Welcome to the gutter, brother of science

Last month, I did a bit of science policy standup. Part of the ‘Standup Tragedy’ series (one of the Guardian’s ‘ten great storytelling nights‘), the programme was a mix of spoken word, music, comedy and more.

The podcast is now online – my piece starts at 45 mins in. I should warn that this was recorded after 11pm in a bar in Brixton. The language may offend. Within 2mins of my set I say “Isaac Newton was such a f*cking c*ck” and that pretty much sets the tone for the whole thing.

I was inspired by this month’s topic of martyrs because it gave me a chance to talk about science’s persecution complex. Like much self-pitying posturing, I think science in martyr mode should probably check its privilege. I discussed the cases of David Nutt and the Galileo Movement, as well as the latest public polling data on attitudes to science and the ways in which politicians say they love some bits of science whilst speedily cutting others.

I also discussed the Royal Society of Chemistry’s outrage over a mad scientist costume, suggesting that if chemists are worried that science is seen as violent, they might want to consider how many scientists are involved in industries of war. Rather than just screeching that people should pay more and more attention to science, sometimes science could do with looking at itself. As the public attitude polls show, bits of science regularly (and scientifically) audit their privilege. The data is there, it’s not hard.

I also talked about how screwed up this idea that pain gives truth is, and that such macho posturing is not only a bit limited, but also plays a part in science’s diversity problem. Some truths are found in cuddles. Arguably having the freedom to have a life outside your job makes you a better scientist. If we stick to this weird idea that you have to suffer for science, we are only going to have a very limited view of the world.

As a more honest manifesto for science in society, I ended with alternative version of the Galileo story; Bertolt Brecht’s powerful line “welcome to the gutter, brother of science.” I’d much rather sit with scientists in the gutter, looking up at the stars together, than see them pinned to a cross.

We need to talk about the Conversation

There’s been some fuss over the possible death of Facebook, and whether such reports have been exaggerated. I’m not too interested in the story itself as much as what it shows us as a study in problems of science journalism. For me, it flags up larger questions about academic writing, and I’d be interested to know if others share these concerns.

Background: The BBC’s technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, did a bit of debunking, and complained about journalists overhyping academic research in the process. It was noted that one of the “hyped” reports came from an academic involved in the research, writing on the Conversation, a site which aims to bring academic voices into the public sphere, promising content from academics themselves (tagline: “academic rigour, journalist flair”). Then the academic himself, Daniel Miller, wrote a longer post via the UCL network saying that a key passage had been re-written by a professional journalist and he regretted agreeing to the final text. Cellan-Jones dubbed this “ghosted” which is maybe the wrong word. As Miller notes, there are compromises academics have to make in sharing their work to larger and different audiences, and it can be hard to draw lines between inaccuracy and retelling. Also the line between ghostwriting and editing can be slippery.

Problem: Miller’s experience of the Conversation resonated with me. I’ve been worried about its approach for a while.

When the Conversation launched first in Australia and then moved to the UK, I was sceptical. I didn’t see the point of a space for just academics’ content. Indeed, I thought that was possibly even a slightly dangerous idea. Also, I wasn’t sure it was needed, especially in the UK. Many academics were blogging on their own or university owned sites already, or for media organisations. But I could also see the value in a space for those who wrote less regularly, including support from professional writers and, despite my misgivings, I think they’ve published some great pieces which might not have made it out of the ivory towers otherwise.

Then, a few months ago, one of their journalists emailed to ask if I had views on university league tables. I said I had opinions but nothing I’d actually researched, and also I was really busy that week but, because I was sympathetic to the topic, I’d give her a quote if she wanted to write something herself. I also didn’t see the point in me writing for the Conversation. I can publish directly to the Guardian site. It seemed silly to chase people like me, a bit cheeky of them even (and I’d previously told Conversation staff this). Still, I stayed late at work and emailed a quote. She replied with a full piece incorporating my few hundred words but really by her, expecting me to add a little more and sign off as if it was authored by me. They were great words. But they weren’t mine. What would I give other than the credibility of my academic affiliation, which meant very little anyway as its not even a topic I have done empirical work on. I was rather shocked by this, so said no.

But I felt crap that we’d both put time into this and didn’t want a fight with a writer I respect, so wrote my own piece as a replacement, staying up late at night to do so. This is the result. I included a bit by the Conversation writer (paragraph 5) because she’d put work into it, and it was good, and I felt rude ignoring it. But it felt very wrong and I regret it. Not, as in the case of Daniel Miller, because it was bad. Quite the opposite. It saddened me that the work of a professional science journalist was being ignored because people seemed to want the cache of an academic voice.

I felt pressured into co-writing something I didn’t want to write, and pressured into saying it was by me. I should have just stood up to them and said “this is dumb and dishonest.” Because it is.

I’ve spoken to several other UK academics about the site since, wondering if they’ve had similar problems. Most say their experiences have been positive; light editing and useful feedback about focus or questions readers might ask, exactly what the Conversation purports to do. But a few others have grumbled too. It’s hard to tell if they are just grumbling in the cliched precious academic way of “but but but of course my jargon-filled eight-page single-sentence rant was more accurate” but I’m not sure. I also think that even if so, the work of the professional writer should be made obvious. A press release from a university communications team, for example, might well re-write research, but it won’t pretend to be the academic themselves (quotes are routinely fabricated by press officers in many fields, but honestly I don’t like that either and I also think the full posts of the Conversation are another step). I also continue to worry about them chasing content from those of us who are already writing a lot in the media, or even have careers in journalism. Mark Lynas has written for them, for example (he’s a visiting fellow at Cornell) and that seems even weirder than when they’ve asked the Guardian science bloggers to write for them. Lynas doesn’t need the Conversation’s help, he’s a highly skilled and successful writer.

If the Conversation is doing journalism, they should acknowledge that and have co-author credits, or even pieces written entirely by their writers, and celebrate that. They don’t, because the idea is that it they offer unmediated academic voices. But unmediated academic voices are often the last thing anyone wants, and playing up to that bollocks isn’t doing anyone any favours.

It reminds me a bit of the fuss over Futurity. I worry that the Conversation seems to be more about offering a shine of academic credibility than meaningful interaction between academics and society at large. I’m all for editing academics (I’ve learnt a lot and had my prose improved by many editors myself) but by passing off the work of a professional journalist as written by academics you do both professions – and the public – a disservice.

I’d like to see the Conversation grow, but I want to see it do so honestly.

The incredible adventures of Professor Branestawm

This is an edited version of a paper just published in Knowledges in Publics, edited by Lorraine and Simon Locke.

Professor Branestawm meets his childhood self, W Heath Robinson, 1933

The incredible adventures of Professor Branestawm: the maturing image of science in 20th century juvenile literature

This essay examines some ways in which images of children or the childlike are used in the construction of the scientist, and does so through the study of a series of books of the mid-20^th century; Norman Hunter’s Professor Branestawm stories (1931-1983). The character of Branstawm, I argue, was clearly constructed as childlike from the start – perhaps as an attempt to appeal to young readers – and yet as the decades move on the character shifts slightly to a presentation which, if not overtly “adult” looses the more childish aspects and is juxtaposed in opposition to children. The maturation of Branestawm is not offered to suggest science “came of age” in the latter half of the 20^th century. Although this is tempting, it is also highly simplistic. Rather, it is an opportunity to explore some of the ways images of the childlike can act on cultural constructions of the scientist. I start with a brief discussion to images of children and science before introducing the case study. I then outline the ways I see Branestawm as a childish (and not-childish) character, before making some more analytical points about how this helps endow the scientist end of the character with some particularly powerful aspects of imagery surrounding the child.

Imagining children and scientists

There are several ways in which aspects of the childlike may intersect with the various qualities generally associated with the scientist. It may appear controversial to call a scientist ‘childlike’: as if it was a criticism, or a form of dismissal. Yet such a link may also endow the image of the scientist with a rather special social status. A child-like science might be seen as trivial, silly and under-developed, but it can also be innocent and innately knowledgeable of nature. I have discussed this in more detail elsewhere (Bell, 2008a) but it is worth sketching a few upfront here. We might endow our ideas of the child and scientists in ways which make them appear very separate social identities. For example, we might imagine children as stupid, or at least naïve, in comparison to the wisdom of science. Such a figuring may then have an impact on the way we imagine the relationship between the two groups, seeing young people as necessarily recipients of scientific knowledge, in need of education to interact with science to be ‘full’ members of society or, for the select few, specific technical training in order to become, after time, scientists themselves. In contrast, however, we might equally see children as inherently good and connected to nature and juxtapose such imagery to depict science as corrupt and corrupting. This trope is arguably dominant in late 20^th C children’s science fiction and fantasy, as discussed by Jacqueline Rose (1994), Noga Applebuam (2005, 2006), Perry Nodleman (1985). There are also ways in which imaginings of the child and scientists might be seen as similar; such as the idea that children are “little scientists” or, conversely, that scientists take a positively childish approach to interaction with nature, mixing scientific charactersitics of disinterestedness or curiosity with a sense of childish wonder and naivety (which will largely be the focus on this essay).

