The relationship between scientists and politicians has never been an easy one these days. Scientists advise our government on anything from run of the mill policy to cyber warfare to natural disasters, to taxation or on the future of our energy needs. But with only 10 percent of employees having a scientific background, is this advice always understood? And even when it is, do what? Politicians always adhere to it?
With me to discuss all these issues and more are Catherine Boast, a fourth year student in physics from St. Peter's College, and Rocherlea, a 30 year fixed student at Lincoln College. Thank you very much for joining me, Catherine. About a year ago, you had a very interesting secondment to Parliament, to the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, as you write. Could you explain how you came to do that and what sort of stuff you got up to in parliament?
Yeah, of course. So my research council, my funding body said the people who fund my defo run, they call them postgraduate research fellowships within Post Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. And they advertise these once a year. And once a year, they send a graduate student who they are funding to spend three months at a post working on pretty much whatever you need them do.
And the idea is that it introduces dialogue between post and between scientists by talking to the scientists, then have access to parliament and to the various ways that science can be brought to bear on policy. The idea is that the politicians get the advantage of these post notes, which are these very condensed reports on current scientific policy. And the scientists get a kind of greater understanding of the parliamentary procedures, how politicians might use their research.
Yeah, that's pretty much it. I mean, it's a Win-Win situation, really. As a graduate student, it's an amazing experience to go and spend three months in parliament to up sticks and do something completely different because it is completely different to scientific research. Because what was your report on that? You were writing? So mine was on digital forensics and crime, which is not something I knew anything about in advance.
I don't think I even knew what forensics really meant before I started. It was the first thing I Googled. It's very steep learning curve. But also, if you don't know about a topic in advance, you're not likely to have very many preconceived ideas, very many biases. Which makes for much easier writing when you know that your final report has to be totally unbiased. That's one of the really important things about post and about these post notes.
So the post notes are the main way that Post communicates with parliamentarians. They have to be totally unbiased and is not just unbiased in the sense of presenting both sides of the argument. It's unbiased in the sense that it has to take in and present a fair representation of the consensus. So it's 90 percent of people think that current policy on digital forensics is a total disaster and 10 percent think it's great is no good.
Just spending half the note saying it's great and half the note saying it's terrible. It's important to to present balance in these things. I think there's a copy of your report here on the table in front of us. Could you give us a sense of what sort of documents these post notes are? So they're four pages long. They are meticulously researched and referenced and they're very policy heavy, a very policy focus, because that's what MPs need.
It's no good just telling them how to hack a computer. They want to know how that's going to affect the decisions that they're going to have to make. So it includes a bit of the the background science of what digital forensics is and information on how it works so that politicians really have a genuine understanding of what's going on and what people are talking about when they say digital forensics.
Well, even though it also is about science and politics from digital forensics, what about the tone so much? How did you describe digital forensics to the politician? Redus Digital forensic science is the process of obtaining, analysing and using digital evidence in investigations or criminal proceedings. So essentially how you get information from digital devices.
So whether that's getting the GPS positions of a mobile phone for the last week or whether it's recovering information from a laptop or decrypting an encrypted hard drive or downloading data from the cloud, it's sort of it's all of these things. It encompasses any kind of digital evidence and how to get hold of it. Essentially the current state of the field. And it's just news and ongoing investigations were summarised by you and your colleagues in this full page report.
Yeah. Yeah. What would you consider to be the main difficulties that you faced and I guess scientists in general face in communicating with parliament? Well, first up, most parliamentarians are not scientists, so you have to assume a fairly low baseline knowledge for these things.
And when you're trying to explain something complicated, like encryption to someone who has only ever used a computer from the outside and never tried to code or encrypt or anything, there's a lot of work that you have to do to make sure that you're communicating everything they need to know in a way that they're going to be able to understand.
But it's also hard to know whether politicians understand science for what it is, whether they really appreciate the fact that the science is, to all intents and purposes, fact. It's not opinion. It's not just another lobby group. It's the best thing is it's our best attempt at getting things right.
And I do wonder I do worry that MBAs have scientists talking in one ear and presenting the, quote unquote, scientific viewpoint and then lobby groups speaking in the other ear, presenting perhaps a somewhat biased view in favour of whatever that lobbying group is in favour of and whether politicians really understand. No, except that the science should trump the lobbying, that these are very different kinds of voices.
