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Should We Trust the Scientists? Transcript Should We Trust The Scientists? Transcript Date: Monday, 20 June 2005 - 12:00AM Location: Great Hall, Guildhall SHOULD WE TRUST THE SCIENTESTS? Professor Lord Winston Introduction by Lord Sutherland of Houndwood Gresham College was created by the will of Sir Thomas Gresham, and it was to make available in the City of London, learning and education, to those who lived and worked in the City, Sir Thomas’ great passion. One of the ways in which we commemorate all that he provided for Gresham College is to have an annual Special Lecture, and this is it this year. The College has various sources of information available to you. Our lectures in the College are all web-cast, and we hope that for those of you for whom this is a new link that you will continue wanting to know about Gresham, but more importantly, what our magnificent professors and lecturers offer to us. This evening I’m very pleased to welcome Lord Winston. Lord Winston is of course a very distinguished academic and researcher. He has been a remarkable physician in one of the most difficult and most sensitive of areas, and he has, in the area of fertility studies, practised medicine as one hopes a good medic would. But of course to many of you and to most of us, he is now known as a marvellous communicator and broadcaster, someone who can take the message of what science and medicine can do for our civilisation out into the wider community and do that in remarkable ways. The topic is fundamentally important for our age. I’m sure Sir Thomas would have approved that this is something on which we want to deliberate, so I ask you to welcome Lord Winston to lecture on “Should we trust the scientists” – Lord Winston. Robert, Lord Winston If you look at the painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder depicting the Tower of Babel, it shows a 13 storey building, stretching up to the sky, with King Nimrod directing operations. The place is crawling with people, with galleys and pulleys and masons, workers of all sorts, cranes, and when you look in detail, the thing that’s obvious is that the building couldn’t possibly work because in fact the rooms are built on a kind of helix and couldn’t communicate with each other and there would be no way of getting access to them. You’ll know the story very well of course: God confounded man’s arrogance and ambition and threw the celestial spanner in the works, and changed their language so they couldn’t talk to each other, and the project died, a bit like some of the Private Finance Initiatives! I was reminded of this recently going to CERN, where there is another Tower of Babel which is currently being built, also about 14 storeys high, but this one is underground. What the physicists are doing is to use the speed of light to try and get protons accelerated to crash into each other and produce ever and ever more mysterious particles, particles that would have been started at the time of the Big Bang. What they’re trying to do is re-convene, if you like, the first few milliseconds of Big Bang, when presumably God either was or was not in existence. The interesting thing is that they’re after the Higgs boson, a curious particle which if it exists proves that modern physics is absolutely right and that most of modern mathematics stands. If the Higgs boson doesn’t perform and doesn’t materialise, then modern physics has a real problem – God will have thrown another spanner in the works. It’s an interesting example of a modern Tower of Babel. It’s an international project, which we in Britain, along with other countries, fund. I am very interested in Brueghel because Brueghel was very concerned about technology. If you look hard at many of his paintings, and many of his drawings, you see this theme recurring. Mankind is thought to have begun in the Rift Valley in Kenya. It’s the place where the early hominids roamed on the savannah. Skulls have been found there of Australopithecus aferensis, and of Homo erectus. The fundamental difference between the two early pre-humans, spaced about 3.9 million and less than 3 million years ago, is that in the space of a million years, the human brain substantially increased in size – it doubled, from about 450 millilitres, a bottle of milk, to 900 millilitres. Modern Homo sapien now has a brain size of about 1,450 millilitres. It’s a bit less for the ladies because they’re prepared to ask the way when they get lost, whereas men need a bit more brain because they go on aggressively driving, trying to find their way, and remembering the turning they took! Anyway, whatever the reason for the difference in size between the sexes, and it’s not obvious, there is a major puzzle here, and that is this extraordinary expansion of the human cortex in really probably around a million or so years. Homo sapiens we believe has been on the face of the Earth for about 100,000, maybe 150,000 years, let’s say for the sake of argument. I have drawn a timeline representing the last 50,000 years, the time that man has been on the planet. By comparison, if we draw another line, in the same space of time to the same scale, in that space of time, something has happened. Although we had the entire genetic structure, all the genes which make up the human brain, for the whole length of that large timeline, in that fraction of time, what has happened is that we’ve invented printing, we’ve written Hamlet, the B Minor Mass, we’ve made the steam engine, we’ve built computers, and we’ve landed on the Moon, in the space of 500 years or so. That is extraordinary. The thing I want to draw to your attention is that whilst the human brain has probably hardly changed at all, there has been a massive change in the human mind, and that I think is a fundamental problem to our society today. It’s one of the reasons why we are so concerned about technology because it is now no longer, as it was in Shakespeare’s time, possible to predict what will happen in the next decade. That is a fundamental uncertainty which has only existed in our recent lifetime. If you look at the greatest idea that mankind has ever had, it must be surely this: it wasn’t the invention of the wheel, it was the recognition that a flint stone, which we’d known about and carved through a million years before Homo sapiens was on the Earth, could be fitted into a stick, which we know that apes use as levers today – the chimpanzee, the gorilla, and so on – but fitted in a stick, this becomes an amazingly different tool. It becomes a lever, a weapon, a spear, an axe, and increases man’s ability to overcome his fragility on the savannah in an extraordinary way. Before that time, he’s a helpless species. He has very little chance of defending himself. After that of course, he can hunt as well as scavenge, and that makes a huge difference to mankind’s ability. It is extraordinary and it’s a great puzzle that it took a million years for somebody to think of that trick, and I still don’t understand why that should be. It must have happened simultaneously presumably in many different places. We live in a scientific world which is somewhat at siege: look, for example, at nuclear power, nuclear waste disposal, global warming, BSE and CJD, our miserable response to foot and mouth disease, which cost the country something like £3 billion, the shocking debacle over genetically modified crops, the attitude towards cloning humans, or the response to the triple vaccine. This response has left something like a vaccination limit of some 60-65% of inner city Britain in parts, therefore a large vulnerable population to measles, which is, make no mistake, a killer disease, and although we’ve been very fortunate and not had an epidemic, the suspicion about the vaccine could well have caused it. I can tell you for certain though, in my own field, that in the next few decades, there will be many men who find themselves infertile as a result of the failure to take up that vaccine because there has been a mumps epidemic which has not been reported in the press. We also face very curious qualms over animal experimentation, and I will spend a little time on embryonic stem cells, simply because these cropped up again in the newspapers this morning, and it seems only right that I should address that issue with you this evening. Let’s look at public trust in general. Well, it turns out that doctors are trusted, teachers are trusted in our society, amazingly, TV newsreaders are trusted, but not journalists – maybe it’s something to do with the level of pay that we now know that newsreaders achieve. It’s rather nice to think, because there are quite a few in the audience, that professors score better than scientists, though often of course some professors really reckon that they are, or at least at one time were, scientists! Right at the bottom of the league.come government ministers, politicians generally, and people who are spin doctors and journalists.
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