When Michael Faraday ran the Royal Institution, one of the oldest scientific organisations in the world, the 19th-century chemist took time to pile into public discourse. He ranted about dangerous pollution in the Thames. He debunked the fad of table-turning and blamed the educational system for allowing such nonsense to thrive.
Nearly 200 years later, scientists are still tackling bad thinking and big problems. For Sarah Harper, an Oxford gerontologist who takes the helm proper at the RI on Tuesday, the rise of denialism, fake news and alternative facts, combined with rapid advances in research that raise deep questions for society, mean that a grasp of science, and all its uncertainties, has never seemed more vital.
Harper is only the second woman to be appointed director of the RI in its 218-year history. The first was her Oxford colleague, the neuroscientist Baroness Greenfield, who was made redundant in 2010 after a redevelopment of the Mayfair premises plunged the institution into financial crisis. It was a damaging episode that Harper does not want to dwell on. “Plenty has been written about that,” she said. “I think it’s time for the RI to move on.”
The details of how it will move on are not entirely clear. Harper has begun talks with the institution’s trustees and management team, but wants time to get to know the organisation too. More collaborations with other bodies are on the cards. “I’d hope that by the end of the year, we’ll have a final strategy in place,” she said.
But if the details are uncertain, the direction is not. “Science impacts on people’s lives on a daily basis now. People increasingly need bodies that can provide trusted and open information, and when an issue isn’t black and white, to explain why there’s a debate and guide them through the evidence,” Harper said. “There is a real role for the RI to be a gold standard for scientific evidence.”
That means more than simply stating scientific results. Harper’s vision, in part at least, is for the RI to beef up its provision of information, and have more non-scientists join its debates on the fruits of scientific research. Crucially, she wants to lay bare the scientific process: the complexities of data analysis, and the often ambiguous, even opaque nature of scientific findings.
That will be valuable at all stages of life, she believes. In reproductive medicine, scientific advances have opened a “therapeutic gap”, where doctors can screen babies for disorders in the womb but have no effective treatments to offer. Where does that leave a couple in the first weeks of pregnancy? How should they respond to the uncertainty? “You can’t have a baby nowadays without having to face up to the fact that science can put decisions on to you that you never had to make even 20 or 30 years ago,” she said.
In Harper’s own field of longevity research, advances in science could raise further dilemmas. Emma Morano, the last person to be born in the 1800s, died this month at the age of 117. Today there are around 14,500 centenarians in the UK alone, but by 2100, than figure is projected to hit one million. “How many will there be if radical scientific interventions to prolong life become the norm?” Harper said. If increases in lifespan outpace those in healthspan, leading more of us to spend our later years sick and disabled, it will raise serious questions about the ethics of the anti-ageing research.
It is not just science that Harper wants the RI to weigh in on. Major issues such as climate change and pollution are more about policy and technology than basic science. Another concern, and one that is likely to grow, is the rise of robots and artificial intelligence in the workplace. Robots are already taking on tasks now done by carers, but are the machines and the care they provide the best option? “We do need a forum where people can discuss, for example, whether we are happy for the market to drive the replacement of human carers by robots. Or whether we as a society feel that there are some jobs that should be retained, at least for the present, by people. There are no right or wrong answers, they are simply questions that should be openly addressed and debated,” she said.
Harper is the first social scientist to become the RI’s director. She studied at Cambridge and Oxford, and worked as a BBC reporter and a producer on Newsnight before returning to academia. Since 2014 she has served on the prime minister’s Council for Science and Technology. Her appointment to the RI from outside the ranks of the chemists and physicists who have often held the post reflects a desire from the institution’s trustees for a different approach. Harper wants the RI to be more inclusive, for science to work with the humanities and arts, the private sector and policy makers, so that the information it provides, and the debates it holds, are delivered in the most rounded context.
“Science is addressing such big global challenges that impact on people’s lives. You’ve got to consider the whole social, ethical, moral and political framing of debates,” she said. “It’s important that the scientist is no longer someone who just sits in a lab. All young scientists should think about public engagement. How will their research impact on the public? Questions that are important to the public should influence the questions they themselves are asking.”
