky wrote in 1978, The Visible College, describing a ‘collective biography’ of five famous left-wing/communist scientists who flourished both before and after the second world war. In this book he spells out part of his motivation at the time:

“Scientists, by contrast, are almost complete strangers to most of us, because we do not know where they come from or how they spend their time. Indeed, having been denied access to their history and culture, we are often tempted to regard them as pretty uninteresting people.”

It seems to me that the general public gets little opportunity to gain insight into a scientist’s life: what makes us tick and what keeps us going when the going is (inevitably) tough, or spurs us on the way when finally things start going right. We probably do seem like ‘complete strangers’ to the majority of citizens. I think this is a gap in the published world. I believe it is a mistake, both because so much tax-payers money is put into science in one way or another, and democracy demands that people understand why this is money well spent (and it’s not just because science has to be instrumental), but also because science is a central part of our culture. Books on history, geography and allied topics are allowed to get quite technical, relying on much background knowledge to be fully understood. Yet somehow they are still regarded as suitable for mass markets (I would cite both Peter Frankopan’s The Earth Transformed and William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road in this category). Science isn’t treated in the same way. The publishing world seems to hold science to a different standard, or perhaps I mean holds the public to a different standard of knowledge so that only ‘popular’ science, assuming little prior knowledge, gets published as a trade book.

Science is a human endeavour, done by humans with all their faults (think Jim Watson, for instance) or virtues (Jocelyn Bell Burnell is a shining example of someone who gave away a vast prize – the Breakthrough Prize – to support scientists of the future who lack means to pursue their dreams). Why should the reading public, the typical citizen, not have access to accounts of what actually goes on in the lab to help them understand if it’s a career for them or their family? Science is too often treated as a strange place inhabited by nerds.

The mantra of ‘follow the science’ used during the pandemic by those who almost certainly had a poor grip of any of science’s constituent parts, was a somewhat dangerous mantra in that there is no ‘the’ in science. The uncertainties that accompanied early advice, the continuing lack of clarity over Long Covid, highlights that following ‘the’ science can be of limited use when knowledge itself is limited, but pushing against those limits is exactly how science progresses. Scientists today need to keep fighting against those who rail against, for instance, vaccinations and climate change. (This brings to mind another salutary recent book I’ve read: Science under Siege, which highlights the challenges scientists in those fields face as politics and money trumps knowledge and expertise.)

But if science is to be bundled away in the technical press, not opened up to the wider public as history so readily is, then much of the way that science proceeds – with taxpayers’ money – will be rendered obscure and therefore potentially ‘suspect’ or ‘not for me’, or just plain odd and irrelevant. I wish there were more books out there that talked about the actual ‘doing’ of science, that a teacher could read to enthuse their classes with some reality not some curriculum-based dry facts implying science is a solved problem not a wonderful puzzle. (And yes I know there are some fantastic books designed for young learners in the classroom about the science itself.) But we need more books that bring to life the life of science, that tell it like it is in the career of a researcher and which are accessible to the non-expert.  However, to date my own approaches to agents to try to pitch a book to help to fill the void have so far fallen on stoney ground. I will keep trying….

Posted in Books, Communicating Science, Donna Strickland, Research, Science Culture, The Visible College, thrills, Venki | Comments Off on The Doing of Science

In which we watch and wait

Posted on 22 February 2026 by Jennifer Rohn

People chatting in a lab

The lab family: a snapshot in time

Precarity is the one constant of academic science. Themes of instability thread themselves through everything we do: experiments that inexplicably cannot be repeated. Once-sound theories that fall into pieces as a result. Job contracts that end after only a few years; even permanent contracts vulnerable to systemic university redundancy plans. And of course: the funding that underpins all we do.

Labs are such a patchwork: as the head, you cobble together a shifting-sand group of people who start and stop at different times, overlapping with one another sometimes for years, other times, just a few weeks. Every person under your care is the product of a grant you have agonised over, often for months, submitted into a pool that can be as competitive as tankful of sharks scrabbling over a single piece of meat.

Once you welcome that person into your lab family, the clock is already ticking: 18 months, two years, maybe three if you’ve been lucky. As soon as they start, you are already worrying about the next grant, as you’ll need to put in multiple grants to ensure that one will succeed.

It’s not just the lab head feeling the strain; it’s much worse for the individual researchers, whose continuity in the system absolutely depends on that next position. Unlike me, they have no buffer system. While I can function for a while with a smaller team, even on life support, there is no such safety net for the individual team of one.

Which is why the news that a number of UK Research Council grant schemes were being temporarily paused, ahead of a reshuffle in priorities, came as such a shock to the research community. One of my own grants in progress was labelled “rejected” on the system just days before Christmas (even though it wasn’t due until March). Hundreds of other grants suffered similar fates, most tragically those that had already successfully passed a stage-one application with positive reviews.

We are all of us on edge, as we have to wait a few more months until we find out exactly when we can apply for grants again, and what those grants will look like. On edge, and in limbo.