It’s important to stress that at am I not trying to suggest children are one thing or another. Rather, I accept that our ideas of the child are generally multiple, and often ambiguously applied (not unlike our ideas of science). In many respects, this essay is less concerned with real children, and more interested in the ways our imaginings of children get replicated and reconfigured elsewhere. To assist us in reflecting on the multiple nature of the child in culture, it is worth quoting a rather long passage from sociologist of childhood, Chris Jenks:

pure, bestial, innocent, corrupt, charged with potential, tabula rasa, or even as we view our adult selves […] whether their forms of language, games and conventions are alternative to our own, imitations or crude precursors of our own now outgrown, or simply transitory impenetrable trivia which are amusing to witness and recollect; weather they are constrained and we have achieved freedom, or we have assumed constraint and they are truly free – all these considerations, and more, continue to exercise our theorising about the child in social life’ (Jenks, 2005: 2).

We can see this in Rousseau and other Romantics, as well as in 19^th and 20^th century developments of developmental psychology, but we should not imagine such theorising of the child is merely a matter of work in ivory towers. It is important to note that when Jenks refers to ‘theorising’, he not only means academic work, but the quite prosaic theorising which we all do as part of everyday social life. We all theorise the child as part of social interaction. We draw on others’ ideas and/ or construct our own based on practical experience and personal moral/ political beliefs. Children, unlike other social groups such as those based around professions (i.e. the scientist) or issues of race, class, gender or sexuality has a rather odd status, because we were all one. The child is, in its own way, extremely familiar. Yet it is also quite strange; ‘he or she inhabits our world and yet seems to answer to another; he or she is essentially of ourselves and yet appears to display a systematically different order of being’ (Jenks, 2005: 2-3, See also Hunt, 1994, for introduction to politics of child/ adult relationships in children’s literature).

Similarly, the scientists we are talking about here are very much the ‘imaginary’ ones of fictional depiction. As many sociologists of science have argued, what counts as ‘science’ is a confused, often contradictory notion which is strategically applied depending on context, rather than the consequence of an inherent ‘demarcation criterion’ (See Gieryn, 1995, for critique of this). In terms of the literary representations of the scientist, we might argue there are right and wrong ways to depict the scientist, and complain about incorrect and/ or overly negative portrayals (e.g. Lambourne, 1999). We could, however, acknowledge that there are a range of identities a scientist in culture might have, and a range of reasons why authors would wish to accentuate one or another of these. Taking this latter approach, tracking fictional scientists can become a way of working through the diversity of ways different people at different times have chosen to think about science in society. Rosalind Haynes (1994) seminal study of the scientist in Western literature suggests literary scientists can be sorted into six ‘stereotypes’. Although somewhat reductive, her typology is useful at least as a heuristic and reflects the ways in which scientist characters have in places become cultural tropes, repeated through culture as sketches and allusions. Haynes’ types range from alchemists driven to pursue an arcane intellectual goal that carries suggestions of ideological evil to more romantic depictions of an ‘unfeeling scientist’ where characters renege on human relationships only in the cause of science. Most important for this study is her sketch of the ‘Stupid Virtuoso’, a character out of touch with the society and so preoccupied with the trivialities of his private world of science, he ignores social responsibilities. This has similarities to romantic images of the unfeeling scientist, albeit slightly less heroically presented, and often comical.

None of this is to argue that images of children and scientists remain purely as ‘make-believe’. The fictional, even the fantastical, not only reflects reality (Hunt & Lenz, 2001, Hume, 1984), but may have a constructive impact on the doing, making and selling of science. Although scientists may find fiction worrying, seeking to correct its mistakes (Kirby, 2003a) or put their own work at distance (Mellor, 2003) they may also find it a useful resource either in the construction of ideas (Kirby, 2003b) or rhetorical positioning (Mellor, 2003, 2007). As Megan Prelinger (2010) has shown in terms of discourses of the space race, allusions to science fiction also feature in advertisements for the recruitment of scientists, thereby playing a possible role in the construction at least some areas of science and engineering. Most interesting for this paper’s purposes, literary researcher Elizabeth Leane (2007) applies Haynes’ typology to those images of scientists constructed auto-biographically in non-fiction ‘popular science’ books by scientists, a loose application of Jurdant’s (1993) idea of popular science writing as the ‘autobiography’ of science.

My argument, however, will be that all incarnations of Branestawm are, at once, both childlike and anti-childlike. If we wish to put this in a theoretical framework, I suggest Thomas Gieryn’s ‘cartographic metaphor’ for the boundaries of science (1995, 1999). This considers the cultural entity we call ‘science’ as analogous to a country on a map, its boarders defined through processes of boundary disputes and diplomatic treaties. The particular advantage of such ‘cultural cartography’ (compared to other frameworks for boundary analysis, see Lamont & Virag, 2002, for some examples) is that maps not only show us where two bounded groups are separated, they also declare shared space; demonstrating simultaneously similarity and distinction. It also reflects, although in a very different context, Ian Mitroff’s (1974) description of scientists’ dynamic alternation between ‘norms’ and ‘counter-norms’ of science, as well as what Simon Locke (2005) calls the ‘ambivalences’ of many cultural images of science. As we shall see, Branestawm, and I believe many more ‘real world’ scientists, negotiate the child/science boundary to take advantage of both positive qualities of childishness as well as the advantages of appearing distinctly ‘mature’.

Introducing Branestawm

The first of Hunter’s Branestawm books, The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm, was published in 1933. It comprised of a collection of stories based on those initially read on the BBC Home Service’s Children’s Hour. They were written by Norman Hunter, who had previously worked in advertising and as a stage magician, as well as serving in World War One in his late teens and is sometimes known as ‘Hunter, teller of tales’. Indeed, he is sometimes referred to as such in bibliographic databases, and the British Library copy of the 1933 edition has ‘teller of tales’ sketched in on pencil in the frontispiece (not by me). The book was illustrated by W. Heath Robinson, who by this time was already famous for his images of fantastic and humorous inventions. The Incredible Adventures were followed in 1937 with Professor Branestawm’s Treasure Hunt. After a break of several decades, during which the writer lived in South Africa, Hunter returned to writing for children, and published fourteen more Branestawm books from 1970 to 1983 (he died in 1995). Although all the Branestawm stories were written by Hunter, a new illustrator was brought in for the 1937 collection, and many different artists have worked with the character over the years. Heath Robinson is possibly the most well known, with his images re-used in several subsequent editions (1939, 1946, 1993) and arguably a strong influence on the later artists.

Professor Branestawm swaps clothes with Colonel Dedshott, W Heath Robinson, 1933

Hunter’s stories centre on the character of ‘Professor Branestawm’, a scientist (or engineer, his specialism is ambiguous) who lives in a small English village. Typically the books contain a series of short stories, each of which describe Branestawm inventing something or trying to go about some form of social life, such as attending a party or returning a library book. Either he gets terribly confused himself or he will confuse other people (often both). In most cases, the invention goes wrong and causes some form of havoc and/ or even structural damage. The inventions are in many ways quite magical and are often anthropomorphized; in that respect the books are openly fantastical. It is worth remembering Hunter’s work as a conjurer here, and that the 1976 spin off activity book, Professor Branestawm’s Do-It-Yourself Handbook, includes several instructions for ‘science experiments’ which are largely magic tricks (although this is a long-standing trope in such books, see, for example, Secord, 2002). They might blow up a building or take over the house. In the 1970 collection, The Peculiar Triumph of Professor Branestawm we, unusually, find inventions which do work, although not in the way they were supposed to. However, interestingly, these were ‘invented’ by child readers, who won a competition run by the publisher to design a machine to be featured in one of the stories.

The key feature of the Branestawm character, and basis for much of the humor of the books, is that he is a social outsider, someone the readers (and other characters) should take some amused bewilderment towards. He is, for many of his fans, the epitome of the absent-minded professor. As Branestawm himself reflects at one point: ‘How strange we professors are, to be sure’ (1933: 173). He finds it hard to communicate with people, and often has conversations at cross-purposes (1933: 130). He walks into a swimming pool because he is thinking too much about finding a library (1933: 88) and continually forgets where he is. When he discovers the library, he tries to buy a bun there, thinking it is a bakery (1933: 29). He finds social life difficult, cumbersome and confusing and often feels out of place and lost. The playfulness of this stereotype is very explicit: in one story, he ends up inadvertently doing an impersonation of himself at the seaside, where people think he is a comic pretending to be an absent minded professor (1933: 203). He has a housekeeper, Mrs Flittersnoop and a best friend, Colonel Deadshott, but generally chooses to be left alone to work with his ‘inventions’.

