Recently, my Cambridge colleagues Diane Coyle and Michael Kenny from the Bennett School of Public Policy took to the pages of Nature to write a cautionary Comment about the role of science and scientists in public policy. They are critical of those scientists who don’t pay attention to how to interact with policy-makers effectively, as opposed to simply baldly stating their views, data and/or evidence. Scientists must recognize, they say,

‘that the importance of science is not self-evident, and that part of the blame for the erosion of trust in science lies with scientists themselves.’

They go on to say:

‘In public policy, solutions to the problems society faces are rarely, if ever, purely technical. People’s values and interests often conflict, and scientific studies do not always provide direct answers to the questions that politicians and officials must grapple with, such as how to reduce crime rates or respond to a disease outbreak.’

There is nothing like working with policy-makers to ram this message home. As the saying goes ‘scientists advise and policy-makers decide’. Chairing science advisory committees, previously for DCMS and now for the Department for Education, clearly demonstrates to me any evidence that a scientist can bring to the table, however useful, correct and possibly even self-evident, can only inform. Many other factors, from ministerial direction to electoral acceptance, not to mention the fundamental issue of money, will need to be taken into account before any decision is made. But if we want the community of scientists to appreciate this, what action – other than writing in Nature – should be taken? If you are a PhD student, you may well be led to believe your thesis, all those results and the paper(s) you submit (and even see published) are the end of the story. In policy terms, that is not so.

Diane and Mike write of ‘science’ in the broadest sense (covered much more effectively by the German word Wissenschaft, as opposed to Naturwissenschaft; English does not have such a neat distinction), and I can really only talk as a ‘hard’ scientist, a natural philosopher if you like, not a social scientist, or indeed an engineer. But, although the details may vary, the basic issue is the same. Where, in training the scientists of tomorrow, do we introduce the idea that pure fact will not be sufficient to drive a policy. As it happens, a conversation with the head of Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing, Tim Minshall (he of the wonderful book, Your Life  is Manufactured), made very much the same point in a different context: the need to ensure a PhD thesis (from his field) considers not just the evidence, but  what impact it can and will have on (e.g) supply chains, scale-up or necessary skills.

In my field, the last chapter of a thesis is, typically, ‘suggestions for further work’. That covers no more than all those things the student might have wanted to do had they had another year or two of funding or the equipment had worked better, or indeed they had access to some other equipment. It would not typically address why the results had any bearing on our lives, potential government policy or saving money in production of some material. In my field, we don’t usually teach that stuff, but perhaps we should.

Turning briefly to a younger age group, the recent schools’ Curriculum and Assessment Review, with its mantra of ‘evolution not revolution’ remains wedded to standard assessments that focus on disciplinary facts, but does acknowledge there are other topics that need to be addressed, if not examined, within schools. One of these is climate change and sustainability – which one hopes has to cross disciplinary boundaries in the teaching – but a lot of material is to be crammed into (non-examinable) lessons in Citizenship and RSHE (Relationships and Sex Education, where issues around misogyny and toxic masculinity are likely to be touched upon, although I’ve already heard from some this is unlikely to be particularly productive).

In other words, in schools, some social issues will be taught but outside the main examinable curriculum, unless subject teachers find a way to bring them in. Should our university science departments be doing more of the same? It is obvious many, if not all, universities are running around trying to work out how to handle AI education and AI in education and assessment. But does every student get formally exposed to discussions around sustainability, for instance? I’m not sure they do. We don’t expect our students to be au fait with the environmental  challenges of extracting enough lithium from under the earth’s surface (be it from the Atacama Desert or China, which provoke different ecological issues) for the batteries we want for the energy transition, or to worry about the supply of rare-earth metals needed for our phones coming from fragile African states. As a physical scientist, all that is likely to be taught is how these components work.

Too often, we only teach facts that can be examined, not the issues that underlie those facts. We are unlikely to teach students to think about how to weigh up the pros and cons of the environmental plusses of moving towards a green economy reducing carbon emissions compared with the damage mining may do to a region. I’m aware many people reading this may think, well my department does, or that there is a specific ‘green energy’ module, but I fear too few actually discuss this wider context. Yet this is the context in which policy makers live, in which they have to weigh up pros and cons of any decision. These specific examples obviously come from the physical sciences, but one could raise the same sorts of questions in the life sciences.

Diane and Mike consider the impact of the growing polarisation of our society due to increasing inequality, the crude distinction between the haves and have-nots. They question whether the decisions – indeed the evidence – that ‘elite’ scientists seek and produce is, in itself, influenced by their status and not relevant to the more disadvantaged and that they may not listen to their views. That what counts as ‘evidence’ may need to be broadened to factor in what people know but which cannot easily be measured and quantified as well as their ‘tacit knowledge’. This is not a new idea (for instance, to give an early example, Brian Wynne has written a lot about this in the context of sheep farmers and the after effects of the Chernobyl disaster), but it is sadly easy to forget in many situations, although it won’t apply in all.

If we, as scientists, want our work to have impact in the way our society operates – be it about the mass take-up of vaccinations or achieving a just green energy transition – we all have work to do to think harder about how we communicate and contextualise what we do, and indeed which questions we ask. Every field will have different challenges in achieving this and it is not to say ‘pure’ curiosity driven research has no place. In our teaching, in our communications to the public (as opposed to within our own communities) we should remember the plea from Coyle and Kenney. We can each do our own bit to remind the wider world they really haven’t had enough of experts.