In Our Time - The Royal Society and British Science: Episode 4

Episode Date: January 7, 2010

As part of the BBC's year of science programming, Melvyn Bragg looks at the history of the oldest scientific learned society of them all: the Royal Society. The horrors of the First World War were a shocking indictment of the power of science. Picking up the thread at this hiatus in scientific optimism, this programme, recorded in the current home of the Royal Society in Carlton House Terrace in London, looks at the more subtle, discreet role the Society played in the 20th century, such as secretly arranging for refugee scientists to flee Germany, co-ordinating international scientific missions during the Cold War and quietly distributing government grant money to fund the brightest young researchers in the land. As ever more important scientific issues face the world and Britain today, the programme asks how well placed the Royal Society is to take an important lead in the future.

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For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Well, my name is Lucy Cramp and I'm a chemist from the University of Bristol. What we do is that we look at ancient molecules that we find either in archaeological artefacts or we find, say, for example, in ancient sediments. And we use these to reconstruct pastoral.

climates and changes in temperature going back millions of years. Climate change is something that's really relevant at the moment for obvious reasons. And what we can do is we can identify past events, say increases in carbon dioxide and episodes of global warming in the past. From modelling what's happening in the past, we can start to understand better what might be happening in the future. Well, I'm here in Carlton House Terrace, which are some of the grandest houses in London. Quite extraordinary to think that ordinary mortals lived in these palaces. They're back onto the mall, which of course goes up to Buckingham Palace,

they have great terraces, and one of these is now the headquarters of the Royal Society. Since its beginning, the Royal Society has showed off its wares to the public, and nowadays over the last 20 years or so, they have a sort of farmer's market. That's the best way I can describe it. 30 or 40 groups of scientists from all over the United Kingdom come along here and show what they're doing. My name is Mohamed Kesheghar. I'm a consultant breast specialist at the Royal Free Hospital. And the title of our project, an exhibition for this year at the Royal Society, is chasing cancer with a flash of light.

We are about to start using light to actually treat breast cancer. So without a need for making any cut in the breast, basically. What we do is we inject a special drug which are called photosensitizer drug, and these drugs are taken up by cancer cells because they are quite hyperactive and also they have got lots of blood vessels. And then by shining the light into the area that we want to treat, it actually triggers the cell to self-destruct. It produces cytotoxic material, some toxic agent within the cell that kills the cell.

I can't tell you how exciting it is. It's quite extraordinary. Especially because this is run by young people. There are screens showing what they do. They brought the laboratory instruments here. They made it a bit interactive so that even people who know very little about science like myself can get the hang of it and join in with it.

So that's what the Royal Society is still doing here in Carlton House Terrace. I am now, you've got to believe this, I'm going to have a go on a virtual car, which is a training tool for young veterinary students. I wish myself good luck. Ladies and gentlemen, may I welcome you all to the Society for its anniversary day. The Royal Society was founded in 1660. Although after 350 years, an institution like the Royal Society will have inevitably developed its own character, its own way of doing things,

Its presidents are still very significant. As we've seen in these programmes, a strong president can leave a lasting impression. 59th and current president is Martin Rees. He's an astrophysicist by training, he's the Astronomer Royal, and then he became president in 2005. I'm with him now in his office in Carlton House Terrace. Martin, when you became president of the Royal Society,

you were quoted as saying, The Royal Society has, throughout its history, supported the scientific community in its quest to improve knowledge about humankind and the universe around us. It's done this for the public good, because the acquisition and application of this new knowledge can lead to a better quality of life and an increase in prosperity. Do you think that high-minded intention has been carried through consistently? Well, the society over its 350 years of history has had its ups and downs, but I think if we

look at the intention of its founders in 1660, I hope we are being faithful to them, because they They were inspired by Francis Bacon, who thought that science had two purposes. Scientists were merchants of light to provide enlightenment, but they also were concerned to ensure the relief of man's estate, in other words, the practical application. The ingenious and curious gentleman who established the Royal Society enjoyed speculation. They were in Francis Bacon's phrase, merchants of light. But they were also intensely engaged with the problems of their era. to explore this notion of the public good

because it has an increasingly old-fashioned ring that phrase. Do you think it plays into the modern condition? I would hope so because I think everyone is becoming aware that more and more of the issues which concern this country and its future and he concern the world in its future

have a scientific dimension. One thinks of global health, energy, climate change, biodiversity, etc., all these issues. which are very important for society clearly can't be solved unless politicians are guided by the best science.