The books have been translated into several languages, including Polish, Swedish, Italian, German and Thai[i]. There was a later BBC radio adaptation in 2001, and a television series in the late 1960s. One study of books used in British schools in the 1970s stated it was one of the top 20 books read allowed in primary schools, alongside the Chronicles of Narnia, The Borrowers, various works by Dahl and beating the Just William stories (Poole, 1986). They are still in print in the UK, although this is arguably largely due to the nostalgic tendencies of children’s publishing, and the books are less common today. Their attitude to race, gender and class would have kept them off school bookshelves from the 1980s onwards. In places, however, Branestawm appears to continue to resonate in British cultural imagery of the scientist; people will still refer to academics as having ‘Professor Branestawm hair’ as if it was an example everyone will know. Christopher Frayling suggests that the shorthand sketches children compose when asked to draw a picture of a scientist may come from computers, comics, cartoons, films or the cover of Professor Branestawm books (Frayling, 1005: 221) Arguably, it is strange that Frayling refers broadly to each media except for books where a very specific, rather out-dated example is given. However this only shows the power and apparent universality of the Branestawm image in particular cultures, which Frayling appears to belong[ii].

Variable Childishness of Professor Branstawm.

I believe the original 1933 Branestawm to be quite overtly constructed as childlike, both in Hunter’s text and Robinson’s illustrations. Yet, Branestawm’s childishness is variable across the twentieth century. As with any long-standing character (Dr Who, Superman, Tom Swift) the cultural referents used to construct the character and stories changed over time depending on the context, although Branstawm retained the same author, albeit changes in illustrator and editors. One of the more overt examples of how shifts in the public views of science had an impact on these changes in the book is that the James Adams’ illustrations of 1937 edition are much more heavily influenced by images of Freud, as a hairier, bearded Branestawm is shown in a neatly drawn pinstriped suit. As I will argue, the character – more in text than illustration – seems to ‘mature’ somewhat when Hunter returns to writing about him in 1970, becoming less and less childlike throughout the decade, before reaching a sort of ‘2^nd childhood’ in the 1980s incarnations. This section will provide a sketch of some of the more childlike aspects of the (generally early) Branestawm, sometimes in comparison with (later) more apparently ‘mature, forms of the character.

To start with Branestawm’s childishness, for all his occasional seriousness in the face of social events such as parties, Branestawm has a clearly presented sense of fun. When the fair visits town, he is desperate to go (1933: 69 onwards). There are also childlike references to eating too much trifle and ginger beer (1933: 86); at bedtime he drinks cocoa and falls out of bed (1933: 169). His lack of social understanding also leads to quite childlike concerns, and he takes things to the extreme. For example, at the end of a fancy-dress party where the Professor and Colonel have gone as each other, people do not believe the had changed back from fancy-dress: ‘So they very nearly had to live in each others’ houses for the rest of their lives’ (1933: 154). The early illustrations show both Branestawm and the Colonel as reasonably short compared to other characters, and they often crouch over slightly, without the more confident posture of an adult. In one illustration Branestawm is shown wearing a ‘trouser elevator contraption’ (1933: 3), a set of braces attached to a fishing rod mechanism, which stops baggy clothes, falling down. This also has the effect of bunching the trousers around his bottom, making him look as if he is wearing a nappy. In the Heath Robinson images of Branestawm, he is often shown wearing clothes which are too big for him; as if he were playing at fancy dress, not quite grown into adult roles. The picture in the 1933 frontispiece shows Branestawm’s tie worn back to front, which is there as a symbol of the lack of care he gives to his clothes (a function of his absent minded-ness) but is also reminiscent of an untidy schoolboy. On some occasions the childlike is, perhaps oddly, constructed through references to symbols of old age. For example, he is depicted as balding. A baldhead is in many ways a symbol of old age, however, it is also has the effect of making the character look as if he hadn’t grown any hair yet. We are also told he has a large head explicitly because he is so brainy (1933: 7) but again, a large forehead is a rather baby-like characteristic. Interestingly, this is perhaps most overtly underlined when we see an image of Branstawm compared to himself as a baby. The Professor invents a potion that brings images to life, but his housekeeper accidentally pours it over a photo album, and facilities of Branstawm through the ages run amok throughout the house. One image shows Branestawm tacking aback by himself as a baby (1933: 121). The baby sits serenely on the floor on the left hand side of the page, grabbing his feet. The Professor mirrors this posture; while falling back in alarm, he bends his body in the middle in a direct reflection of the baby’s movement out to touch his toes. Although the professor is much taller than the baby, and clothed, the differences largely end there. They are both generally hairless. Significantly the baby’s hair is the course and frizzy type, characteristic of ageing, rather than light and soft curls. Further, the baby has glasses, despite overtly being much too young to wear them. This, to me, seems like a clear example of ‘ambivalence’ around child/ adult boundaries with respect to a scientist character, drawing similarity and difference at once. I also think it shows that Heath Robinson picked up on the same cues in the text as I spotted.

The 1930s Branestawm is seemingly terrified of people. Characters from the rest of the village, when we see them, are shown to like him, but generally he hides from social life, with the exception of one friend, Colonel Deadshott. Such anti-social behaviour is also in some ways quite childlike, reflecting a child’s lack of socialization or shyness. The distinction being that an absent minded professor is innocent of society by choice or inclination; for a child it may be more temporal, but effects are similar. Branestawm’s lack of socialisation is also symbolised through references to his odd approach to clothes, language and food. Again, these could be seen as childlike, having not learnt. They are humourous because they are incongruous to what might be expected as normal, but there are also ways in which they figure the character as cute, almost useless in a childlike way (underlined by the housekeeper character, there to take care of him). They also make him slightly inhuman though, almost alien. On food, he would have breakfast overnight so he could start earlier the next morning on an important job (1933: 15). With clothes, as well as the fancy-fress and trouser contraption incidents mentioned earlier, he is referred to as making notes on his shirt cuffs (1933: 16) and at one point inadvertently puts on a ladies bonnet (illust., 1933: 48). Hunter obviously enjoyed linguistic play, and although notes like “He had very few friends because people found it so very difficult to talk to him” (1933: 1) are perhaps a nod to scientific jargon, the language used by the character is more a matter of being vague and imprecise, suggesting a lack of familiarity with language rather than having developed his own advanced form of it: (saying “thingummy” and “whateveritis” (1933: 3). Perhaps most significant, people are indulgent, or at least tolerant of his odd behaviour – Deadshott pretends to understand him (1933:4). In one incident he blows a man’s house up. The professor offers to build him a new one. “But the clock–man said he’d rather invent his own house, thank you all the same” (1933: 66).

In the 1930s Branestawm hid away in his own private space of the home, and in the 1970s we see him out and about, interacting in more public spaces of libraries, school and parks. In the 1980s, we see a sort of synthesis of the two locations; the public world is brought into the home. It is thus a very domestic setting, but one at home and familiar with the outside world. In 1980s, he becomes much more explicitly affable and loveably foolish again, he has parties with jelly and ice-cream (1983b) and writes letters (1981b) although interacts with the world in a familiar way, not as terrified as he was in the early books, he generally stays at home (pleased when guests go home, producing a machine because he doesn’t like writing thank yous). He doesn’t want people around, although this rime around it doesn’t seem as if it’s because he is scared of others, more that he’s learnt they are annoying. In the 1970 book, there are also several encounters with children, emphasising the distinction between the two social roles, and with less of the juxtaposition performed to also show similarity we saw in the 1933 Heath Robinson illustrations. As Branestawm moves into the 1970s, the central characters of these books are now ones for the children to laugh at and look at from afar, not play at being. They are funny because they are odd to the children, not odd like the children.

Where as the 1930s inventions tend to be based in Branestawm’s home, designed to solve problems on running the house, in the 1970s, inventions are on a larger scale, working for public good of whole village, not just himself, based in the outdoors, in the centre of social life (parks, shopping streets, school). In the 1974 book, Professor Branestawm’s Great Revolution, the last story reveals what the revolution of the title is, the professor is asked to design a revolving restaurant. He also lectures at an institute for science and other scientist characters are brought in. There are references to the links between science and the military, as well as commercial culture. There is a greater sense of specialization. In first book it is not clear what he was a professor of; he invented machines, with the suggestion that he was an engineer, but he also had books on languages. Post war, he is more explicitly fashioned as a scientist/ technologist when he goes abroad it is not to anthropologically study the people, but to learn more of their inventions (1970: 37). Looking at the language, the Professor also discusses the science in slightly more detail, suggesting a rather more ‘adult’ vocabulary (compared with the thingummy and whatiscalled’s of the first book). There is even a rival Professor, Gasket Basket, who he gets into an inventing competition with, but uses underhand methods, employing “rascals” to steal Branestawm’s invention. Inventions in 1980s books return to rather more domestic settings (1981ab, 1982ab, 1983ab).