For me, it could be a lot worse. I have a team of seven, a few of whom are funded through to 2027. We have four papers under review and even more than that number nearly ready to submit, so any grants I do submit are likely to be well-bolstered with evidence. In my field, there are a few funding charities with whom I have had success in the past, and which remain available. The Almighty Wellcome, too, is still up and running – although much as a road closure diverts all the traffic to somewhere else, people assume that these alternative sources will only become overwhelmed.

But the people I really worry about are the early-career researchers (ECR), the ‘teams of one’, who need to find their next post-doc, fellowship or faculty position. Anecdotally, I understand that the bleak scientific news from the United States has already driven an increase in overseas applicants to the UK and Europe – themselves saturated job markets that can ill-afford yet more contenders. A common way of taking on post-docs in my field, for example, is via the ‘project grant’ route: one of the paused schemes.

Even if I am able to submit a project grant in the summer, such is the protracted nature of the process that any associated position will take another year to become available. What happens to all the ECR who are ready to move on now, or in the next few months? There is the very real possibility that this strategic pause will actively drive young researchers out of academia – perhaps forever. It is a tragedy, all the worse for seeming wholly avoidable. Surely this pause could have been worked into the system seamlessly? Surely live grants could have been grandfathered in? None of it makes any sense.

For now, I try not to worry, and I’m busy making strategic plans which will allow me and my collaborators to move in any number of possible directions once the way is finally signposted. While I am no stranger to imposter syndrome, I also know, objectively, that my grant success rate has been high of late and that my area has been remarkably fashionable. I can weather this, from the lab perspective. And I will do all I can to support my team to cling onto their academic dreams despite the odds – heaven knows I could write a master class on that particular subject.

But for now, I can only watch and wait along with everybody else.

Posted in academia, careers, Research, Science Funding, staring into the abyss, The profession of science | Comments Off on In which we watch and wait

Conflicts of Interest

Posted on 15 February 2026 by Athene Donald

Many years ago, before I was even a professor and still a newbie when it came to sitting on decision-making committees, I had a very disturbing experience at one particular grant-giving meeting. The details of what, who and where aren’t important, but the behaviour of the Chair and his (yes, it was a man, though that’s probably not relevant) pals around the table is what I want to discuss. I wasn’t the only woman on the committee, but the other woman was out of the room, as it was a grant from her husband that was under discussion. Again, although this couple were quite unknown to me and their research far from my field, it was clear some of the others – including the Chair, who I’ll refer to as Prof A – knew the couple well.

On the face of it, the grant application was not well received and the referees’ reports were not supportive. The startling thing was when Prof A said ‘ah well, we all know what he was trying to say’ and wanted to argue that the proposal should be funded. Others around the table nodded that the guy was a good guy and the grant should be supported. I sat there gobsmacked. I was not alone. I may, in those far off days, have felt too far out of my depth and of insufficient seniority to object, but someone else did. (I’d like to think if no one else had spoken up, I would have done, but who knows at this distance in time.) They pointed out that interpreting what the applicant wanted to say in this case but not in any others, was unreasonable. In essence, that the committee were attempting to rewrite the application mentally and on the spot.  After some discussion, the proposal was scored (appropriately) quite lowly and we all moved on.

It left a very nasty taste in the mouth. Up till that point I had regarded Prof A as a good chair. He was business-like in general, kept the discussions moving on without allowing anyone to grandstand so that we kept to time, and held the committee together when there were internal tensions between what one might term the old guard who had one view of the field, and the more modern quantitative side. However, his manoeuvring on this occasion really shocked me and it made me wonder how much other grants had been steered to success (or failure) in more subtle ways. I may say, Prof A went on to a senior leadership role in the UK, and I did wonder (although our paths never crossed again) whether he still had this blind spot about his mates. This would have mattered greatly in that subsequent position.

I would like to think conflicts of interest are handled better now, with more explicit guidelines being common. However, they are differently interpreted between different bodies. Sometimes a grant-assessing committee requires anyone from the same institution as the applicant to leave the room. If the application is actually from, say, three universities, then numerous people may leave the room. Those left in the room may not be the experts, and it is hard to believe the applicant(s) are getting a fair hearing. I’m not sure what the answer is to this problem, but sometimes excluding someone from a Zoology department because an application from Maths in the same institution has applied may feel a bit like overkill.

Then, particularly with fellowships of different sorts, there is the question of who can be a referee. Sometimes a collaborator, who knows the individual well, is excluded because they’ve co-written papers (often a time limit of five years is put on that), or a PhD supervisor is ruled out, either (or both) of which can leave, particularly if anyone from your institution is also excluded, the early career researcher scrabbling around to find someone suitable. Excluding those who know an individual well means that references may come in that are very bland, offering little more insight than the stuff already available in the submitted paperwork.

Moving up the career ladder, it may not be simply your science that is being judged, but also leadership skills, the ability to chair meetings or effect change. But, again, those outside your institution may not have had much opportunity to see an individual act in these capacities. A colleague you know well through your research may have little to say about your strategizing.