But I wouldn't like to overlook the fact that we are also concerned to foster science as part of our culture for enlightenment. Everyone or citizens need to have a feel for science if they are to participate in the political debates that would be increasingly important because more and more of the political debate

is going to involve questions where there's a scientific dimension and if the public debate is to rise above tabloid slogans then everyone has to have some feel for science I would hope that by 2050 all of Europe will be getting a lot of its energy from solar collectors in the Sahara

for instance we're from Imperial College London from the Department of Physics and our exhibit is all about high efficiency solar cells so if you think about the conventional silicon solar cells you might see on your roof today they're about 15 to 20% efficient.

And we've got a few tricks we're working on to try and boost efficiency to 30 or 40% efficient or even higher in the future, hopefully. One way we can do this is by stacking different materials on top of each other in the solar cell. And in this way, this helps us to absorb the solar spectrum more efficiently. So the high-energy light is absorbed first, and then the lower-energy light is absorbed in the next part of the same.

solar cell and in this way we absorb all the light from the spectrum at its optimum energy. The idea behind this is to build large power stations out in the desert and generate huge amounts of energy and then feed that back into the grid or have a high voltage line to bring it from the Sahara to Europe. We in the World Society support several hundred young scientists and we are able, through a government grant, to give them support for... up to eight or even ten years. And we think that's very important

because that means they are relieved with the immediate pressure of applying for grants every year. I've been fortunate in my career to have met most of the UK's leading scientists, those of Nobel Prize winning quality, and the equivalent. And they would all say that their best work was unpredictable.

And I think there's a great risk that if too much funding is restricted to responsive mode, short-term grants, we will lose the opportunity to achieve the really high-risk, high payoff types of science which have served us so well in the past. I'd like to quote the words of a former Royal Society President, Aaron Klug, I quote. The major insights in science come from people who have the patience to develop an intimate understanding of a problem, who have the space and the freedom to take professional risks and to know how to make creative use of the surprises that they encounter when

they do so. These are the people who make the enduring difference. These are the people whom we must nurture wherever we find them. End of quote. We sat now in the current council chamber of the Royal Society, surrounded by faces of some past presidents, such as Joseph Banks looks as if he's still in charge of proceedings today. So far this week, we've been charting the path of an idea of a dream even, held by a small number of men in the wake of the English Civil War in the middle of the 17th century, a plan to get together regularly, to interrogate nature herself for the improvement of man's lot, and to advise accordingly on the best course of action where matters of fact were concerned. As the 19th century due to close, people might finally have

anticipated such a shining future, resplendent in the benefits of a scientifically informed establishment and population. But the events in Europe of 1914-18 illustrated just how a modern, mechanised and scientific approach to human activity could reap devastation. Scientific knowledge was power for ill as well as for good. To discuss the Royal Society in 20th century British Science and its role today, I'm joined by Simon Schaffer, Lisa Jardine, John Agar, Senior Lecturer in Science and Technology Studies at University College London, and Keith Moore.

head of the library and archivist here at the Royal Society. Lisa Jardin, can you give us some sense of what the perception in the 1920s was of the impact of science on the 1418 war? We know, you know, from images of the Great War what gas and the use of gas said to a public that was somehow used to war as being the killing fields with traditional weapons. the consequence for certainly British science of the First World War was a recoiling from the very instruments that had seen the instruments of progress.

Keith Moore, is there anything in the archives or anything said around the time that you come across, which says science has led to all this, it's so horrible, it's more horrible than ever before because of what these scientists have done. I put it very crudely, but is there anything in that area? The society itself, in terms of the war it had, was used to look at particular inventions or ideas during the war and determine whether or not they were feasible as weapons or things that could be brought to the trenches.

