Professor Lord Robert Winston arrived at Robinson on Wednsday evening to give the annual Keith Entwhistle Memorial Lecture to the Cambridge Veterinary Society.

The talk was untitled, and he warned the audience that it would be more of a “polemic” than a lecture, as he wanted to talk in Cambridge with something that had “no academic content at all”.

In the talk itself, he suggested that scientists now, more than ever before, have the responsibility to make it clear when they’re unsure about the negative effects of the technologies that are developed from their discoveries. Speaking about technological advances in Elizbethan times, he said “in the past, they knew where technology was taking them”. Today, given how fast progress is in these areas, he thinks that we would be hard-pressed to be as sure.

Demonstrating this point, he cited his worries about how air-travel could make it easier for infectious diseases to spread across continents and become uncontrollable.

With increasing nuclear waste disposal problems, foot and mouth, and global warming, he thinks that these are clear, recent examples of advances that we once thought of as umproblematic which have proved to be otherwise.

All represent part of “a growing crisis for technology”, as they are cases of when scientists have failed to regconise dangers, and ultimately became problematic due to scientist’s “failure to deal with the engagement with the public”.

“Every piece of human technology has an adverse side that we often forget” he explained. It is the responsibilty of scientists to prepare for those if they can. If they can’t, it then becomes about communicating issues effectively to the public, and not deluding people into thinking that all scientific progress is infallible.

He described the gap between where scientists are, and where the public see them as part of the difficulty; “we have persuaded people that we’re certain”. He said that this ‘certainty’ isn’t a good illusion for science to put to the world because it just doesn’t exist: “we deal, I think, with uncertainty... certainty within science is as dangerous as certainty within religion.” The problem is that people start to see scientists as far more unimpeachable than they actually are, “we have the risk of exaggerating what we can do.”

Winston warned of the danger scientists face in failing to listen to the public’s concerns about the impact of some of the research they conduct, saying that the number of people turning to alternative medicine was “evidence of our failure to engage with the population”.

He cited many more examples of occasions when he thought the scientific community had failed in this respect, saying of the disputes over GM crops that, “we scientists were incredibly arrogant... we didn’t really listen to or answer those fears”.

He admitted that the pressing problem of communication between science and society had to be tackled by both parties, with the government being more aware of the important contribution scientists can offer, arguing that “there isn’t the proper use of the available science in government”.

Although he said “there needs to be much more modesty on the side of scientists”, he acknowldged that there are two sides of the coin and he feels “we need a scientifically literate society”.

I asked him why he thought that science and soceity are seen as such separate spheres, and he admitted that, for students certainly, it can be “too difficult to be broad...it’s a shame, I think science should be seen more as a cultural activity”. Futhermore, he expressed his surprise that science and society are considered as separate, “we have to understand the science we do is not our science...you do Cambridge’s science....it’s paid for by society”. As such, it is the scientist's responsibilty to engage with it.