I am minded to think through this as I wade through a pile of applications for early career overseas fellowships. In this case, someone at the intended home institution has to write a reference explaining their willingness to host the person concerned. These letters are intensely variable, in ways that may have no bearing on the candidate. Obviously, it’s good if the applicant and the host have had some interaction, but not when it is the student’s recent PhD supervisor who has just moved overseas and wants to take their student with them. That seems to me to be missing the point of the fellowships of broadening experiences. On the other hand, if it is the head of the overseas department, however strong a bond may have formed between applicant and the group they are going to work with, all that may appear on paper is a letter promising to provide space and IT support. That may be the bare minimum required, but it is not helpful. Sometimes one feels one email between hosting PI and applicant is all that has so far transpired, which does not give confidence either. But none of this may have anything to do with the strength of the applicant.

I’m not sure what the answer to this broad-ranging conundrum is. The more I think about how we judge others in the sciences (and probably elsewhere), the less confidence I have that any assessment can avoid one kind of bias or unfairness or another. One certainly doesn’t want the kind of behaviour that I started this post off with. But whose letter of reference should one trust to be totally objective? And can one exclude oneself, the reader and judge, from having one’s own biases (as opposed to scientific judgement) about the particular group or sub-discipline that turns up on the application form?

Posted in bias, fellowships, grant panels, Research, Science Culture | Comments Off on Conflicts of Interest

A year of inaction: why has the Royal Society allowed itself to be hollowed out by Elon Musk?

Posted on 11 February 2026 by Stephen

Colourful image from the webpage of the Royal Society. Background is a mix of images of electronic circuits and silicon wafers. Text reads: "Welcome to the Royal Society. We are the independent scientific academy of the UK, dedicated to promoting excellence in science for the benefit of humanity."

Professor Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society, would have you believe that concerns raised within and without the Society about the behaviour of their honoured fellow, Elon Musk FRS, are because some people think he’s a “bad person”. Nurse’s predecessor as President, Sir Adrian Smith, repeatedly sought characterise the concerns as differences of political opinion so that any attempt to bring Musk to book would amount to interference with the right of fellows to hold and express controversial views. Several other Fellows have, I understand, dismissed the concerns over Musk’s actions as a storm in a social media teacup.

If these various claims were true, the Royal Society’s inaction in respect of Mr Musk would indeed be warranted. There is of course some political character to Musk’s activities, since over the past several years he has been very politically engaged, campaigning enthusiastically for Donald Trump and even for a time worked within the Trump administration (as head of DOGE); and it is true that some of those who have objected to Musk’s continued fellowship within the Royal Society clearly don’t like his politics. 

But the heart of the matter is not to do with political differences. It is to do with the fact that Musk actions amount to clear contraventions of the Fellows’ code of conduct. Given the ongoing obfuscation and confusion around the issues raised by this troubling episode, I think it is important to put on record carefully and straightforwardly why the Royal Society’s failure to address Musk’s breaches of their code has so undermined the integrity and authority of our national academy of science. 

Why does the Royal Society have a code? It explains that in the preamble: 

“The Royal Society’s fundamental purpose, reflected in its founding Charters of the 1660s, is to recognise, promote, and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity. The credibility of the Society’s work in pursuit of these objectives rests in large part upon its reputation. This in turn rests upon the reputation of the Fellows and Foreign Members of which the Society is composed, and their upholding of high standards in their work and conduct both inside and outside of the Society.”

And how exactly has Musk’s conduct fallen below the standards enshrined in the code? I want to focus here on what I see as the primary concerns, steering clear of those that arguably have some partisan or political character. They can be simply stated:

First: following Musk’s acquisition of X he removed the teams who worked to counteract the spread of deceptive material and by reconfiguring the algorithm to boost his own posts, has become one of the most prominent sources of misinformation on the platform. 

Second: as head of DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), he played a leading role in grievously, chaotically and at times unlawfully undermining federal research agencies and programmes in the USA. 

Third, and most seriously: also as head of DOGE he bragged about defunding USAID, an action that is reckoned to have killed tens of thousands people by suddenly depriving them of critical healthcare and to result in up to 14 million deaths by 2030, according to a study published in the Lancet.

It is difficult to see how spreading misinformation can “support excellence in science” given the long-established ethos of the scientific community that truth-claims should be consonant “with observation and with previously confirmed knowledge”; or how drastic and disorderly cuts to research and aid budgets that have cost some people their jobs and others their lives “encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity”. 

Musk’s actions appear to be diametrically opposed to the mission and values of the Royal Society. As the code makes plain, his Fellowship of the Royal Society is “a privilege predicated on adherence to particular standards of conduct.” By accepting the honour of fellowship he has agreed that he “shall not act or fail to act in any way which would undermine the Society’s mission or bring the Society into disrepute” (Section 1.5). The code also clearly explains that this stricture applies to statements or conduct inside and outside the Royal Society: “When speaking or publicising statements in a personal capacity, Fellows and Foreign Members must still strive to uphold the reputation of the Society and those who work in it, and be mindful that what is said or stated in a personal capacity could still impact the Society” (Section 4.19); and “When acting in other capacities (for example, as an employee of another organisation), Fellows and Foreign Members must be mindful that what is done in other capacities may still reflect on the Society” (section 4.20).