On the whole, therefore, people could be quite enthusiastic about what the royal society was doing during the war. I think it was afterwards that second thought started to kick in. Lisa. Well, that movement is such a classic effect of war in relation to scientific innovation, which is the exuberance, which Keith, I think, is suggesting, goes on internally, where away from the battlefield, people are excited about innovation and development, and the speed of which it goes under the financial investment you get during a war.

And then afterwards you get the recapitulation. You get, as John said, some movement, onwards, but you also get that recoiling from the effects of what you've done. Simon Shuffer? The First World War provided, it's rather grim to say so in many ways, unprecedented opportunities for insisting on the value of the scientific, and particularly what I think we should call the techno-scientific, the welding together of science and technology,

not only for the purposes of industrialised death, but also for the purposes of rational planning, so that a whole host of innovations which its inconceivable would have been made by the British establishment without such a trauma were rapidly brought into effect during the war in itself and in its immediate aftermath. Such as? For example, and notably the establishment for the first time of a government ministry for science, the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. Do you know what you had to think about to what science did?

in that First World War and what came about after it as a result? Within Whitehall and within other departments of state, there's actually a lot of scientific experts at work already by the First World War. Especially if we look at the military departments, we find that the British state is a pretty expert state already by the First World War, and what the First World War is confirms that and brings it out into the open. So at least at the administrative level, the consequence, or one consequence of the Great War,

was the establishment of a British scientific complex close to the state. Higher science itself changed a lot in those first decades alongside the war. Can you give an example of that through Eddington in 1990 and how that might have shifted the goalposts? Science had imagined itself before the war entirely international. Not only that, but the model that British. scientists, particularly within the Royal Society, had used as a stick with which to beat Whitehall, was Germany. It had been German scientific planning, German scientific investment that had

been used by British scientists pre-war as an ideal type of what should happen here. This argument does not survive the First World War. Eddington, heroic bicyclist, pacifist, Cumbrian, Quaker, one of my heroes. And fellow of the... And indeed, fellow of the Royal Society. Yes. One of the very early admirers of Einstein's general theory of relativity is very keen in the immediate aftermath of the war to maintain and in fact reinforce the closest possible links between British and German scientific establishments. For Eddington, Einstein was the perfect scientist for his cause here. He is one of the very few German scientists who had opposed the intensely nationalistic

manifesto of 93 scientists in Germany, a manifesto justifying German war activities. So part of Eddington's expedition to the South Atlantic in early 1919 to observe a solar eclipse and thus provide data that would prove the truth of Einstein's remarkable theory about light and gravitation wasn't very much also a part of this demonstration. And the idea that there had been a revolution in the sciences and in the fundamental sciences at that, bringing together brilliant British observational work in the South Atlantic with visionary German theorising was much advertised and much discussed

as an example of the virtues of internationalism in the post-war period. But, and here's the rub, I don't think it quite worked because the divisions between German, French, English scientists continued after the First World War. The rift that was opened up by the First World War took a long time to heal.

Simon, you want to come back again. This is a very good example of one of the many dramatic changes that I think the First World War brought with it, which is a switch in the British model of where Utopia is from Berlin to the US. It is no longer a German model

of science industry and the state, which is being touted by British scientists to British administrators, rather it's the US system of science support that seems to be prestigious. And that will have huge effects on the relations between science and funding and the career of the Royal Society

right through the rest of the century. But the American model is built on primarily philanthropy, it's built on private industrial wealth, recycled into philanthropic projects. Philanthropic wealth can build the great telescopes of Mount Wilson and Mount, Palomar, leading to America, leading astronomy, and it will soon lead other sciences as well. Now, there is no equivalent for Britain. Britain doesn't have that great industrial wealth to spare.