Professor Branestawm’s Trouser Elevator, W Heath Robinson, 1933

The Rhetoric of the childish scientist

There is a sense that the inability to interact with society is a necessary consequence for scientific achievement, and by that vein, also socially acceptable:

For although the Professor was so clever, or perhaps because he was so clever, he was very absent-minded. He was so busy thinking of wonderful things like new diseases or new moons that he simply hadn’t the time to think of ordinary things like old spectacles (Incredible Adventures, 1933: 1)

This is very similar to what Rosalind Haynes (1994) calls the ‘stupid virtuoso’, and arguably pre-dates the more Victorian image of childhood present in the book. Certainly, an absent minded professor is not unique to these books. However, there are ways in which stupid virtuoso characters can be endowed with aspects of childishness, and worth reflecting on this to deconstruct them, and consider the ways they may influence our ideas about children’s relationships with science (and vice versa). From a study of Richard Feynman’s popular writing, she argues that behind anecdotes of asking for lemon and cream in your tea, or asking a servant to dance lies a notion of ‘the wise fool’. As Leane puts it, ‘the boy who saw the emperor’s nakedness’. These stories are applied to show how the scientist can debunk unnecessarily or cruel social practices and find the efficient, true and (morally) right way ahead (Leane, 2007: 151). She does not reflect on it being a boy (rather than a person of any age) which manages to see the ‘nakedness. Yet, this unconscious reference to youth is significant, as we see the idea of the innocent child intersecting with notions of the scientist as either ‘disinterested’ (Merton, 1973) or a ‘modest witness’ of nature (Shapin and Schaffer, 1985).

Linked to this idea of innocence is a strong sense of simple-ness in the image of Branestawm, which I would also sits within some of the figuring of him as a childish character (whilst at the same time not being dependent on it). For example, again from the start of the first book:

Professor Branestawm, like all great men, had simple tastes. He wore simple trousers with two simple legs. His coat was simply fastened with safety pins because the buttons had simply fallen off. His head was simply bald and it simply shone like anything whenever the light caught it. (1933:1)

This equating an idea of simplicity to both science and greatness, which reflects cultural ideas of the scientist as humble, as well as more philosophical points such as Occam’s razor. It also implies we need not question him; he just is. Yet, interestingly, behind the appearance of simplicity lies a more complex sense of magic, as the character also plays up to the idea of the scientist as having an intuitive or hidden ability to work nature. E.g. in the description of one of his inventions (pretty standard for many throughout the whole series, until the 1980s):

Blue and yellow smoke shot out from every part of the machine. Wheels whizzed. Levers clicked. Little bits of stuff went buzzing up and down and round and round. And far beneath them the landscape rushed by quicker and quicker until at last they could see nothing but a grey haze all round them (1933: 4-5)

Similarly, from 1981: “Suddenly he had an idea. Right out of nowhere it came. Like catching measles, only nicer” (1981b: 5). It’s maybe worth remembering Hunter as a stage conjurer who fancied himself the fancy-dress of the mad scientist; an odd reflection of JBS Haldane, perhaps, who in his Mr Leakey stories (1937) adopts the costume of a magic man, but equally uses a children’s book to play with ideas of the scientist as magician. As Haynes’ history of fictional scientists shows, this idea of scientist as magic man has a long history; if anything it is an especially old form of the character. However, it’s also worth noting that this an almost magical connection between the child and nature is a very common theme in children’s literature too. As Rose puts it, the child is “constantly set up as the site of a lost truth” (Rose, 1994: 43). Applebaum (2006) has argued that such nature-child connections are used to distance children from science, and critique the latter in many science fiction books written for young people. However, I think Branestawm is an example of the ways in which the two can be combined, endowing the scientist character with the various positive characteristics of the child mysteriously in nature (for other examples of this, see also Bell, 2008ab).

Branestawm makes a mess, W Heath Robinson, 1933

Concluding points

This essay has considered some of the ways in which an image of the child might be woven into those of a scientist. I hope this helps us consider some of the detail of our cultural construction of scientists, in particular their rhetorical appeal. Oddly perhaps, the childlike can endow the image of the scientist with a rather unthreatening and intuitive association with natural knowledge, even if childlike scientists will also have to work to distance themselves from other images of youth such as the more pathological notions of ignorance, triviality or thoughtlessness. As Elizabeth Leane’s (2007) discussion of constructed public face of Richard Feynmen suggests, there is a rhetorical appeal to such constructions, as childlike imagery may provide powerful symbols of an apparent link to truth and/ or purity of purpose. Leane’s study also shows how these fictional representations make spill into non-fictional ones. Branestawm is not part of a concerted public relations campaign for science, but such images can be extended elsewhere to be.

It would be a neat piece of analysis to argue that between the differences in age-based allusions of Branestawm are reflective of the emergence of ‘Big Science’ as a form of coming of age, but that would be too simple. To some extent this analysis is ahistorical anyway. Or rather, cross-historical. Not because what Branestawm depicts is in any way universal, but because children’s literature is so often carried across time. Due to the nostalgic tendencies of children’s book production and dissemination (i.e. that it is made by the generation before its audience, and parents often give books of their youth to their children), what Branestawm said about science then is largely what it says now. Branestawm is interesting today not only as an expression of science in the mid 20^th century, but of one that both looked back nostalgically at the time and is still resonant in its nostalgia today; either through various recycling of post modern culture or more directly, as readers of the 1970s give it to their children, who give it to theirs. Instead, the variability and contingency of Branestawm’s symbolic childishness perhaps provides an extra analytical point. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Scientist characters became more central to public life, but at the same time would emphasise their special qualities to appear distinct. If I was to hazard any broad statement about the sweep of time the books reflect, it is that images of science became, perhaps, more ambivalent, drawing on the childlike images of the past and adding in new. The most recent edition of the 1933 book (which is the most long-lived) I could find was over a decade ago, but there are e-book versions, BBC last re-broadcast a reading of the stories in March 2011 and an online bookshop listing suggests a “Vintage” edition will be published again in 2013. So he may yet return, perhaps re-fashioned by a new author, illustrator or production team.

References:

• Applebaum, Noga (2006) ‘The Myth of the Innocent Child: the Interplay Between Nature, Humanity and Technology in Contemporary Children’s Science Fiction’, The Journal of Children’s Literature Studies, vol3, issue 2, July 2006.
• Applebaum, Noga (2005) ‘Electronic Texts and Adolescent Agency: Computers and the Internet in Contemporary Children’s Fiction’, in Reynolds, Kimberly (ed) Modern Children’s Literature. (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave).
• Bell, Alice (2008a) ‘The Childish Nature of Science: exploring the child/science relationship in popular non-fiction’ in Bell, Alice, Davies, Sarah & Mellor, Felicity (eds) Science and its Publics: Following Scientists into Popular Culture (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars), 79-98.
• Bell, Alice (2008b) Science as Pantomime: Explorations in Contemporary Children’s Non-Fiction Books, PhD thesis, Imperial College London.
• Frayling, Christopher (2005) Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know: The Scientist and the Cinema (Reaktion Books, London).
• Gieryn, Thomas F (1995) ‘Boundaries of Science’, in Jasanoff, Shelia et al (eds) (1995) Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (London: Sage) pp393-443.
• Gieryn, Thomas F (1999) Cultural Boundaries of Science. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
• Haldane, JBS. (1937) My Friend, Mr Leakey (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
• Haynes, Rosalind (1994) From Faust to Strangelove: representations of the scientist in western literature (Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore).
• Hume, Kathryn (1984) Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature (New York and London: Methuen).
• Hunt, Peter (1994) An Introduction to Children’s Literature (Opus, Oxford)
• Hunt, Peter and Lenz, Millicent (2001) Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction (London: Continuum).
• Hunter, Norman (writer) Robinson, W Heath (illustrator) (1933) The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm (John Lane, London)
• Hunter, Norman (writer) Arnold, James (illustrator) (1937) Professor Branestawm’s Treasure Hunt (John Lane, London)
• Hunter, Norman (writer) Robinson, W Heath (illustrator) (1939) Stories of Professor Branestawm (selections of first two books) (EJ Arnold & Son, Leeds)
• Hunter, Norman (writer) Robinson, W Heath (illustrator) (1946) The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm (Penguin, Harmondsworth)
• Hunter, Norman (writer) Adamson, George (illustrator) (1970) The Peculiar Triumph of Professor Branestawm (Bodley Head, London)
• Hunter, Norman (writer) Hughes, Derek (illustrator) (1974) Professor Branestawm’s Great Revolution and other incredible adventures (Bodley Head, London)
• Hunter, Norman (writer) Rose, Gerald (illustrator) (1981a) Professor Branestawm’s Pocket Motor Car (Puffin, Harmondsworth)
• Hunter, Norman (writer) Rose, Gerald (illustrator) (1981b) Professor Branestawm and the Wild Letters (Bodley Head, London)
• Hunter, Norman (writer) Rose, Gerald (illustrator) (1982a) Professor Branestawm’s Mouse War (Bodley Head, London)
• Hunter, Norman (writer) Rose, Gerald (illustrator) (1982b) Professor Branestawm’s Building Bust-Up (Bodley Head, London)
• Hunter, Norman (writer) Rose, Gerald (illustrator) (1983a) Professor Branestawm’s Hair-Raising Idea (Bodley Head, London)
• Hunter, Norman (writer) Rose, Gerald (illustrator) (1983b) Professor Branestawm’s Crunchy Crockery (Bodley Head, London)
• Hunter, N (writer) Robinson, W Heath (illustrator) (1993) The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm (Puffin, London)
• Jenks, Chris (2005) Childhood, 2^nd edition. (Oxford: Routledge).
• Jurdant, Baudouin (1993) The Popularization of science as the autobiography of science, Public Understanding of Science, vol2. October 1993, pp365-73.
• Kirby, David (2003a) ‘Science Consultants, Fictional Films, and Scientific Practice’, Social Studies of Science, vol33(2):231-268
• Kirby, David (2003b) ‘Scientists on the set: science consultants and the communication of science in visual fiction’, Public Understanding of Science, vol 12(3): 261-278.
• Lambourne, Robert (1999) ‘Science Fiction and the Communication of Science’, in Scanlon et al (eds) Communicating Science: Contexts and Channels (London: Routledge), 146-157.
• Lamont, Michele & Virag Molnar (2002) ‘The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences’, Annual Review of Sociology 28:167-95.
• Leane, Elizabeth (2007) Reading Popular Physics: Disciplinary Skirmishes and Textual Strategies (Hampshire: Ashgate)
• Locke, Simon (2005) ‘Fantastically Reasonable: Ambivalence in the Representation of Science and Technology in Super-hero Comics’, Public Understanding of Science, vol 14 (1): 25-46.
• Mellor, Felicity (2007) ‘Colliding Worlds: Asteroid Research and the Legitimatization of War in Space’, Social Studies of Science, vol. 37(4): 499-531.
• Mellor, Felicity (2003) ‘Between Fact and Fiction: demarcating science from non-science in popular physics books’, Social Studies of Science, vol. 33, no4: 509-538.
• Merton, Robert (1973) The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, edited with an introduction by Norman W Storer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
• Mitroff, Ian I. (1974). Norms and counter-norms in a select group of Apollo Moon scientists: A case study in the ambivalence of scientists. American Sociological Review, 39, 579-595.
• Nodleman, Perry (1985) ‘Out There In Children’s Science Fiction: Forward into the Past’, Science Fiction Studies, vol 12: 285-295.
• Poole, Roger (1986) ‘The Books Teachers Use’, Children’s Literature in Education, vol 17(3) 159-180.
• Prelinger, Megan (2010) Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957-1962 (New York: Blast Books).
• Rose, Jacqueline (1994) The Case of Peter Pan, 2^nd edition. (Basingstoke: Macmillan).
• Secord, James A (2002) ‘Portraits of Science: Quick and Magical Shaper of Science’, Science, 6^th September 2002, vol. 297 (5587): 1648-1649.
• Shapin, Steven & Schaffer, Simon (1985) Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and The Experimental Life (Princeton UP: Princeton)

Acknowledgements: This work was carried out as part of doctoral research (AHRC grant no: 05/116470) at the Science Communication Group, Imperial College. Drafts of this paper were presented at several conferences. My thanks to the organisers of these events, as well as all attendees for their attention, suggestions and questions.

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[i] My thanks to the ‘academic discussion of children’s literature – uk’ listserv for assistance in tracking down Branestawm in translation.

[ii] It should be noted that here Frayling is discussing a set of drawings produced by 7-11 year olds in the South West of England in summer 2003. An argument for the resonance of Branestawm in the subjects of the 1983 UK study he is replicating might be more convincing.

Occupy RCUK! Or why science funding matters

This first appeared on the Greenpeace EnergyDesk.

Compared to Canada and Australia, Brits might be forgiven for feeling a bit relaxed about the relatively pro-science stance our government seems to take (the odd “flat earth love-in” notwithstanding).

But beware politicians who come baring science scented rhetoric, or at least be ready to ask which bits of science they are so keen on, put to what ends. Because it’s not just the size of the science budget that matters, it’s what you do with it.

See, for example, yesterday’s report from Scientists for Global Responsibility; on how research is being directed towards developing aggressive weapons rather than talking the roots of conflict. Or the University of Manchester’s £64 million deal with BP last year, to explore “Advanced Materials.” Advanced materials which are especially useful for squeezing those hard-to-extract fossil fuels out the ground. Or the big smiles from Cameron and Cable at the Big Bang Fair last spring, as they ushered our nation’s youth towards careers with Shell and BAE Systems, Or when the Natural Environment Research Council, our official body for environmental science, decided to celebrate its ability to help “de-risk”  the activities of oil companies in the polar regions. Whose hopes for our collective future do those bits of science serve? Whose pockets?

Many important debates about how we might best apply scientific energies get obscured by arguments about the need for “pure” research. But put down the spherical physicist (imaginary ideal case that doesn’t exist in real world) because large chunks of science are already being directed. And so they should be.

The idea that at least some scientific work should be focused towards key social challenges informs how we organise science the world over, and has done for as long as we’ve been doing science on a large scale. This doesn’t mean we tell scientists what to find. It just means that, because we believe in science’s power as an engine for change, we think about which direction we point in in. The idea that science should be directed really isn’t – on a policy level – controversial at all. The question is who gets to direct it.

For example, the environmental sciences body NERC has, as its number one strategic goal, “enabling society to respond urgently to global climate change and the increasing pressures on natural resources”. Dealing with climate change is their moonshot; NERC are our people who keep an eye on these things. I for one am glad we invest in some brains on that issue.

Considering this expressed goal, we might be a bit taken aback by a call for expressions of interest to run a new Centre for Doctoral Training in Oil and Gas research which was quietly offered with a very short deadline a few weeks back. A cynic might argue they wanted it to slip out reasonably unnoticed over the summer. We might even possibly wonder if it was delayed so as not to coincide with the Balcolme protests. Because it is a bit suspicious.

Before you get too angry, there is also a DTC in wind funded through the EPSRC (engineering council). But this new centre does seem a bit odd, especially coming from NERC. It’d perhaps be simplistic to say they are using public money to run PhDs in fracking. But they are kind of using public money to do PhDs in fracking. When the BP materials centre was announced last year, the Nature news blog mused that that, as corporate labs wither, industries were looking to campuses to fill their research needs. Similarly, this new centre from NERC does feel a bit like someone, somewhere is taking the piss.

PhDs are important. That’s why research councils are strategising at the level of organising doctorial training centres. DTCs are controversial across academia for this reason – strategy is easily a code for cuts – and there was some fuss when NERC said they’d bring them in. PhDs are a key part of scientific labour in that they do a lot of the actual research, but they also train and make new scientists, so a centre for training like this is designed help encourage more work in an area and strengthen it as a long-term academic field. They are a way to plan the future of science, and with it a way to plan the future of our planet.

It would be understandable if other NERC funded scientists, not to mention the British public at large, asked questions. Who decided this was a good idea? As I’ve argued before, the governance of the research councils are far from open, and that’s a failing in terms of both doing good science and democratic accountability. It’ll be interesting to see the results of the Platform/ People and Planet work on the fossil fuel industry’s involvement in UK universities, but I suspect one of the most interesting results will be what they haven’t been able to find out about.

Unpicking the politics of science funding gets harder still as public research does more and more work with industry (see George Monbiot’s “monstrous proposal”). This issue of collaboration connects to another issue in the structure of science funding we should all be paying a lot more attention to; the move to collaborative funding where it is easier to access public funds if you can also bring some resources from industry. There are lots of advantages to this, but if over-applied, it limits us to research which serves the status quo rather than disrupts it.

Science is one of the places we can find hope when it comes to dealing with climate change. But it’s also, potentially a source of a lot of damage too. Protest camps at sites for possible exploration – as we saw at Balcombe – perhaps show activism moving further upstream than equivalent targets at power stations or airports. But a really forward-thinking protester might want to consider occupying Research Councils UK.

Troll Below? Science policy below the line.

Some streetart on a bridge in Dublin

I have an essay in James Wilsdon and Rob Doubleday’s collection: “Future directions for scientific advice in Whitehall” (downloadable for free). It’s an invitation for the various greats and goods of science policy to not only use social media to promote their ideas but to “go below the line” and listen to the public there too. I know such listening is problematic – I’m not about to try to rehearse all the problems here, they exist and are generally very specific to the people and cases involved – but that doesn’t mean you can’t try.

There’s a shorter version on our Guardian blog, or here’s a preview of the full thing:

We should ask what we want openness to mean online, what forms we want to invest in, and how this should be organised. There is a lot more to open science than simply open access. Indeed, a preoccupation with the latter as a solution to social ills may well be a way of avoiding dealing with the former. Further, how we choose to finance and manage forms of open access is far from straightforward. Whilst politicians, scientists, publishers and learned societies argue it out, the #icanhazpdf hashtag is gradually whittling away at current publishing models (used so people looking for paywalled papers can find those with institutional log-ins who are willing to be generous on their library’s behalf). Scientists may feel persecuted by activists, especially if they engage in debates over climate change, alternative medicine or animal rights. They may also feel that when work flows into ‘social media’, even more of their private lives are being taken over by work. Online interaction can be tiring.

