Future Perfect

by Robyn Williams

  At the turn of the century four of our major scientific organisations-the RACI (chemists), AIP (Sciences Council), Institution of Engineers and Maths Council- issued two statements:

  ‘If the current rate of university losses continues, there will be no Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics or Engineering to support innovation after 2020 AD.’

  ‘If the current rate of secondary school participation in Chemistry, Physics and Advanced Mathematics continues, there will be no enabling science in secondary schools beyond 2020 AD.’

  They are referring in both statements to the ‘enabling’ sciences that turn the wheels of industry.

  Of course kids don’t want to do science. It’s difficult; it seems like an Everest of knowledge you have to climb-all the way or nothing. And you end up, even if you keep scoring mega marks, with twenty times less money than the snots who cruise straight into commerce courses-and wait an extra decade to get there. Nothing has changed. Primary school teachers of science have scant qualification in the subject; the average age of science teachers in high schools the last time I checked was 58 (oddly, the same as for program-makers at ABC Radio National), and starting salaries for science graduates would be funny-if they weren’t tragic. The last time I dared find out how many intending science teachers graduated with physics in a year in New South Wales the answer was two.

  I could go on.

  The strange thing about discussion of either broadcasting or science education in Australia is that it is so repetitive and the assumptions are so old-fashioned. TV becomes a matter of ratings competitions instead of a discussion of how fresh talent can use the digital technology to produce ultra-cheap original material (remember Mike Rubbo’s Race Around the World or Race Around Australia for ABC-TV?) rather than globalised co-productions costing $2 million an hour. With science the lament is that somehow Jack and Jilly don’t want to study flat out until they are thirty so they can get a job at the CSIRO or at a university (half the geology departments around Australia have been closed, and chemistry is at risk) to earn about the same as a cleaner.

  Mortgage consultants, fashion-model etiquette advisers (I kid you not), luxury-goods experts, fifth-layer management meeting attenders, consulting consenting consultants, marketing gurus, lifestyle coaches, people to help you rearrange your clothes cabinet and knicker drawers-these are the earners of our age, often scoring twice the salary of a Nobel Prize winner and ten times the earnings of a post-doc lab researcher with three degrees.

  I could go on.

  An ABC science reporter with a PhD and six years’ experience (or maybe a five-year, first-class-honours veterinary science degree) will earn the same as a freelance office cleaner and a third less than a truck driver. Not that a truck driver shouldn’t be properly compensated, but the time he spends qualifying is not, shall we say, commensurate. (As I write I see an ad for an ABC science programs commissioning editor requiring plenty of experience. Salary $83,000.)

  What’s the answer? How do you convince young Australians-or young Americans, for that matter-that science should be studied? Well, it won’t be by following the example of Education Minister Julie Bishop when, after the latest crisis erupted, she popped up on ABC-TV and earnestly, beseechingly, gave the traditional oration asking Australian kids to commit to a lifetime of hard toil and penury.

  There are, of course, degrees with built-in job tickets: dentistry, medicine, computer science and vet science. Student numbers are maintained here, even though the extra cost of the training and apparatus these courses demand requires foundations to be set up to support them. Even forensic science degrees have received floods of applicants, although the paucity of jobs at the other end belies the impression given by CSI and Silent Witness. Fortunately, the courses are ideal preparation for work in environmental jobs so they turn out to be worthwhile as career preparation. But we all need science like everyone needs music. If you are keen on singing or piano, you are not expected automatically to go to the Conservatorium, do concerts as a soloist and conduct a symphony orchestra. Most of us just have an iPod and a record collection. So what if there is no direct job ticket?

  Science must be studied at schools, from primary level onwards, because it is essential to life. Aside from the five I gave at the start of this chapter, there is a much more immediate reason that might convince youngsters and their parents. Every job of the 21st century needs some science. Judges and lawyers have to know about DNA and forensic evidence, farmers must understand genetics and chemicals, cooks must be au fait with nutrition, Salmonella and botulinum, business people need to know about IT, and architects about energy and water. Teachers need psychology, prostitutes prophylactics, sportspeople pharmaceuticals, stockbrokers bio-investments, cleaners recycling, carpenters forestry, fishers ichthyology (before fish all die out), and beauticians health care. And everyone needs to know about the environment. Or else!

  But is this not a confidence trick? Yes, we all bump into science and technology along the way, but surely it can be left to the boffin in the dreary coat. And surely the professions use only a gloss of science that their practitioners can get by without knowing about.

  No, what I am prepared to assert is that you make a far better professional with a solid scientific acculturation. You do not need expertise in rocket propulsion or brain surgery to run a business, but it will help to be scientifically literate and to know how to analyse proposals. This is why it is not a surprise to find people with geophysics or biochemistry degrees in investment banking.

  But what about English, French translation or Latin? Science helps with each one. In English there is a way to put word patterns into a computer to tell whether Shakespeare really did write Shakespeare’s plays. Someone decided to do this with Iris Murdoch’s novels and found that her last book used language differently from her others, indicating the onset of Alzheimer’s disease long before the doctors picked it up.