So there's a problem. It's very striking this American maverick, big industrial money, big success money, being invested in the great enterprises that will produce the breakthroughs, the unexpected breakthroughs. unexpected breakthroughs don't really go with learned societies. And that's not simply a feature of the Royal Society. It's inbuilt and it's, I think, partly why for many people, the function that the Royal Society performed through the early in middle years of the 20th century, namely of dissemination and of gentle lobbying and of nudging and nurturing, is exactly what those groups do.

And there is a problem for the Royal Society more generally in the 20th, century, in that science is changing. The two big trends in the 20th century, which is when science becomes a field that employs many, many more people than it had done in previous centuries, that's not something the Royal Society can easily represent, and science is becoming a much more expensive project. By the 1950s, for example, it becomes essentially a matter for the Treasury to decide which projects go ahead and which don't. Now, this creates problems for the Royal Society too. we're talking around this table about two competing things,

the great drive forward, which is perhaps beyond the reach of a society of that kind, and what I keep calling the public science face, which is what we desperately need, which is we must have an infrastructure of scientific education and understanding if we are not to be in a state, a suicidal state, as it's been said,

in relation to our own future. To go back to what John was saying a little earlier, are we saying flat out that science goes where money is? That was said frequently about painting or the great artists. They go where their money was. Venice is rich. They're off to Venice. New York. They're off to New York. Is the same of true of science? I think absolutely the same as true of science. It's always expensive and collaborative. It always relies on forms of sociability.

It has always relied on very complicated relationships between expertise, trust and patronage. On the other hand, however, it has this Janus-faced quality. Reliable knowledge, we're told, will be produced if and only if social, political and economic pressure are kept as far away as possible from inquiry. Hence the very famous expression when a scientist, perhaps Benjamin Franklin, perhaps Michael Faraday, we're not sure who, is asked, what's the use of your work, sir, to which the answer is what's the use of a baby? The fact that one can't apparently predict

the outcome of inquiry is often, probably rightly used, to defend value freedom and the relative autonomy, if not the relative seclusion of inquiry. But you don't really believe that, do you? Which of those two things? The disinterested, unconnected version. I thought you gave half the answer to that question. Because yes, science goes where the money is, but the money

goes where the drive for development is. It isn't just the money is there. The money is directed by groups, but not necessarily the groups who would be the disinterested benefactor. of whatever might benefit mankind? No, I think it's very striking. This is ideology.

This isn't history. The ideology has two parts to it, and they are always articulated simultaneously, and one doesn't survive apparently without the other. That was true of the German model. It's certainly true of the 20th century British and American models, which is that it is apparently necessary to say that research should not be.

be too strictly guided. And it is equally necessary to say that research has the most extraordinarily unanticipated spin-offs, and that's why it should be supported, both by private and by public capital. John Hager, you're not in your head. Especially in the 20th century, that only certain patrons can afford much of the science. It's so expensive. This means military patrons, government patrons. and following on from that is choices of where to put the money. Such amounts of money need to be justified. They need to have a public justification. The Royal Society has actually struggled with this

because the Royal Society has placed a lot of emphasis on the importance of its independence. And there are times when certainly individuals, secretaries and presidents of the Royal Society would have taken sides, have decided not to because it would compromise the ideal of autonomy and independence. But the really striking thing, surely, about British science specifically in the age of modernity

and world science in general, is the great shift proportionately and in absolute terms away from the academy towards industry and war. So that the typical scientist of modernism, is not a university-based researcher, is not a professor or a postdoctoral student. A typical scientist for most of the 20th century was a chemist working in an industrial organisation, not an academic working in an academic laboratory. Now, it's changing again.

Probably a typical scientist is someone managing a medical trial in a contract research organisation, probably part of a multinational, probably the trial is taking place somewhere in the third world. So a certain kind of, I think in many ways, admirable, scholarly ideology is in constant tension with the brutal facts of where the scientific work is being done and why it is being done. And I think that raises some absolutely fascinating questions for what the Royal Society is about. now. Science has been utterly transformed during the last three fifty years and the world has been transformed by science. Nonetheless, some values endure and our ambition

for the next 50 years, indeed maybe the next three 50 years, must be to sustain the spirit of our founders. Martin, when you became president of the Royal Society, do you have a specific agenda as a president for your presidency? Well when I started I was concerned that we should become more in with education because I was concerned about the fact that many young people have been turned off science by the lack of good teachers in many schools. And I was also very concerned that the best science was not always being employed in policy and that we as scientists can help to raise this up the agenda.

We're in your office, which is a centre of established power in this country in many ways. The Parliament, I'm pointing through the window over there, can't see it for the It's the moment, but there's houses of Parliament down there. There's Buckingham Palace up on the right. There's Westminster Rabby down there. Just long there's there at there's Westminster Cathedral. There's Whitehall to my left. I could go on and here you are in the middle of it.

What is your relationship? What do you see your relationship as being with the state and with the establishment? Very importantly, we are independent. We can speak with an independent voice, and that's a contrast with the American National Academy of Sciences, which was set up by the government and has an obligation in the US to provide advice to the government. We are independent.

We do provide advice, but we hope to depend increasingly on private funding for our activities. Over the last few years, we have seen our role as a centre of policy studies to be increasingly important. Global health, energy, climate change, biodiversity, etc., all these issues which are very important for society, clearly can't be solved unless politicians are guided by the best science. On the political agenda, science tends to be trumped by seemingly more urgent but less important matters. Nor is the best scientific advice always taken or even available. The Royal Society's advice, whether sought or not, deserves we believe, to have impact. How confident are you that your advice will be taken?

Well, one hopes that the advice of scientists, whether independents academies like ours or committees set up by the government itself, is taken very seriously by ministers as a prelude to making the kind of decisions they have to make. But we have to bear in mind that when a minister makes a decision, the scientific import is just one element of that decision and there may be others. What is very important is that the evidence is presented to the minister and is listened to,

and if a minister ends up not going along with the evidence of his scientific advisory committee, then it should be explained publicly why that's been done. How far do you think that your advice, first of all, how far is it taken when offered and how far is it sought for? Most of this advice has been offered whether sought for or not. We have done some reports where we have responded to a government request. For instance, we produced a report on nanotechnology, which was at the request of the government. And this, I think, has been a successful precedent because nanotechnology,

is newly developing and we felt it important to engage with the public before the issues became commercialised and before stances became frozen. I think we learned our lesson from the rather poor way in which

the UK handled the GM crops issue where by the time the debate went public there was a standoff between the big industrial companies on the one hand and the greens on the other. We wanted to avoid that for new technologies. When Charles the second gave it its shardy, he hoped that it would

give great prosperity to the country. Does the pursuit of prosperity come into your reckoning? Indeed, I think if we look ahead, it's fairly clear that we in this country will certainly become poorer unless we become smarter and more successful in maintaining our traditions of science and engineering

and that we become an attractive place for everyone in the world to come and do science and to apply science. Because unless we do foster innovation, we will lose in the competition with the rest of the world, particularly the research in Far East. One of our main concerns is the lack of professional teachers, particularly physics and mathematics in schools.

The real concerns about whether that's competitive. But also I think we've got to be concerned that industry takes advantage of the best scientific expertise and develops the new technologies for clean energy, for instance, global health and other areas which are going to be crucial for the prosperity, not just of this country, but of the world. So I'm David Clements from Imperial College, and what we're showing here are the Herschel and Plank missions, which were launched on Ariane 5, Herschel. It's a fire infrared space telescope, and its goal is to image the universe in the foreign infrared and find the missing half of the history of energy generation in the universe that's hidden by dust.