Fellows are also expected to understand the consequences that flow from breaches of the code; they must “acknowledge the responsibility and right of the Society to ensure this Code of Conduct is adhered to, and accept that if a breach of the Code of Conduct has occurred this may trigger enforcement action (including temporary or permanent suspension as a Fellow […]” (section 5.21)

To date, more than a year since concerns about Musk’s breaches of the code of conduct were first raised, the leadership of the Royal Society has failed to take any meaningful action or to explain how his actions do not, in their view, contravene the code. When Nurse wrote to Musk last year detailing the concerns raised by his actions, he got no reply. It is hard to imagine how this disregard for the Royal Society and its code could be any clearer, yet the Society took no further action. 

Arguably, the leadership of the Royal Society is now also in breach of its own code of conduct. As section 1.3 makes plain: “The Society strives to act in accordance with the highest standards of public life. In their work with the Society, all Fellows and Foreign Members are expected to follow the Nolan principles of public life, namely: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership.” 

Where is the accountability, the openness, the honesty and the leadership? Nurse has claimed in his interview with the Financial Times that the Royal Society “should not start ‘making judgments’ about the ‘character and behaviour’ of fellows”, a statement that is in essence a denial of the Society’s code of conduct. In failing to call Mr Musk to account over his actions and in repeatedly declining to explain why they believe he has not fallen foul of their code, our national academy gives the very strong impression of having abandoned its values. 

This has gravely weakened the legitimacy of the Royal Society’s claim to speak on behalf of the wider UK scientific community. The seriousness of this failure should not be underestimated. At a time when we need reputable institutions so speak up for high standards of integrity and evidence in public discourse, the Royal Society has – for reasons still known only itself – spiked its own guns. 

This affair has dragged on for far too long and barely makes the news anymore. Instead the headlines are dominated by politicians riding to power on waves of misinformation and clinging to it – as in the case of the recent killings of two US citizens on the streets of Minneapolis – with flat denials of the evidence of our own eyes. In the face of the daily degradation of public discourse by lies, deceit and conspiracy theories transmitted across social media, many of them touching on scientific matters such as vaccines, climate science and the wealth of human diversity, the Royal Society stands almost mute. Instead of facing the most serious challenge to its values in decades, it has averted its gaze and now clearly wishes this whole Musk business would just go away. But it will not go away. The Society now faces the shame and embarrassment of the fact that a company run by one of its Fellows is being investigated for the creation and distribution of child sexual abuse material. 

It isn’t just on matters of science that we must push back on misinformation spread in bad faith. The bedrock of our democracy is being eroded, as Eliot Higgins and Natalie Martin have described so succinctly in a recent Demos report that warns of the “epistemic collapse” due to the loss of trusted information supply chains and the breakdown of relationships between citizens and the state. Their verification, deliberation and accountability framework offers a tools for diagnosing the strengths and weaknesses in our democratic processes. Simply put, they identify three foundational functions of democracy: 

    • Citizens must be able to know what is true. 
    • They must be able to see that their voices count in shaping public reasoning. 
    • And they must be able to hold power to account.

The Royal Society is hardly the main player when it comes to shoring up democracy, but it is an important one. Its failure to properly deal with Musk, particularly with regard to his spread of misinformation, has weakened each of the three pillars identified in the Demos report. Higgins and Martin are doing the hard thinking that we might once have looked for at the Royal Society. Our national academy should have a strong voice in the wider debates about truth, trust and accountability, but first it must put its own house in order. 

I offered suggestions over six months ago about how it might go about this. They will bear repeating and updating since so little has happened in the meantime.

First, the Royal Society needs to demonstrate that it is willing to deal effectively and proportionately with breaches of its code of conduct. Although President Sir Paul Nurse has raised his breaches of the code in correspondence with Musk, even going so far as to suggest that Musk might wish to resign his fellowship, when no reply the Royal Society did nothing. Their failure to respond to Musk’s indifference to their values sends the message that these values have little meaning for the Society itself. It is frankly intolerable that the Royal Society has allowed itself to be hollowed out in this way.

Second, the Royal Society needs to update its code of conduct to deal with cases where one of its Fellows pivots from science to more questionable activities, political or otherwise. The assumptions underlying the current draft – that Fellows would be practising scientists – clearly no longer hold. The updated code has to address cases where Fellows engage in behaviours that are divorced from evidence and truth-telling, while explicitly still allowing for freedom of speech, political pluralism and robust, good-faith debate.

Finally, the Society needs to deliver on its vague promises of action and communicate its plans to advocate for the value of science and scientific values amid the rising tides of misinformation. Having been mute for more than a year now, it has to rediscover a voice that truly speaks for the community it claims to represent.