  Fiction writers often utilise science as material-Peter Carey in Oscar and Luanda , Ian McEwan in Saturday and Margaret Atwood in most of her books. Michael Crichton (himself anthropologically trained and a doctor) made a big hit with Jurassic Park and did science a disservice in State of Fear, with its bizarre line on climate change.

  It is when you talk to writers-or actors-that you learn how deeply they need to understand science. David Williamson’s last few plays-to take just one example- were a tour de force on the uses and abuses of psychology. Williamson studied both that subject and engineering, on which he later lectured.

  French translation? Surely not? In fact my brother, at the University of Nantes in Brittany, uses IT, dubbed TV news reports and cognitive science to give his students an interactive way to practise conversation. It can be done from English to French or vice versa-or in any other languages they might choose.

  Latin humanism Professor Yasmin Haskell at the University of Western Australia has discovered a trove of poems from renaissance Italy in which medicine (hypochondria; chocolate therapy) is discussed. They give new insight into the thinking of that era. And although habits are changing, doctors and botanists still need Latin to some extent. The point is that the disciplines intermingle.

  So what is the lesson for schools and universities? That science must be attached to every subject. As chair of the National Commission for Environmental Education, I visited several campuses (ANU, Murdoch, Macquarie) to propose that teaching about the environment be incorporated into every faculty. None of the deans we met objected. This is not a quixotic idea. Professor George Seddon, for example, one of our greatest thinkers on the environment (he’s been professor in four distinct disciplines, no less: English, Environment, Geology and Philosophy!) has written brilliantly about the influence of literature on how we think of nature and landscape and how we care for both as a result. Science could similarly be linked to law (as it already is at UNSW and Melbourne University), building and architecture, commerce, the arts and sport.

  If other universities follow the example set by Vice-Cha
ncellor Glyn Davis at the University of Melbourne and favour general degrees, with specialisation coming only at postgraduate level, this universal distribution of science will be straightforward. What would that do for recruitment to scientific professions? According to a former federal education minister, John Dawkins, it can only do it good. Dawkins says the top science performers will always select themselves; others, having been allowed to study science to tertiary level without feeling a white coat must follow, may opt for one anyway.

  Money incentives help too. The former speaker of the US House of Representatives, Republican Newt Gingrich, himself a keen dinosaur man, has proposed that American high schoolers choosing science in Years 10-12 be paid the equivalent of a McSalary-what they would earn serving fast food. In Australia one sensible measure would be to reduce university science students’ HECS debt, which is now punitive and exceeds, on average, the amount owed by other students (can anyone really be surprised that labs are emptying?)

  At school, why not pay science teachers more? It takes a generation to train new ones, so in the meantime we should try to recruit retired science professionals, as well as engineers, to fill the gap. This measure did not frighten our Council on Environmental Education either, though I thought it would. Implementation is another thing. But it is already happening in some places, so examples can be learned from.

  As for what actually happens in schools and universities, it is plain that many students, like me 40 years back, are bored to jagging sobs. Science in class looks like a vast edifice of arcane information, clear to the Rain Man but tough going for everyone else. This is what students say. What they need is more practical problem solving. The discussion of ideas would also help. It takes many tutorials to free the minds and mouths of youngsters never before required to be articulate.

  What of the future of science itself? Should it simply be allowed to find its own way untrammeled? Is there any point in putting up ‘flagships’, or trying to ‘pick winners’, or ‘waging wars’ on targets such as cancer or drought? Science costs lots of money, which is one reason it is in disfavour: politicians do not often want to spend millions, or even billions, on vast bits of boffinry that might, just might, bring results in twenty years’ time.

  And those results are not predictable. Tom Barlow in Australian Miracle tackles the question of picking winners by citing President Nixon’s failed war on cancer. Billions of dollars and decades later, not much had changed. Compare this with the Australian Lawrence Bragg’s seemingly obscure investigation of the shape of molecules with his A-team in Cambridge -basic science on stilts. The result: the modern drugs industry, the human genome and the future of medicine, genetic engineering and- who knows?-the creation of new forms of life.

  But one thing is clear: our future is dreadfully uncertain. Australia alone could face severe climate change, drought, the possible collapse of biodiversity together with soil depletion, water crises and much else. Try tackling those without a scientific infrastructure or a populace informed about what’s happening to them.

  The blood chills.

  * * * *

  The Hunches of Nostradamus

  2008 Student recruitment in Science falls below that for Cake Decoration and Psychic Massage. Minister calls for national campaign.

  2009 CSIRO is restructured. Two new ‘flagships’ proposed: Universal Happiness and Biofools. Typist sacked.

  2010 Professor Melvin Schwartz (MIT) wins Nobel Prize. He is claimed as Australian because he once changed planes in Brisbane.

  2011 Barrier Reef dissolves. Minister promises it will recover.

  2012 CSIRO restructures.

  2013 ABC-TV Science outsourced to Beyond Productions. Beyond sold to Time Warner.

  2014 Science studies at Australian universities offered only as online courses-to save expenditure on apparatus.

  2015 Australian researcher at University of Melbourne confirms means for wiping out malaria parasite. Immediately offered posts in Geneva and Baltimore.