This is stars, supermassive black holes. We find that about half of the energy that they emit has been absorbed by dust, which means you can't see it at all. So we're basically missing half of the history of the universe. If you go, largest optical telescope on the planet, the Hubble Space Telescope, working the optical up in space, you can't see this emission at all,

which is why we need to go into the far infrared. That requires you to be above the atmosphere, because the atmosphere is opaque to fire infrared radiation. And so Herschel will allow us to fill in that missing half of the history of the universe, as well as giving us more detailed pictures of star formation regions and planet formation more locally to us in places like the Orion Nebula. My name is Julia Yeomens. I'm a professor of physics from the University of Oxford,

and our stands called Nature's Raincoats. What we want to do is work out how nature, how plants, in nature, how they keep dry, and then we want to try and get these ideas and use them to design new products. So if you ever look in your garden of plants like the nasturtium or the lady's mantle, what you find is that when you put a drop of water on a plant like that, it rolls off incredibly easily. And that's because plants have special surfaces which help them to keep dry. And what's special about the surfaces is they have little tiny bumps on them and the bumps hold up the drops on top of the surface,

and then they can roll off very, very easily. So what we're going to try and use this for is to use it, first of all, for paint which can put on the outside of buildings. And the idea is that when rain falls on the paint, it rolls down very, very quickly, and this helps to keep the buildings clean. Another possibility is swimsuits, self-cleaning swimsuits, so that when you get out of the water,

you end up staying dry. Do you think we made good use of our science here, and how do you think Royal Society plays a part in that? I mean, there's still a lot of good British science being done, Simon, I'm sure. Oh, yes. I mean, the British science community is extraordinarily powerful, pro rata, and indeed in absolute terms, and it both receives and produces remarkable, of resource, application, knowledge and information.

There's no question about that. However, things are not quite so sanguine, it seems to me. One has to run extremely fast to stay in the same place. And I think as we look back over the past 350 years of the British sciences and the Royal Society, there's at least one obvious lesson that we might want to draw here, which is the pervasiveness of a certain kind of pernicious idea, and I believe it to be absolutely pernicious, which is the strong relationship between scientific achievement

and vicious international competition. If you go back to the late 1600s, figures like John Wallace and Isaac Newton and their friends were already making lists of great English, and they meant English scientific achievements, as weapons with which to belabor foreigners, assert the truth of the values of English culture and so on. In the period of the late 19th century through the First World War and beyond, a kind of political Darwinism is invented in which the

struggles for survival amongst nations is argued by many spokespersons for the sciences, especially within the Royal Society, that that struggle can only be won by this nation with the weapons of science and technology. And we're still. still there. In fact, we're there even more. At the very moment when the relative proportion of GDP spent on research is gently declining, it's argued that this kind of investment is indispensable for, and here's the key word over the past 350 years, our competitiveness. And it's exactly there, I think, that the relations between science society and the state, with the Royal Society kind of absolutely entrammeled there, become really fascinating and important.

A lot of countries spend significant percentages of the GDP on scientific research and development. How does Britain fit into that? Where are we on the tables and how much are we spending? John? We spend about 2% of our economy on research and development, which is roughly what we'd call science. oddly it's been dropping gradually. As economies grow, we spend less and less on sciences, which is slightly counterintuitive. But we spend about well over now £20 billion a year on research.

How does that compare with other countries? We are more than Italy, about the same as France, considerably less than Germany, in terms of percentages, considerably less than the United States and Germany. Japan. China is almost the same as us now. I think that from what we've been discussing in which we've said that military and private investment in science is more significant because of the sums involved than the Royal Society for instance possibly could be, I think that a learned

society has to turn its attention to what it has always been best at, namely lobbying for the infrastructure in terms of public education for science. I mean, this is a moment, this is a moment when we learn that 40% of the British public do not believe that climate change is man-made. Now, that means they're not properly educated. That means they don't know how to assess the evidence. You think there's no argument at all on the other side? Science is always about probabilities and likelihoods, and it's never about certainties, but you have to educate your public at large to understand how to pursue those arguments.

and we have failed miserably in so doing. Now that's part of the understanding the process, a very broad process of science, understanding science in society. One thing that the Royal Society is now very good at, actually, it has a Science and Society programme that encourages understanding of science more generally. Keith Moore, and we're coming towards the end of this now.