A related issue is whether the public can be trusted with science in the open. One might, for example, feel pleased when the Science Media Centre manages to keep a story out of the press (as when I heard senior scientists cheer in the case of a story about GMO food last year). Alternatively, one could follow the lead of the Cancer Research UK news blog which accepts that stories they don’t agree with will get published, but uses the more open spaces of the web to put extra context out there, hoping those who care will find it. One recent piece of research argues that the ‘incivil’ tone of web comments can derail evidence-based public debate on science, technology and especially environmental and health issues. For all that I can personally relate to this (having uncomfortably found myself being incivil myself, as well as at the receiving end of incivility), such calls for polite behavior online leave me uneasy. Complaints about ‘tone’ are too easily used to quell dissent. Words like ‘troll’ can become a proxy for what is, at best, disagreement, and worst, class hatred.

It is now 18 years since Bruce Lewenstein suggested a ‘web model’ as an alternative to top-down ideas of science communication in his study of the cold fusion controversy. This networked view seems almost too obvious today, as gross a simplification as the deficit model. But it contains an important message that is increasingly hard to ignore: the simple messiness of scientific discourse. Although neater debate has its uses, especially in policymaking, that doesn’t mean we should aim to tidy it all up. This mess is how we build capacity for more coherent exchanges, build trust, learn and digest. It is also where people can show dissent and support for science, both of which are important. We should be wary of being too spooked by the incivility or apparent lack of expertise online. As science policy debate bleeds onto social media, we shouldn’t be scared to take a dip below the line, and take some time to look and listen. You never know what we might find.

For personal reasons – and partly to make a slightly tongue in cheek point – comments are closed for this entry.

John Hayes MP and the bourgeois

Gove-themed streetart, Brighton.

Our energy minister John Hayes seems to enjoy the word “bourgeois”. I don’t blame him, it’s a fun word to say.

Back in October, he described the idea of onshore wind farms as “a bourgeois left article of faith based on some academic perspective”, arguing that “We need to understand communities’ genuine desire” instead “These things are about the people and I am the people’s minister” (as the Telegraph said, this seemed odd from a Tory minister). I heard him make similar claims to be on the side of the real people in a lecture at Imperial College later that month too. Yesterday he used it again, this time while dismissing David King’s perspective on clearing rainforest for biofuels as “detached, bourgeois views” (from 2hr 40 mins in). Within hours, this line had made it into Hayes’ Wikipedia entry, nestled between references to his low Stonewall rating and membership of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child.

If Hayes is going to apply the language of class war, we might as well run with it, especially as his perspective reminds me slightly of Soviet agricultural policy. I’m not being facetious. It’s also where I find some worth – as well as the ultimate poverty – of Hayes’ perspective. Let me explain.

Soviet agricultural policy is fascinating stuff. Short version: There is a long-standing Marxist issue with reductionist and determinist nature of genetics (and honestly, Francis Galton was a bit of a dick). A chap called Trofim Lysenko offered an alternative, and ended up dominating Soviet biology and agricultural policy to the extent that dissenters would be sent to the Gulags. Aside from a more socialist view of how nature worked and should be managed, he also offered a character of a self-taught, plain-speaking “barefoot scientist” of the people. It was worked in contrast to an idea of isolated lab-based ivory tower academics apparently more interested in animals and chemicals in bottles than people (good In Our Time on Lysenkosim). It was an attractive message. Even though if was also largely wrong, with disastrous consequences to boot.

In the same way, Hayes’ claim to be for the people sounds attractive too. Many scientists today, even David King, do seem distant and bourgeois. Hayes has a point in that, even if I think it’s ultimately used to disempower the public voice and be anything but as egalitarian as he implies. Who exactly are the publics against wind power? (they prefer it to a shale gas well, at least). And the landgrabs issue behind much of the biofuels story this week? All about inequality.

The last few decades have seen a lot of good work on public engagement with UK science. However, this challenge is huge, especially in the more politically charged issues like climate. It amounts to a quantity of work which frankly we haven’t come close to scratching the surface of investing in enough. Also, at the same time as all the increased public engagement work’s been going on, science education has managed to alienate many members of the general public. There are fees, etc, limiting access to universities but there are deeper problems too. The school-science curriculum is still largely designed to prepare people for A-level then undergraduate science, even though most people won’t take it that far. It’s also (oddly perhaps) influenced by the lobbies who want to keep a distinct identity for chemistry, biology and physics, meaning multidisciplinary, political topics like climate science don’t get the attention they deserve. There have been movements to try to design a science curriculum more focused on making educated publics, not scientists. But the scientific lobby largely manages to undermine it. Interestingly, one of the first UK politicians to really push for this “school science for the people” was Thatcher, Hayes’ Tory class war around science isn’t exactly new.

In recent years, the science lobby has also been actively arguing for “triple science” GCSE as the gold standard for those who want to do science at the top universities. Except there aren’t enough science teachers to go round, so this puts certain schools at an advantage. Tories seem to love triple science. The cynic in me says it’s because they know it keeps the proles out. Science used to be seen as a field open to working class kids – especially compared to classics or literature – but increasingly, it’s not the case. Access to scientific careers is a public relations issue in many ways, because if science is see as something “people like me” wouldn’t do, it’s culturally distant. Simply having friends and family who work in particular fields is one of the most powerful forms of engagement there is.

School science is the only time everyone learns together. We should do it better, and the scientific community need to take a good, hard look at themselves and think about how the choices they make in constructing themselves – or at least their undergrads – may further social inequality. And how this can come back to kick them in the bum when they get called bourgeois.

On the Today Programme, Hayes claimed to be talking about pragmatics: “my principle concern is to keep the lights on, and if the lights went off it’d be no good saying it was for the right reason, energy security is fundamental. It’s all very well having these kind of detached, bourgeois views but I have to deal with the practicalities”. In comparison, King had just been asked if saving the rainforest was a hippie-ish concern to save orangutans. He replied very calmly: “never mind the orangutans, it’s about the oxygen that we breathe, we’re talking about something quite serious”.

Precisely because the desire to breathe isn’t “bourgeois” it’s important scientists work harder to keep the public onside.

Big Pharma: Small Science?

I recently read a paper by some colleagues at SPRU on the publication patterns of the pharmaceutical industry. I thought I’d share a short write up of my notes. A version of the paper is here (pdf) or full citation:

• Rafols, Ismael, Hopkins, Michael M, Hoekman, Jarno, Siepel, Josh, O’Hare, Alice, Perianes-Rodríguez, Antonio and Nightingale, Paul (2012) Big pharma, little science? A bibliometric perspective on big pharma’s R&D decline. Technological Forecasting and Social Change.

You might be forgiven for thinking the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t publish research. It does. Quite a bit. “Big Pharma” (the world’s 15 largest firms) have around 10,000 publications. It’s still only about 4% of total publications in the field (and to put that 4% in some context, Big Pharma firms invested £46 billion per year in research and development between 2004-07, compared to the National Institute of Health’s £15.25b). But looking at some of the whats, whens and wheres of Big Pharma publishing can be interesting. They seem to be publishing around 9% less than they did 15 years ago, in slightly different areas, with evidence of different collaborations in ways which suggest they are a bit more of a follower than a leader when it comes to science. Although the issue is very complex, as the paper notes in its conclusion, is Big Pharma is not doing the research itself, will they be able to continue to be able to justify their large profits?

The researchers used Web of Science to download publications – “article” “letter” “note” “proceeding paper” and ”review” – from the largest 15 European and American pharmaceutical firms, amounting to a total of 160,841 records for the 1995-2009 period. Note: Here “European” meant they had an affiliation to at least one European Free Trade Association country (EU + Switzerland, Norway, Lichtenstein and Iceland). Though I’m personally taken by the idea of applying a Eurovision view of “European” in research policy data collection, I guess the politics of Israeli publishing might be a complicating factor. Also it’d just lead to really bad null points jokes in seminars. The data was then analysed with VantagePoint software, and they used Pajek and VOSviewer to create visualisations.

There are different motivations to publish in the drug discovery and drug development stages. In the discovery phase, publications can signal to investors but participating in the more traditional exchanges of “open science” (open in that they are published, even if there’s a paywall) also allows industrially based scientists access to the resources of the scientific community. In drug development, a degree of openness is often required due to the need for clinical evidence for the uptake of innovations. The authors argue that the evidence-based medicine paradigm has encouraged this (though some might argue not enough). They also suggest that scientific publications are sometimes written to diffuse information about the effectiveness and safety of pharmaceuticals; acting as a marketing tool, to win support in regulatory/ policy areas.

So, what’s Big Pharma publishing? More in rheumatology and ophthalmology (up 190% and 122% respectively), perhaps reflecting areas of increased therapeutic interest. Interestingly, also up was health policy and services (151%) reflecting greater role in fields closer to patient (or perhaps closer to the market) such as health services and clinical research. The industry’s shift away from agrichemicals and materials explains drop in plant (down 62%) and polymer science (down 71%). Chemistry, in comparison, was relaivly stable, but biomedicine was down 40% and cell biology down 46.5%. Put this data through visualization, and you get a pretty map of threads and bubbles lets you see a larger picture of a diversification of research interests. Also, the drop in biomed sciences can be seen in context of increase in peripheral areas related to new techniques (e.g. computation bio) and a marked shift towards disciplines more orientated to clinical applications. As the conclusion put it; we can see an apparent shift from bench to bedside.

There also seems to be some evidence of the organisational shifts many others have noted of Big Pharma in recent years. E.g. there’s a lot of talk of a shift to “team science” of collaboration, especially in biological sciences, medicine and neuroscience. This data suggests it’s even stronger in big pharma. However, interestingly it seems to be external partners which seem to be taking the intellectual lead: there’s a distinctive decrease in the number of big pharma first authors in collaborative publications (from 43% to 35%). The researchers conclude that the picture of Big Pharma their data presents is that of an intellectual follower, not leader.

We should be careful of drawing conclusions on this data as a simple proxy for what’s happen in Big Pharma. For example, there was no obvious sign of off-shoring of research to countries outside US and Europe (e.g. Singapore, India and China). However, the researchers suggest that due to division of labour in this particular collaborations and which part of that labor gets author credit, this is one of the areas where publication data underestimates actual activity. Also interestingly, although the oncology publishing increase is consistent with other data on pharmaceutical projects, there was increase in cardiovascular publishing despite decrease in number of projects. As Brian Balmer’s book on secrecy in science tells us, there are complex, often inter-mingling reasons for opening and closing scientific research. Similarly, there are a complex of reasons for publishing and not publishing. Still, it tells us something things and suggests others and if you’re interested it’s worth having a look at the full paper, including appendix.

Should scientists be bolder in public?

I spoke at the London Climate Forum this weekend. This is a rough sketch of what I said.

Jeremy Grantham is the investor behind the “Grantham Institute” centres for climate change research at Imperial and the LSE. He recently wrote a provocative opinion piece for Nature, arguing:

Overstatement may generally be dangerous in science (it certainly is for careers) but for climate change, uniquely, understatement is even riskier and therefore, arguably, unethical. It is crucial that scientists take more career risks and sound a more realistic, more desperate, note on the global-warming problem. Younger scientists are obsessed by thoughts of tenure, so it is probably up to older, senior and retired scientists to do the heavy lifting. Be arrested if necessary. This is not only the crisis of your lives — it is also the crisis of our species’ existence. I implore you to be brave.

It’s a bold statement. But possibly not a fair one. As Roger Pielke Jr quipped, “how about you go first?” More to the point, perhaps, many scientists recoiled from the suggestion, not simply because they lacked the courage or conviction of their work, but because they felt that isn’t a productive way to do science in public. People’s ideas of science vary, but to many it is not about bolding delivering anything, but asking questions.

And yet, perhaps Grantham has a point that climate is different. It’s more urgent, and there are more than enough people external to science ready to pounce and amplify your understatement for you. It’s surrounded by a very different political narrative of certainty and doubt than, for example, BSE. It’d be wrong to build a policy of scientific advice for climate based on models constructed in other crisis. Further, one might argue that climate science as a community is a bit too reticent, a bit too quick to hide (at least compared to other actors in the field), perhaps because the scientists who are currently at the most senior levels came into it before it was such a high profile political issue; they didn’t sign up for this.

In many ways, this isn’t a new dilemma. One might even say it’s the basic paucity of scepticism, the evental emptiness of doubt: At some point, you have to believe in something and act, or you do nothing. That doesn’t mean we have to be stuck though, it’s just a matter of deciding when you do choose to put questions to one side and act.

I don’t think we should be prescriptive about what scientists do here. If some would rather focus on uncertainty, fine, but equally I don’t think we should necessarily admonish those who take their work more boldly to the streets either (for one thing, that plays into stories those working against scientific advice would seek to promote: who are we really serving when we do such scolding?). That’s not to say we can’t critique individual actions we disagree with, but I’d like to think science is big and diverse enough to cover a range of approaches to science in society, and that we should be ok with that. If anything, we should celebrate and foster diversity of political attitude and approach. There’s a lot more to scientists in society than simply those who speak out and those who don’t; there are different ways to speak, a range of frames and a diversity of possible audiences. As Pielke Jr argues in his book the Honest Broker, their are various models for scientific advice one might choose, the important thin gis scientists do pick one approach, and do so consciously  thinking about which they apply, when and why.

I’m not sure I agree with Grantham’s focus on senior scientists, although they will have to be more accepting of such an approach if younger, less senior ones are to be involved too. This kind of work doesn’t just have to be done scientists either, but other members of the scientific community: educators, public engagement officers, artists, psychologists, sociologists, writers, press officers, storytellers, filmmakers, all sorts. (Yes, these people are part of the scientific community – broadly defined – and many are very skilled too).

We just don’t see enough of this activity applied to climate science. And so, I’d say if Grantham really wants a stronger public discourse on climate science, he should put his money where his mouth is and fund some. There used to be the Grantham Prize for journalism, the funding for which was recently shifted to training journalists, but journalism is only one part of the sort of work needed here. I would like to see a much larger project of investment in a larger range of climate communications. (I think it should be funded by the government, but that’s another fight). I know way too many science communication people who deliberately frame their ideas to have a biomedical theme so they can apply to Wellcome public engagment grants. If Grantham helped put together a climate version, I’m sure many would shift their energies, and that’d probably be a lot more productive in the long run than front page photos of Brian Hoskins occupying an oil rig.

JD Bernal: the communist crystallographer

A small sign of political protest at the University of Sussex this morning.

I was supposed to go to the JD Bernal Lecture at Birkbeck College a few weeks back; given this year by David Willetts. Except it was cancelled after a perceived threat of “disruptive” political protests. So I found myself with a free evening. I had another invite that evening, to an event at my old employer, Imperial College, celebrating their ongoing relationship with EDF. Or a mate was giving a talk about Spanish communism. In the end, though, I decided the best way to pay tribute to Bernal was to curl up with a few books about him.

Here are my notes.

John Desmond Bernal was born in 1901 in County Tipperary. He went to boarding school in England, then a scholarship to Cambridge in 1919, studying maths and science, followed by doctoral work with William Henry Bragg at the Royal Institution. He moved back to Cambridge in 1927 as lecturer in structural crystallography, becoming assistant director of the Cavendish Laboratory in 1934.

Bernal was one of those scientists people feel the need to say “he never won a Nobel” about, presumably because maybe he could have. It’s sometimes argued that he just spred his expertise a bit too thin. He was largely recognised as a bit of a general clever-clogs, picking up the the nick-name “sage” at university. A couple of his PhD students – Max Perutz and Dorothy Hodgkin – did win Nobels though, as had his old supervisor, Bragg. Rosalind Franklin worked with him for a bit, as did Maurice Wilkins, Francis Crick and Aaron Klug. So he had a bit of Nobel shine around him. But it’s maybe inappropriate to lead a discussion of Bernal with a list of famous people he worked with though. He was, after all, as famous for his socialism as his science.

At school he had been rather insulated from politics. But from early 1920, he started attending Socialist Society meetings at Cambridge and, as a PhD student living in Bloomsbury later that decade, he joined both the Holborn Labour Party and the Communist Party (it wasn’t especially remarkable to be a member of both at the time). He marched in the General Strike in 1926 and was supposed to have been left very moved by the experience of walking though London streets left at a relative standstill. But his years in Bloomsbury, if anything, weren’t especially inspiring politically, and it was in the 30s back in Cambridge that he got more active. There’s a story that he was galvanized by the Russian delegation’s contribution to a major history of science conference held at the Science Museum in 1931, but I tend to think reports of damascene moments are worth taking with a pinch of salt. Some said Bernal eventually took to Marxism with a religious fever, a replacement for the Catholicism of his youth (a point others also have made about his adoption of Freud). Again, I’m sceptical when I read people are religious in their political zeal, it just seems a bit patronising. I don’t know though, maybe Bernal was. Apparently he wasn’t strictly a “card carrying” commie, having dropped his actual card sometime in 1933 and not bothering to replace it (see Fred Steward’s chapter in Swann & Aprahamian).

Bernal wasn’t unusual as a politically active left wing scientist in 1930s Britain. Eric Hobswam cites CP Snow as saying if you were to poll a couple of hundred of the brightest young physicist in the mid 1930s, you’d have found around fifteen communists, a good fifty more on left and a hundred admitting to leftie sympatheises, with the rest neutral apart from the odd handful on the right (Swann & Aprahamian, 1999: xii). Bernal could be seen as at the forefront of what some would call “red science” in three ways: the organization of scientific workers, part of political mobalisation of science against war and as one of the more influential prophets for the potential of science for progress (Swann & Aprahamian, 1999: xi).

