By MARK HENDERSON - TIMESONLINE
Added: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 UTC

http://timesonline.typepad.com/science/2009/11/the-eureka-breakfast-lord-rees-on-the-values-and-value-of-science.html



To the Royal Institution this morning, for the first in a series of science breakfasts organised by The Times to celebrate the launch of Eureka, our new magazine devoted to science, life and the planet. For those of you who have missed it, Eureka will be appearing in The Times on the first Thursday of every month, and you can also read articles from the first two issues at Times Online.

Today's speaker was Lord Rees of Ludlow (pictured above with James Harding, the Editor of The Times), the President of the Royal Society and Astronomer Royal, who recently wrote a fine column for the first issue of Eureka. He took as his subject "The Value and Values of Science".

Familiar figures in the audience included Colin Blakemore, the neuroscientist, Simon Singh, the science writer, Mike Stratton, the cancer geneticist, Lucy Hawking, the author and daughter of Stephen, and Frank Skinner, the comedian and Times columnist.

It was a thought-provoking lecture, and I thought I'd share a few of the highlights here.

One of Lord Rees's first observations seemed especially apposite this week, given the row over the sacking of David Nutt as the Government's chief drugs adviser. Scientists, he said, are not the only people who should have a say over the direction and regulation of science: society as a whole has a stake in issues such as global warming, nuclear power and designer babies. Scientific advice, however, is critical to good government, and he chose one of my favourite Barack Obama quotes to make the point:

"It's a duty of advisers to government, and of scientific academies, to ensure that policy decisions are based on the best science, even when that science is still uncertain and provisional. When President Obama announced the names of the scientists who would join his administration -- a real 'dream team', incidentally -- he said that their advice should be heeded 'even when it is inconvenient -- indeed especially when it is inconvenient.'"

TAGGED: SCIENCE