 

Posted in science, Science & Politics, Science Culture | Comments Off on A year of inaction: why has the Royal Society allowed itself to be hollowed out by Elon Musk?

KPIs – a Mixed Blessing

Posted on 8 February 2026 by Athene Donald

I have sat on enough committees when KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are discussed, to know that they can be very helpful in moving an agenda forward and identifying where sticking points may be blocking progress. However, they should never be the only goal in any programme of work, nor used slavishly without thought. To take one specific item that arose at a meeting I was at recently: is the number of university spin-outs a good KPI? Or should one only count those that have had £X invested in them, or have more than Y employees. Or survived for more than Z years, licensed their product to a certain number of companies, with a turn-over exceeding some figure….and so on. Creating a spin-out company is, in many ways, the easy bit, but there are all those other metrics that could alternatively be chosen (and no doubt others I haven’t put my finger on) and choosing which to focus on may modify behaviour or lead to different ideas of ‘success’, for the individual or the university.

As criteria were being selected for REF2021 (if that isn’t an indelicate subject to bring up as the next cycle draws to a close), when I was chairing the Interdisciplinary Advisory Panel, we were sent a long list of possible metrics that could be used in the context of interdisciplinary research. After a lengthy debate, we decided that none was really fit for purpose. That put all the emphasis on to the panels to make judgements about quality (as well as whether they were genuinely interdisciplinary), but we were convinced that was the right path to follow. The extensive and thoughtful evidence review, The Metric Tide, more generally aimed at the entire REF process, highlighted many potential dangers in being too dependent on metrics, even though relying on them would undoubtedly have simplified the process and cut costs (but at a cost in a different sense). And as academic readers of this blog will no doubt know, academics (and associated administrative staff) are good at jumping through hoops and complying with the rules of whatever ‘game’ is being played.

Yet not ever using metrics has its own issues. How can one tell if progress is being made? The recent HEPI report, Making Metrics Matter: A more ambitious approach to tackling racial inequity in higher education, highlights why metrics still have a huge role to play in our universities. If one looks at the admission of racialised minority students into higher education, it can be seen great strides have been made. However, if these students then fail to thrive – as one could argue both the attainment gap and completion rates demonstrate – simply counting how many start a course is unhelpful. The reality is, as ever, the right question has to be asked. Too often it isn’t.

To take a different example from education, what is happening in (English) schools? The various measures of success – for a school – derive from exam results. The period Michael Gove was Secretary of State for Education saw rapid changes in what was valued. At the time I was Chair of the Royal Society’s Education Committee. We responded at speed to multiple ‘consultations’, suspecting responses from us and others in the wider community were not going to change anything, not least because the speed of decision-making hinted at no one having time to read what was submitted.  The recently-removed idea of the E-Bacc came from this time, and has met with substantial opposition over the years, so its termination will not be much regretted. However, the Gove view was always that it is simply about standards, and that is what should be pushed in schools. I had a conversation once with William Hague (back when I was Master of Churchill College and he’d been giving a talk there), when my attempts to discuss school education with him, simply led to the blanket comment that the standing of English schools had improved in the PISA tables, so we must be doing things right. He wasn’t interested in whether this focus on a ‘knowledge-rich’ education was appropriate for the current world, with Google at children’s finger-tips and the world of work so different from when he was growing up.

Every child achieving and thriving is the current Government’s mantra, and there is absolutely no doubt that they are investing in ways to make that possible, starting with substantial investment into family hubs, early years’ provision, breakfast clubs and so on. But, leaving aside those children who start school not ‘school ready’ and who may struggle to catch up, there are many children for whom the transition to secondary school is difficult and who disengage during their teens when faced with a curriculum that is only directed at exam grades. Teenagers themselves have spelled out how they would like to learn more about financial management for instance. The recent Curriculum and Assessment Review had little to say about this. A recent commentary spells out how the mood music in the profession is shifting away from the Gove ‘traditionalist’ approach, wanting to see less emphasis on the metrics of exam grades. Nor is this simply related to the huge challenge of rising SEND numbers, but rising mental health issues (a problem HE faces too) should tell us all is not well: forcing round pegs into square holes never works. Teachers need time in their working day to consider pupils in the round, according to local circumstances for instance, and not just be bound by centrally-driven metrics that may work for one locality but not another.

KPI’s – definitely a mixed blessing, and to be used with caution not slavishly.

Posted in E-Bacc. curriculum, education, Equality, metrics, spin-outs | Comments Off on KPIs – a Mixed Blessing

Vertiginous Nostalgia

Posted on 31 January 2026 by Henry Gee

IMG_8252Against the remote possibility that neither of you has heard that I’ve written a book called The Wonder of Life on Earth, which is out next week, well, you know now. Or, rather, I co-wrote it. I did the text, but an artist called Raxenne Maniquiz painted the pictures.  They aren’t attempts as realism so much as stylish and impressionistic. The book is aimed at pre-teens, who I’m sure will appreciate the pictures more than the text. In an afterword, I wrote that Raxenne’s illustrations ‘remind me of a book I read as a small child called The First Days of the Earth. That was a long time ago, and you can’t get it any more’.