  2016 Minister identifies crisis in science student recruitment. Sends out press release from 2008 unaltered except for date change.

  2017 Cairns destroyed by cyclone. Toowoomba goes dry and is evacuated.

  2018 Remaining university Geology and Physics departments closed. Subjects offered as part of first-year Commerce.

  2019 Australian Museum becomes dinosaur theme park. Its scientific research ends.

  2020 CSIRO restructures. Science Minister renamed as ‘Minister for Restructuring’. Calls for…

  3. The Future of God – God’s Only Excuse

  God’s only excuse (He doesn’t exist).

  – Jean-Paul Sartre

  * * * *

  One key to the future of the human race is, strange as it may seem, something that probably isn’t there. He was never there; but he was always the most important player in the pack both for winners and for losers. He is the ELEPHANT not in the room. He is the means by which his self-proclaimed representatives make us resigned to our fate, stoic about calamity, fatalistic in the extreme.

  His is the name called as we invade, bomb, crusade, invoke the law, terrorise. He may, of course, be entirely innocent of all that is done in his cause. He may not be the one to blame at all. Particularly if he’s absent. But what is done on his behalf continues to be one of the most malign influences in every country on Earth.

  If we do not get this right and understand what is happening, I fear for our future.

  – Robyn Williams

  * * * *

  Dawkins treats Islam as just another deplorable religion, but there is a difference. The difference lies in the extent to which religious certitude lingers in the Islamic world and the harm it does. Richard Dawkins’s even-handedness is well-intentioned, but it is misplaced. I share his lack of respect for all religions, but in our times it is folly to disrespect them all equally.

  – Professor Steven Weinberg, Nobel laureate in Physics

  * * * *

  God had a busy time in 2006. There were many books written about his nonexistence. One of them was mine.

  There was one by philosopher Daniel Dennett-who actually looks like God on High in the clouds should look, all white beard and beatific smile suitably combined with a honeyed accent honed in Massachusetts and Oxford. Then biologist Louis Wolpert gave an engineering explanation for the invention of God, confessing as he did so that his son is a fundamentalist Christian and his chum is cosmic paranormalist Rupert Sheldrake. And then there was Richard Dawkins.

  Dawkins is a friend of mine. I was his daughter’s babysitter. We have had meals at each other’s houses, love Oxford, have partners who appear on television, cherish the memory of our departed buddy Douglas Adams and are both angry about demagogues in cassocks creating mayhem. His book, The God Delusion, sold heaps and caused storms. The interesting thing is that his book, unlike my own small volume (Unintelligent Design), was attacked from both the right and the left. It is interesting to consider why.

  The God Delusion was written with the explicit intention of removing any belief the reader might have in a deity. ‘If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.’ When I read this in the opening chapter of Delusion, I was merely amused. At least he’s honest! Others reacted in quite a different way. They saw instead a foaming zealot, a snarling evangelical atheist riding the crimson chariot of the Antichrist. This is not the Richard Dawkins I know.

  He is gently spoken, donnish, argumentative in that ever-so-Oxford way: ‘If you mean this… then that…’ or ‘I wouldn’t accept your premise-let’s unpack those assumptions’ and so on. All very pass the port and proper protocols. He would certainly not see himself as leading any kind of hostile movement raiding monasteries or burning basilicas. Or even as a member of a group who-with the possible exception of the Skeptics-are as unfascist a bunch of jovial iconoclasts as anyone could hope to meet (not even the shadow of a Robespierre among them). His ire with religion, which I sh
are, is directed at the harm it does and at our polite pretense that things are otherwise.

  Richard Dawkins is not remotely political (perhaps his greatest failing) but he is assumed to be so. The Selfish Gene, written 30 years ago, was taken to be a primer for rapacious come-what-may capitalism. It was nothing of the sort. When celebrating its 30th anniversary, he confessed that the title was given to him by the publishers and that it could equally easily have been called The Cooperative Gene. His own societal views are as unremarkably social-democrat as you would find at any Ivy-League campus sherry party; he is unusual only in the amount of confidence he has invested in science and the effortless elegance with which he is able to write about it.

  What do his accusers say? Scientists on the left, such as the late Stephen Jay Gould and Steven Rose, call him a reductionist, claiming he sees genes as independent ciphers marching relentlessly towards some hideously inhumane goal of their own. Their difference with Dawkins on biology is that they see whole organisms and populations at the forefront of selection, not just bits of them. Stephen Jay Gould, as far as I know, appeared only once in a public forum with Dawkins, in a debate broadcast on the Science Show, in which they referred to each other as ‘ships passing in the night’. It is interesting that in one of Gould’s last books he benignly separated religion and science into different ‘niagisteria’, implying they need not be in flagrant contradiction.

  Terry Eagleton is more scathing. Eagleton is Professor of English at the University of Manchester, was once at Oxford and is solidly on the left. He writes: