Good science and the European dimension
British prime minister Sir Keir Starmer has been travelling this week, aiming, as the media put it, to ‘re-set’ relations with Europe. The self-destructive act of Brexit, while not likely to be undone anytime soon, must plainly be mitigated if our new government is to see the economic growth that forms the basis of its plans.
A big headline this week, coming from Starmer, is that perhaps a European youth mobility scheme is back on the agenda. We all know it is important for young Europeans to experience life in another country. This is not migration. Let’s call it growing up, or simply growing a better world. In an interesting accident of timing Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, that great poem to human unity, has just had its annual performance up the road from Imperial College, at the BBC Proms.
For the Good Science Project, the link between travel and science, between research and new perspectives, is endlessly interesting. Our first Friday Forum last year, titled Nauka Emigrantka, looked at the joys and the perils of migrating for your science. Chaired by science journalist Urszula Kaczorowska, a staffer at the Polish Press Agency, this was a fascinating panel discussion about the challenges a scientist faces, when they move their research to another country.
As the Good Science Project moves into its third year, I hope we can grow links with other European countries, and travel more, both physically and intellectually. Certainly the desire to enhance research culture is not simply a British preoccupation. The distortions scientists sometimes suffer, from the competitive hunt for grants or from the insecurities of employment and publication, are found across the continent.
The Good Science Project in Krakow
Can we learn from our European colleagues, as we try to understand better the social, economic and political forces that impact on scientists? Last summer I co-directed, with Urszula Kaczorowska, a summer school in Krakow, at the invitation of the Jagiellonian University. We worked with social science doctoral students, nurturing the communication skills young academics need if they are to flourish. Because they were social science students, their research areas often touched on the fractured nature of European politics.
Each morning of the Summer School, Urszula probed the students’ research. What was their project? How does it work? Why does it matter? Listening to Urszula’s interviews I felt I was experiencing in real time the basic tenets of the Good Science Project: that when it comes to research we always will find that the character of the scientist – their persistence, their care, their ingenuity – has powerful relevance. So often, in laboratory life, the gaze turns exclusively to publications, grants won, and the frailties of collaboration. It was a great discovery too, to see how much the students enjoyed and benefited from those conversations with Urszula, feeling – rightly – that such supportive but critical scrutiny itself is a boon to their research. At the same time they were learning the best ways for academics and journalists to interact.
Thinking of that wonderful Summer School in Krakow, it is clear why Poland is a good country for a science communication partnership with Imperial College. Like the United Kingdom, a change of government in Poland has brought a sea-change in official attitudes to Europe and the EU. Today, from opposite ends of the continent we in the UK and colleagues in Poland look across at each other, and perceive in the land between us not zones of national fervour, but routes to a shared wealth. No doubt an element of that wealth will be the common benefit that good science brings.
In 2021 Imperial College signed an agreement – a Letter of Understanding – with four Polish Universities. Together we would explore ways of spurring on progress in science communication. The agreement was a success, with meetings in Poznan, Krakow and Warsaw. Back at Imperial, Gareth Mitchell, Urszula Kaczorowska and myself, looking for ways to capture good practice in science communication training, made the Minding Science podcasts. Meanwhile feelers are out also with the Medical University of Gdansk, the Pomeranian University of Słupsk and the Wrocław University of Science and Technology. Let’s see what happens.
A philosophical epilogue
There are philosophical reasons too why those interested in innovation in science communication might be drawn to Poland and other Central European countries. For in this area of Europe, over the last 100 years, two vital philosophical developments gave us new ways to look at science. Interestingly, the two developments seem at odds with each other. On the one hand, partly in response to the programmes of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, scientists, mathematicians and philosophers, many of them fleeing west, looked for ways of detaching science from society and from culture, so that research could never again be abused and shaped by dictators. Yet, on the other hand, our contemporary belief that science is inseparable from society also has origins in Poland and its neighbouring countries. Think of the Polish physician and microbiologist Ludwick Fleck (1896-1961), a survivor of Auschwitz, who argued that scientific facts take shape through the collective processes of belief and social interaction. For Fleck, scientific knowledge is as much social construction as it is the mechanical collection of data and the blunt comparison of theory. If Fleck is an obscure name to us today, his vast influence is obvious once we remember that his work was known to Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996). Kuhn’s 1962 text The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is today recognised as the epochal moment when science was pushed back into the embrace of society – sometimes an unwilling embrace, but an embrace nonetheless.
Another Central European philosopher-scientist, Hungarian chemist Michael Polanyi (1861-1976), was also a forerunner of Kuhn. In his 1958 book Personal Knowledge Polanyi wrote that scientific thought and practice are guided and even fixed by tacit understanding and by personal styles of thought and expression. These social and personal aspects of the scientific project, argued Polanyi, are central to scientific advance, but are not easily reduced to objective foundations of data gathering and theory testing.
These rich intellectual traditions of Poland and its neighbours, both pulling science into society, and also separating it from society, remain pressing and central tensions for science communicators. For it is science communicators who we rely upon to navigate a safe path through social issues as well as through scientific issues. Science journalists, in other words, are not simply transmitters of information, or informal educationalists. When they work properly, these communicators are agents of science-society enrichment, and are very much needed. Science communicators must continue to look across Europe, learning from each other, and developing their philosophical, social and technical understanding of the scientific world-view.