Indeed, you can’t. I tried. I could find no trace of its ever having existed.

Then I had an epiphany.

The book was actually called First Days of the World, and I have just taken delivery of a paperback copy I bought on eBay. It was IMG_0595published by Scholastic in 1958. The text was by Gerald Ames and Rose Wyler, the impressionistic illustrations by Leonard Weisgard. I am sure the copy I had as a small child back in the mid- 1960s was hardback, but after almost 60 years, my memory isn’t what it was.

But as for the pictures — looking them now, the wonder of them came flooding back in a wave of nostalgia that feels almost like physical vertigo. The power of these pictures took me back to my infant self. I hope that The Wonder of Life on Earth will have such an impression on a young mind that they’ll feel the same when they come across it again more than half a century later.

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IMG_0596

 

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She’s a Feisty Little Thing!

Posted on 25 January 2026 by Athene Donald

Many women I know get their dress commented on, or their general appearance, rather than the excellence – or otherwise – of their science. I’ve yet to hear someone comment on a man’s choice, or absence, of tie, or the state of his hair. It’s a trivial example but, alongside other subtle forms of denigration, such as not using a woman’s title in an introduction while according that privilege to a man, it is intensely frustrating. It is also nothing new.

Margaret Cavendish

The very fact that Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (shown here), was known as Mad Madge back in her lifetime in the seventeenth century, immediately conveys a sense of how people reacted to her. She dared to stand out – both in dress and activities. She wrote. Copiously and under her own name. These were not suitable female tracts about domesticity or religion, but about much larger issues including those relating to science (or natural philosophy as it was known back then). She was an atomist; she experimented with lenses and microscopes during her exile in France and formed her own opinion about their utility; she worried about animal experimentation and vivisection (notably by William Harvey) when this was a barely considered issue. She wrote about all these things and set out a vision of an alternative world in what might be said to be the first book of science fiction, The Blazing World (1666). In this book she had critical comments about the rather newly formed Royal Society and its Fellows, whom she satirised as ‘bird men’, ‘fox men’ and ‘spider men’.  It is perhaps not surprising that when, a year later, she visited the Royal Society (the visit was only approved with great reluctance), the general view of her was damning.

Samuel Pepys, who would soon assume the role of the young Society’s President, referred to her as a ‘mad, conceited ridiculous woman’ and commented that her dress was ‘so antick…I do not like her at all’.  There is no doubt she chose to dress very eccentrically, including sometimes in male attire. But, then as now, it ought to be possible to go beyond superficial matters such as clothing and focus on the content of what is being said or written. Cavendish wrote a lot. She wanted to be remembered by posterity (as she now is), explicitly writing early on ‘all I desire is fame’, and continuing to hope, mainly unsuccessfully, for her ideas to be given serious thought. She simply went against all society’s rules for how a woman, even a duchess, should comport herself.

Being eccentric was one way of attracting attention, but also not one that was likely to ensure that that attention was serious. I’ve learned a lot about Margaret Cavendish over the years, having partaken in two panel discussions about her life and impact. Firstly on Free Thinking (although on that recording, most of my remarks were excised, presumably in order to reduce the length of the programme); secondly in a panel discussion last autumn about the marginalisation of women in Philosophy and Science, with The Philosopher (video here).  In both cases Francesca Peacock was also on the panel and, if you want to know more about Cavendish, Peacock’s book Pure Wit, describes her life in lively detail. Or, if short of time, a chapter about her is included in Richard Holmes’ book, The Long Pursuit.

Why have I chosen now to bring all this up? Partly because I’ve been asked to write something for the Royal Society’s celebrations of 80 years since the first women were elected to the Fellowship and I wanted to include a few words about Cavendish’s ill-fated visit to the Society as the first woman to be allowed in (but then had to trim it in the interests of length). But also because of something said to me recently by a visitor to Cambridge about her daughter. This young woman had just embarked on a university course related to Physics and was finding her environment far from congenial. It seemed that the men she was paired with simply took over, elbowed her out of the way, when it came to practical work.  ‘But’, the mother said, ‘she’s a feisty little thing.’ I felt indignant on the daughter’s behalf that this was what it took to survive, in 2026, on a Physics-related course. Whereas, around the time Yale first admitted women and Eileen Pollack found the Physics course unwelcoming, as described in her 2015 book, The Only Woman in the Room, about her time at Yale in the mid 1970’s, that could be forgiven, perhaps, as consistent with the fact Yale hadn’t really adjusted to women on campus. But now? Really?

Women wanting to pursue a Physics-related career should not need to be feisty to survive – or eccentric, or have their dress referred to or any of the other indignities both Cavendish and Pollack, some centuries later, had to endure. We need women of all dispositions in our workplace, not just the ones who dare to stand up for their corner. It is depressing to feel that our university labs are still so often hostile, and whoever is in charge of them, be they professors or PhD students, don’t think it is important enough to intervene when a woman is being patronised or bullied (on the limited information I have about this particular case, I don’t know which, but neither is acceptable).