Why, in your opinion, has the Royal Society survived for so long? It must be useful, I guess. I mean, many organisations have used the Royal Society as a model, so it seems to work. It seems to be quite adaptable in the way it does business. So the things it has done over the years have subtly changed. But the core of what the Royal Society is about, which is trying to get the best science into the public domain,

there's a threat of that which runs right from the very beginning to today. John Hager, you're not in your head. This comes from the 300th anniversary meeting of the Royal Society, which of course is in 1960, and it's at the time when the post-war big science projects, some of them have been built, like the Joddle Bank Telescope that's been built. They're straining the funding system at the edge. And the War Society has to think, well, how do we handle this situation? And the President of the World Society then is Cyril Hinchelwood, physical chemist,

says this on the relations between government and industry. The intercourse on terms of equality between these different estates of the nation is like a sensitive nervous mechanism endowing the community which possesses it with capacities and potentialities realisable in no other way. The subtle coordinating action of the academy can no more be replaced by a bureaucratic organisation or a system of economic incentives and deterrent. then the intricately involved biological controls of a living organism can be replaced by crudely devised mechanical appliances.

I think one of the most wonderful things about the Hinchelwood quote is if you put it back into a particular political context, in the mid-20th century, one of the dominant groups in British science in general and even within large, though not all, all sections of the Royal Society, is not just left wing, but fellow travelling, in many cases, communist, and in favour, therefore, of central state planning. Against that model, what Hinchelwood is saying is,

no, let's be a bit more subtle through behind-the-scenes lobbying, through a certain kind of characteristic British metropolitan mixture of laudable philanthropy and cunning backstage lobbying. And it's precisely one of the functions of the wrong, Royal Society to act as a kind of effective lubricant that should guide the way science and the state interact. And what's so extraordinary about that is that 2010 must surely be the first time since that that we would be prepared once again to appreciate that version of the role of the Royal Society

because it's everything that is British about the idea that there would be a kind of quiet elite that would be knowing and understanding and appreciating more than any trained expert or any committee of peers or any elected group. And we have come full circle to that. There is definitely a sense, as certainly as I feel it, that we are almost relieved to think of that as being the way that science might be directed. But certainly for the last 50 years, we have not believed that. Do you still see it as having that sort of key role? If the 20th century has told us anything about the Royal Society is that when it hasn't adapted, other organisations have stepped in

and I think the lesson there is the Royal Society has to continually listen to changing voices and changing trends. And I think if we're talking about celebrating a moment for the Royal Society and celebrating its strength, then at the moment I see its strength as being this extraordinary respect, its power in relation to government and its capacity, therefore,

to launch just those debates which need to be had where the general public, not those educated to university level and certainly not those within the scientific community itself, learn to engage with the issues and make their own decisions, such as they do in other areas of their life, because without that we're lost.

Our entire life is controlled by science. We rely on science, of our day-to-day life is driven by science, and we fail to engage with it in adult and mature terms at our peril, and the Royal Society is there to give us that grounding and launch pad for our own understanding. The Royal Society has been housed here at Carlton House Terrace since 1967. The building I'm in now was designed by John Nash in the early 90th century. This is where Martin Rees has his office.

but a short walk along a corridor and you enter a different architectural world. This is a space of glass and light, white walls, clean architectural lines. If you like a modern space, and it's pleasant to report that the place is full of young persons chatting away presumably about science. Hi, I'm Peter Hatfield, UK young scientist at the year. The main project that we've been working on is an experiment that we've designed that's going to be launched on satellite into space in 2011. that uses technology from the Large Hadron Collider, and this will make it the first piece of technology from CERN to be used in space. The experiment itself looks at high-energy particles hitting the Earth's atmosphere called Cosmic Rays,

and will hopefully be able to lead to several new insights about the nature of these particles. In particular, their behaviour at higher energies, what direction they're travelling at, and how the Earth's magnetic field affects them. We also have a range of projects across chemistry and biology as well. In chemistry, we're looking at a molecule that will inhibit the action of the PDE-5 protein, which is significant in the action of smooth muscle in the cardiovascular system. And we're hoping to design a molecule that will effectively be able to help lower blood pressure. If you've enjoyed this BBC podcast, why not try others, such as Material World,

where Quentin Cooper discusses everything from archaeology to zoology. To find out more, visit BBC.co.ukh, forward slash podcasts.