One of the outcomes of they way Bernal was not only a scientist interested in politics but someone who felt the two should be connected was his 1939 book The Social Function of Science. The book paid strong attention to the way resources were allocated to various parts of science and technology had become crucial to the development of nations. It was highly influential, instrumental in the development of the social studies of science. As Chris Freeman summarises, for Bernal science is the most important thing humans do and so, in both short and long term, it’s own justification. It provides such a huge capacity for social change and improvement of peoples lives. It just had to be planned out in the right way. At the heart of Bernal’s book – and his political legacy – is a call to organise this great human power of science, and to organise it to serve the many, not the few. His particular inspirations and approaches contained, arguably, somewhat of an over-idealisation of USSR’s particular way of planning science by Bernal. But that doesn’t mean his central desire to try to organise science is necessarily wrong, just that we might disagree about the best way to go about it. There are a range of ways we might organise science, and a range of ways we might be explicit and hope to involve others in this process.

Freeman agrees with Bernal’s enthusiasm for ambitious well-organised use of science and technology for human welfare, but stresses need to be complemented with equally explicitly commitment to promotion of open critical debate (see also Freeman’s Vega lecture on Bernal). In reference to Bernal’s much publicsised support of Lynsenco, Freeman argues that the best way to criticise and expose reactionary ideas in science remains to point out they are unscientific in public, not to rely on political labels. Bernal’s view of organising science was basically “a vision of brains interlinked to form a complex hierarchical system” (Swann & Aprahamian, 1999: 129), and that’s where the list of “great names” at the start sort of fit. Bernal venerated expertise, or at least he had a strong belief the benevolence of the scientific expert when it came to distributing the power to make decisions about science. In many ways this is what separates him from some contemporary social studies of science. It’s also one of the (many) ways his rather scientific and technological utopian approach diverges from greener left wing politics.

In 1938 Bernal was appointed professor of physics at Birkbeck, but at the onset of the Second World War he was pressed into service. Apparently John Anderson (that’s Anderson as in Anderson shelters) wanted Bernal as a scientific adviser “even if he is as red as the flames of Hell”. Together with his friend Solly Zuckerman, Bernal gave analysis of bombing a quantitative basis, which helped make a case against exaggerated claims about the effectiveness of Allied bombing, going on – with Patrick Blackett – to advise against the bombing of several German cities as a waste of manpower and resources. Later, Bernal and Zuckerman were seconded to General Mountbatten’s D-Day planning team, and a strong friendship sprang up between Bernal and Mountbatten.

After the war, Bernal resumed his professorial duties at Birkbeck, setting up the Biomolecular Research Laboratory in 1948. Post war, although apparently he “helped put the S in UNESCO” (Swann & Aprahamian, 1999: xxiii) his politics sometimes got him into trouble with the scientific establishment. He was excluded from the British Association for the Advancement of Science after speech he gave in Moscow critiquing the nature and control of science in the capitalist west, and Julian Huxley refused to work with communist scientists. Bernal was also an active peace campaigner, involved in the World Peace Council. When the British Peace Committee attempted to host the World Peace Congress in Sheffield, a number of delegates ended up stranded in London, including one Pablo Picasso. Bernal organised a party in his flat for them, and Picasso drew a mural on the wall of Bernal’s sitting room. Bernal later gave it to the ICA, and it’s currently at the Wellcome Collection (only a few blocks from Birkbeck).

I haven’t really gone into his personal life here, but Hobsbawn, in his LRB review of Andrew Brown’s The Sage of Science described Bernal as having a “purple” approach to sex to complement his otherwise redder characteristics. Brown says Bernal and his wife took to their open marriage “with gusto” (pdf, see page 65). You can google around a bit for more. He had a few kids. His mum sounded pretty cool. Read the first few pages of Brown’s book for details on her. There are a few portraits of him in the national collection and a plaque outside his old flat in Camden. He died in 1971 and is buried in South London.

So there you go. John Desmond Bernal (1901-1971). A scientist, a leftie, a pacifist, a lover and a fighter. “Red as the flames of Hell”, but mates with Mountbatten. Not a card-carrying communist, but no less an enthusiastic one. You can make up your own mind as to what you think he’d have made of the threat of a protest over higher education funding, or of a lecture in his name being given by a Tory science minister. Birkbeck have published the text of the talk Willetts would have given, so you can make up your mind what Bernal would have thought of that too.

Happy birthday Frank Oppenheimer!

The conservation of angular momentum being demonstrated at the Deutsches Museum, 1926.

I’ve written about Frank Oppenheimer before, but as today marks the 100th anniversary of his birth, I thought he was worth mentioning again.

Frank Oppenheimer had a fascinating life. I highly recommend KC Cole’s biography of him. The short version is that he was born into a reasonably wealthy American family and followed big brother J Robert (of Manhattan Project fame) into physics. Frank stood next to Robert when the atom bomb was first tested. After the war, however, Frank ended up being black-balled from academic research due to his brief membership of the Communist Party in the 1930s. I’ve read rumours that this was because of how sensitive his brother’s work was to the energy industry but only rumours, I’ve never seen anything strong on that. So Frank sold an old painting of his Dad’s and ran a cattle ranch instead. How’s that for alternative postdoc careers? When a vacancy for a science teacher opened at the local high school a few years later, he tried his hand at education. He sounds like a fun teacher, starting lessons with trips to the local dump to collect bits of old machines to use in demonstrations of thermodynamics. He also developed a large library of teaching resources to share with other teachers or students. His reputation spread and he ended up being invited back to teach at the local university. In 1965, he secured a fellowship to do some research at UCL and, while he was there, visited several of the major European science museums. These inspired him to set up something similar, but more informal, when he got home. This became San Francisco’s Exploratorium, opened in 1969.

As the Exploratorium website puts it, they broke the science museum mold. It was more science by way of the local dump than the rarified archive of the Patent Museum and Great Exhibition which set the basis of the London Science Museum collection. Many exhibits were put together from old bits of scientific equipment Oppenheimer had talked contacts at NASA and Stanford into donating. There is a lovely story that someone spotted new traffic lights in the street outside, so they asked the company that manufactured the lights to donate the old ones and that became an early optics exhibit. From the start, the Exploratorium was built on a very scientific commitment to the sharing of knowledge and continuous development as well as reasonably artistic sense of playful reinterpretation. As their website puts it, the exhibits are never “done”. Maybe I’ve read too much sociology, but this image of slightly messy, opportunistic, networked and tinkered-with science seems like quite an appropriate exposition of 20th century research. There was also a strong commitment to openness. Their workshops were set in the centre of the museum, with windows so visitors could see the exhibits being developed and fixed. Most importantly, perhaps, they shared instructions of how to make their exhibits with other institutions through training networks and a set of “Cookbooks“. It’s all a bit open source.

Their ideas spread far and wide, and Exploratorium exhibits have been made and remade around the world. I once stumbled across a sort of pop up Exploratorium in a subway tunnel in Brussels which included exhibits made by schoolchildren. Exhibitions have been developed and localised as they moved. I remember a “thong-a-phone” exhibit from a science museum in Brisbane I worked in for a bit in 2001, which I’m guessing would have a different name in the UK or USA (it was a musical instrument you played by hitting pipes with what Australians call thongs but I’d call a flip-flop). They all also drew on a longer history than just the Exploratorium. The Science Museum’s Children’s Galleries, opened in 1931, sits firmly in this history, as do books and shows by characters such as John Henry Pepper.  The picture at the top of this post is of staff at the Deutsches Museum in 1926 demonstrating an exhibit which looks very like a common Cookbook exhibit on the conservation of anular momentum. I think the idea for “Explainers” to staff the gallies came from France, but today there are a huge range of different Explainer-like programmes all over the world.

In terms of the UK, it’s worth stressing the role of Anthony Wilson in the early development of the Launch Pad gallery in London’s Science Museum and Richard Gregory in Bristol as well as some of the hands-on exhibits at the Natural History Museum. Those are just a couple of names I could mention though, lots of other people have had a role all over the place, as the field has grown with a culture of continuous development which was facilitated by, but not in any way limited to or even originated with, the Exploratorium approach. Moreover, whatever the hardware, these exhibits would be constantly re-interpreted by staff and visitors. If I learnt anything from my time as an Explainer, it was that you couldn’t know how someone would interpret an exhibit. Reading kids’ letters to the Explainers was especially illuminating (sometimes outright puzzling). Science centres are about interaction, and are themselves a consequence of such interaction too.

So, Happy Birthday Frank Oppenheimer! You old (sorta) commie, you helped make something lovely. The power of the Exploratorium has arguably been due to communication between people and things, not individuals. Still, Dr O had key role. As his museum readies itself for a move next Spring, I hope the story of Frank’s interesting scientific career keeps on being told and his legacy continues to be redeveloped and remade across the world.