What will it take for women to feel at home in a Physics Lab? We don’t only want the ‘feisty’ to be the ones who survive. I recall something Curt Rice said to me twelve years ago ‘Put a single woman in a group of men’, he said, ‘and she will feel uncomfortable and awkward. Put a single man in a group of women and he will feel in charge.’ (The full blogpost in which I refer to this is here; the word feisty appears there too.) Clearly, we need men to feel less at home, less entitled, less ‘in charge’. And if the men in the room aren’t able to act appropriately, it also needs a watchful supervisory eye and determined intervention.

 

Posted in Curt Rice, Eileen Pollack, Equality, Francesca Peacock, Margaret Cavendish, Women in science | Comments Off on She’s a Feisty Little Thing!

OBITUARY: Saffron ‘Ronnie’ Gee (2008-2026)

Posted on 18 January 2026 by Henry Gee

The death is announced of Saffron ‘Ronnie’ Gee, Jack Russell Terrier on Friday 16 January, after a long illness, aged eighteen.

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Ronnie came to us in 2011 aged about three, from a family that was moving into accommodation where pets weren’t allowed. It must have been a huge wrench for them, as Ronnie was a fantastic dog, a real live wire.

At first I was told that we were adopting a crossbreed between a Jack Russell and some other dog such as a dachshund. But when I met her my impression was that she was the most Jack-Russelly Jack Russell that you could possibly imagine. Sparky, cheeky, occasionally very fierce, great fun to be with and indestructible. As one of our guests observed, she was a ‘little rascal’.

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With her great friend and playmate Heidi the Dog

Her recreations included chasing motorcycles and mobility scooters; running at very high speed in circles on the beach around her great friend Heidi the Golden Retriever (also no longer with us), teasing her with a ball, and vanishing down holes. Heidi was an internet sensation, having starred in a movie (scroll forward to 2’19”). Ronnie was never one to be outdone, though, and joined Heidi in a blog post about writers and their dogs. She was also part of a book project. Field research for Heidi and Saffron’s Guide to the Dog Friendly Beaches of North Norfolk saw us exploring beaches and their facilities from Sheringham to Happisburgh, but it was one of those things that never materialised.  In later years she became a regular at the North Sea  Coffee Company where she enjoyed her eighteenth birthday party with her many friends, canine and human.

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At Her 18th Birthday Party

It was there that she finally achieved stardom, a few weeks before her death, in the North Sea Coffee Dog Nativity Tableau, as Baby Jesus.

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Finally, a Starring Role

When Ronnie came to us she’d just weaned a litter of puppies. We wonder what came of them. They would be extremely old by now, but we like to think that they in turn had many descendants. Perhaps, even now, Norfolk is alive with Ronnies — running, tumbling, jumping, getting up to mischief and enjoying life as much as their ancestress once did. Ronnie is survived by three other dogs, three cats, two hens, a royal python, two fish and her grieving human family. May her memory be a blessing.

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The Wonder of Life On Earth

Posted on 16 January 2026 by Henry Gee

 

The time is rapidly coming up to fast approaching the publication of The Wonder of Life on Earth, written by me, illustrated by Raxenne Maniquiz and published by Two Hoots (an imprint of Pan Macmillan) — it’s aimed at preteens but is really for people of Very All Ages. For full details click here.

I’ll be launching the book at the Norwich Science Festival on 18 February – tickets are now on sale.

But wait, there’s more: a special release of 1000 signed copies with free poster is available from independent bookstores. My favourite independent bookstores are The Book Hive in Norwich and Chicken and Frog in Brentwood, Essex, though I’m sure others are available. Support your local independent bookseller!

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Critique of comments by the President of the Royal Society on the Musk Affair

Posted on 14 January 2026 by Stephen
Screenshot of an article in the Guardian, published on 14 Jan 2026. Showing a picture of Elon Musk, the headline reads "Royal Society president reignites Elon Musk row by defending lack of action

Article in today’s Guardian

From interviews that were published last week by the Financial Times and The Guardian, I get the sense that the new President of the Royal Society, Professor Sir Paul Nurse, is almost as sick of the Musk affair as I am. He may well be regretting consenting to these interviews because they have re-ignited the debate about the Royal Society’s handling of concerns raised within and without about actions by Musk that are in apparent contravention of the code of conduct that Fellows are required to adhere to.

From the various reactions reported in the Guardian this morning, the issue continues to divide opinion. But it’s also clear from the comments of those who spoke in support of Nurse’s defence of the Royal Society’s inaction that there is still a great deal of misunderstanding about the existence and meaning of their Code of Conduct and about the particulars of the concerns raised by Musk’s actions.

In the interests of more open and informed discussion of this matter I thought I would provide the full copy of the comment that I provided to the Guardian, fragments of which appeared in this morning’s article (which I have edited lightly for clarity and to remove background material). The Guardian interview should be free to read; the FT piece is probably for subscribers only, so I have pasted the relevant extract at the end of this piece).

