In the Dark

Have recent events left you with a sinking feeling that science isn’t valued in today’s modern world? Are you aggrieved that the great and the good nowadays seem to be so unimpressed by research for research’s sake and require us instead to divert our energies into “useful things” (whatever they are)?

Looking for something to optimistic to say I turned to Peter Medawar‘s book Advice to a Young Scientist and found, to my disappointment, that actually there’s nothing new about this attitude. For example, Medawar explains, no less a character than Dr Samuel Johnson, in his Life of Milton  offered the following rant about Milton’s daft idea of setting up an academy in which the scholars should learn astronomy physics and chemistry as well as the usual school subjects:

But the truth is that the knowledge of external nature, and the sciences which that knowledge requires or includes, are not the great or the frequent business of the human mind. Whether we provide for action or conversation, whether we wish to be useful or pleasing, the first requisite is the religious and moral knowledge of right and wrong; the next is an acquaintance with the history of mankind, and with those examples which may be said to embody truth and prove by events the reasonableness of opinions. Prudence and Justice are virtues and excellences of all times and of all places; we are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance. Our intercourse with intellectual nature is necessary; our speculations upon matter are voluntary and at leisure. Physiological learning is of such rare emergence that one man may know another half his life without being able to estimate his skill in hydrostaticks or astronomy, but his moral and prudential character immediately appears.

Medawar attempts to cheer up his readers  by responding with the following feeble platitude

Scientists whose work is prospering and who find themselves deeply absorbed in and transported by their research feel quite sorry for those who do not share the same sense of delight; many artists feel the same, and it makes them indifferent to – and is certainly a fully adequate compensation for –  any respect they think owed to them by the general public.

Tripe. Delight doesn’t put your dinner on the table. It’s not enough to feel smug about how clever you are: we need to convince people that science is worth doing because it’s worth doing for its own sake, and worth funding by the taxpayer for the same reason. Feeling sorry for people who don’t get the message is a sickeningly patronising attitude to take.

I should point out that the rest of the book isn’t all as bad as this, but  the mood I’m in today the best advice I could offer a young scientist at the moment wouldn’t require a whole book anyway:

Don’t!