Examination of Witness (Questions 60 - 67)
WEDNESDAY 17 JUNE
SIR ROBERT
MAY
60. We shall have an amplification from you.
(Sir Robert May) Yes.
Mr Beard
61. Going back to the previous question on public
exposure to scientific advice and the debate which goes on and
the potential or not of the public becoming confused by this,
do you see it as part of your responsibilities or the OST responsibilities
to promote this greater openness in Whitehall and generally to
promote a better public understanding of what scientific advice
is all about?
(Sir Robert May) Yes. We have a larger responsibility
for public awareness and public participation in science. We spend
£1.25 million a year through the Office of Science and Technology
on such things as the relatively newly established science week.
It started with about 3,000 events and has grown to about 8,000
involving as many as certainly one, maybe two million people last
year. The British Association week in early September and other
events through the year are predicated not on handing down understanding
from on high but trying to engage people in the shared excitement
of an awareness of what is going on, particularly younger people.
I see our role as reaching not just to producing trained people
and post-graduate programmes but thinking about university, secondary,
primary education. I construe my role on the various committees,
Cabinet and other committees, which think about the uses of information
technology, as prompting them to think of imaginative ways of
using it in a contemporary computer games idiom in primary school
science education and as part of all of that I see in training
people a way of motivating interest in an awareness of the issues
of the day in which scientific advice is going to be important
in framing policy.
62. Do you not think those occasions are preaching
to the converted to a great extent? None of them get very much
coverage in the Sun or the Daily Mirror, for instance.
(Sir Robert May) That is a good point. Coming back
to science week, you get two million people, many of them younger
kids. They have not been owned until they were the age of seven
so much of it at the very younger ages is trying to capture the
young unconverted. It is true that much of the activity beyond
that is preaching to the converted. It is true that science in
television and to a somewhat lesser extent on radio, although
I think Britain does it better than any other country, still tends
to be ghettoised in science programmes rather than intruding in
a seamless way into the emotional and work lives of characters
on Eastenders, as it ought to. As many of you know, I think the
emotional and intellectual lives of most of my colleagues in universities
are every bit as rich and gossipily interesting as the lives on
Eastenders. I would wish us to be even more imaginative than we
are in doing this, granted that we do it better than most people
to begin with.
Mr Jones
63. It has been fascinating. May I turn to the
quality of advice and how we assess that? Departments are encouraged
to seek scientific advice from a broad range of sources. How do
they assess the relative value of one piece of advice when they
may have contrasting and conflicting advice from another source?
How do you help them?
(Sir Robert May) Not an easy question to answer. In
the first instance in my ideal world you have to have created
this problem for yourself by making sure you embrace the whole
range of opinion, thus creating the problem. Then how do you resolve
it? I see no substitute for ultimately having the ability, ultimately
the common sense to judge what is certain and what is uncertain.
Sometimes there will be things there just ineluctably uncertain
and all you can do is offer a balance of probabilities. That is
something I believe we should be more willing to embrace. In one
of the examples I mentioned to you, the very short notice study
I did, helped very much by the Chief Scientist in the Health and
Safety Executive and by two other outside people, the Chief Executive
of the Natural Environmental Research Council and the Rector of
Imperial College (a former MOD Chief Scientist), to prepare a
report which then was transmogrified into a little broad sheet
to the remaining inhabitants of Montserrat, this quite frankly
offered advice in terms of degrees of risk; one in a thousand,
as it were. It was couched in language coined by the Chief Medical
Officer but then spelling it out in frankly numerical terms, by
this we mean one in a thousand, one in ten thousand. That was
just distributed to each of the inhabitants of Montserrat. It
quantified this risk for different areas of the island. My sense
is that it was something which people absorbed just as they absorb
weather reports couched probabilistically. I think we underestimate
sometimes the willingness of people who have not had professional
scientific training to embrace commonsense probabilistic concepts
when they are properly framed. Most of these people are perfectly
able to do this when playing games of chance, as most of them
do.
64. Earlier this year we met the Education Minister
from Montserrat who told me that half the islanders have left
as a result of your advice.
(Sir Robert May) That is what I would have done. I
was persuaded to delete from the advice that I would leave if
I lived there. It was put to me that it was unnecessarily egotistical.
65. It sounds to me as though they may not have
deleted it in the copies distributed. You have already very helpfully
said that you believe that more scientific evidence should be
published and I think we welcome that. A lot of scientific advice
does come under the label of advice to Ministers and is therefore
kept confidential. Could you gauge to what extent there is a tendency
for departments to claim that decisions were taken on the strength
of scientific advice when in fact other factors were more influential?
May I particularly mention Gulf War syndrome and see whether you
are prepared to say anything about that?
(Sir Robert May) Without making reference to the example
you just gave, I would say I do not think this happens very often.
Chairman
66. When I was doing my training as a scientist,
for whatever that was worth, it was when the Cold War was at its
height from 1953 to 1960, I remember several of my professors
saying to me that they did not really care at all about the Cold
War: they did not care at all that there was an ideological difference
between the West and Russia and its satellites. They were scientists.
Scientific information which they obtained through their research
was available to the world. That was the world in the biggest
sense. We are now talking of the world in a smaller sense. We
are talking perhaps just of this country or those who want to
read it. Do you believe that scientific integrity, the scientific
view I have just expressed and some of my eminent professors at
London University have expressed, is still an attitude that scientific
advisers, even if they are not able to fulfil that idealism still
wish to do even when giving advice to Ministers? They would prefer
the advice to be public advice. They would prefer their science
to be in the open rather than in any way closed so others might
be able to make their own judgements on the scientific facts they
are postulating.
(Sir Robert May) I cannot speak with authority for
the other chief scientists, but I would certainly bet that way.
My opinion would be that most people would feel that way. That
is how I feel and in that respect I am not all that different
from the other chief scientists.
67. I have a feeling that your final comment
was given to us 15 minutes ago when you quoted from Brecht. I
am sure you prepared that for the very end of your session but
we kept you going for another 15 minutes. We are most grateful
for the whole of this evidence session which we have found very
rich and rewarding, so much so that we may on another occasion
like to call you back again and develop some further ideas and
finish some of the questions we did not even get started on. We
do thank you very much for coming. We find your evidence has been
extremely helpful in this inquiry and we look forward to seeing
you on other occasions.
(Sir Robert May) Thank you. First prize: two weeks
in Philadelphia.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. The Committee
adjourns.
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