“Nurses’s interviews were troubling in several respects. Overall I was surprised by the weakness of the positions he laid out.

He said that the Royal Society should not make judgements about the character and behaviour of its fellows. But that statement is a direct contradiction of the fact that the Royal Society has a code of conduct for its fellows. The code opens with the statement: “Fellowship and Foreign Membership of the Society is a privilege predicated on adherence to particular standards of conduct.”

Nurse’s claim that “it is naive, frankly, to say that we should get rid of him because he’s a bad person” is the latest in a long series of attempts by the Royal Society to dodge the very real and substantial concerns that have been expressed by fellows and thousands of members of the scientific community about Musk’s behaviour. It is disingenuous, frankly, to say that the concerns about Musk arise because some people think he’s not very nice. 

Nurse’s contention that if the RS were to take action in respect of Musk role in defunding research as head of DOGE might create real difficulties if Patrick Vallance FRS (now Minister for Science in the UK government) were to oversee cuts in the science budget also miss the mark. All democratically-elected governments, including Trump’s, have the right to set budgets as they and their legislatures see fit. But the issue here, which Nurse is ignoring, is that under Musk the cuts were implemented in a chaotic, ideologically-motivated and evidence-free fashion. Musk also public bragged about defunding USAID, an act that has already cost thousands of lives and, according to a study published by the Lancet could cost up to to 14m more by 2030. In both these actions, Musk’s conduct has run completely counter to the declared values of the Royal Society. And now we have the dismal news that a Fellow of the Royal Society runs a company that is enabling and profiting from the dissemination of child sexual abuse material.

To date, the RS has failed to provide a single word of explanation for their contention that Musk is not in breach of the code of conduct. Although Nurse, to his credit, did engage in correspondence with Musk about concerns raised by the scientific community, when he got a no-reply brush off from Musk, he meekly let the matter drop. Although in his Guardian interview he acknowledges the threat of rightwing populism which thrives on ignoring science’s commitment to “the pursuit of truth, evidence, rational thinking [and] courteous debate”, the feebleness and cowardliness of the Royal Society’s response to Musk riding roughshod over their code and their values is truly depressing. It is not the full-throated defence of scientific values that we so desperately need in these troubled times.”

So what happens now? The Musk affair seems to be the zombie issue that, no matter how hard the Royal Society might wish, will just not die. I wrote back in June 2025 with suggestions for three steps forward that the RS might make to repair its standing, only one of which has been half-taken since then.

I remain committed to seeking a constructive way out of this impasse and am continuing to reflect. I hope to have further to say in my next post.

 

Excerpt from FT article:
Elon Musk should keep his UK Royal Society fellowship even though the Grok AI image generator developed by his company has generated sexualised images including of minors, the body’s new president has said.
Sir Paul Nurse told the FT the explicit pictures were “a disgrace” but the national science academy should not start “making judgments” about the “character and behaviour” of fellows, even if technology they created enabled unlawful acts.
“That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t criticise and criticise publicly — I’m fine with that,” Nurse said of Musk in an interview. “But I think it is naive, frankly, to say that we should get rid of him because he’s a bad person. I’m afraid there’s many bad people around, but they have made scientific advances.”
The 365-year-old institution was rocked in 2025 after two fellows quit in protest over Musk’s continued membership and other scientists inside and outside the academy condemned the tech billionaire’s behaviour.
The complaints included that he spread misinformation and bore responsibility for steep cuts to US scientific research institutions by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Musk left Doge in May last year.
The society held an extraordinary meeting of fellows in March but decided to take no disciplinary action against Musk, who was elected a fellow in 2018. It argued that judgments potentially seen as political would do “more harm than good”.
The academy’s code of conduct states that fellows must “strive to uphold the reputation of the society” and heed that remarks made in a personal capacity could still affect it.
Nurse, then the society’s president-elect, wrote to Musk as part of the response to the concerns. Nurse said he suggested to Musk that he resign his fellowship, but received no reply.
Musk has prompted fresh criticism over the images produced by xAI’s chatbot tool Grok in response to user instructions. Lawmakers in the UK, EU and France have threatened his social media platform X, where the images are posted, with fines and bans.
On Friday access to Grok’s image generation function was limited to paid subscribers, though Downing Street said the change “simply turns an AI feature that allows the creation of unlawful images into a premium service”.
Contacted for comment, xAI responded: “Legacy media lies.” The company has said it has taken down illegal AI-generated images of children.
On January 3, Musk posted on X that “anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content”.
Nurse, who was previously the Royal Society’s president between 2010 and 2015, said the institution should only expel fellows if their science proved “faulty or fraudulent or highly defective”.
“You see there Isaac Newton, behind you?” he said, gesturing to a portrait in his office of the eminent mathematician, who was Royal Society president for 24 years during the early 18th century. “He was a very nasty piece of work, yet we revere him.”
The society was not a “dining club” or “political party”, Nurse said, noting that he was sure it had included “murderers” and other criminals in the past.

 

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