Exactly. And that they're not they're not equivalent. That science isn't just another another lobbying group. Rob, perhaps you'd like to come in here, this issue of the scientific consensus against the views of various lobby groups is something that you feel comes up quite a lot.
Yeah, I think that, you know, it's hard to know exactly what goes into making a policy decision and when science is involved, you know, there are a number of cases where the decisions that government make aren't necessarily or don't seem from the outside necessarily based in scientific fact, a particular example you've written in your notes is about nuclear power in Germany. It's not a very big decision was made that seems very sudden given to the scientific adviser at the time.
The situation in Germany was such that the German government very pro nuclear and pro nuclear power. And then right after Fukushima, their policy did a flip and they basically started going down the road of getting rid of their nuclear power plants. And that was a very solid decision. And I suppose the question to be asked is whether that was really a decision which was based on scientific evidence or whether that was a political decision.
Given that there were elections coming up that year, you know, it might not be as black and white as that. There are also issues where if you're a particular government, you want to stay in government and you want to to do a whole host of wonderful things. Maybe doing something which the public don't like or perceived by a lot of groups to be a bad decision is not the way to go. Do you want to stay in government and maybe help poverty in a particular country?
If you want to know if you're for example, if you're a Labour government in the U.K. and you're in power and you think that the worst thing that could possibly happen is not climate change, but actually the conservatives getting into power because they'll cut welfare, then you're going to make a decision based on that and you're going to weigh up those two options.
So it's not always clear, particularly to scientists, why certain decisions are made and whether they are based on fact or whether there is other things at play. But there's a very complicated relationship between political practicality, political expediency with a sort of cruelty and scientific advice. Absolutely. I mean, particularly with the Germany case. I mean, Angela Merkel has a PhD in quantum chemistry.
And, you know, she's she's very scientifically literate and she will have understood the decisions that she was making. And it's hard to know whether the decision that was made in Germany was actually made. It would be unreasonable to assume that it was made from a lack of understanding of science, but there might may have been more play.
Thanks, Rob, I think we'll perhaps come back to this issue later in the podcast, but Catherine, you wrote about the decision regarding the sugar tax in the United Kingdom being an issue in which there was side advice on one hand, and then the political decisions followed a curious path. It was a very so this unfolded while I was at post. So it was very interesting to be there and be in the middle of it and sort of see it unfolding.
So Public Health England were commissioned to produce a report on reducing sugar in diets. So public health England is supposed to be autonomous from government. It's sort of part of the Department of Health. But at the same time, it didn't ought to be influenced by government. And they produced this report. They found that price increases, for example, by taxation on sugar sweetened drinks and other high sugar products does have an influence on whether people buy these and consume these things.
The idea being then that if they don't buy them, they're not going to drink them. So it will help the impending obesity crisis and diabetes and all. Exactly, exactly. Initially, the government said that they were not going to impose issued a tax and in fact, they refused to publish this report produced by Public Health England. And that was a very controversial move because Public Health England is a public body doing research with public money in the interests of open access.
They should have had to have published the report, but the government suppressed it, or at least that's how it seemed. In fact, the report was then leaked and after the report had been leaked, the government. Change tack and decided there were, in fact, going to impose a tax on sugary drinks and then subsequently they did publish this report. So we know that it says what the league said it had said.
So it was an interesting case of government suppressing science, which obviously never should happen, and then ignoring it. But once it became apparent that that's what was going on, backtracking and going with the science. So overall, they have gone with the science, but it took a somewhat shady and tortuous route to get there. Securitas being diplomatic. Exactly. Do you think this kind of thing happens a lot?
I genuinely don't know. I would like to hope it doesn't. But unless these reports are leaked, unless the press gets wind of these reports existing, there's not going to be any pressure on government to do anything about it. So it was only because this was quite a high profile story that national press picked up on. It had celebrity backers like Jamie Oliver jumping up and down and saying that we need to do something about this.
We can't know how many of these reports disappear. Well, actually, the I don't know, was it because of this sugar tax? But recently, the research bodies in the U.K. at least, have been moving much more towards open access.
So the research that comes out from not only public bodies, but universities and everyone across the U.K., if it's funded by one of the main research councils like, you know, HDFC or one of the Science Technology Facilities Council, I went to one of these has to now be published open access within two years. And so the research directly from the researchers is being is being much more what is being made much more widely available,
which hopefully might prevent some of this happening in the future? Well, I think it was the other way around. I think that it was because of this emphasis on open access, on everything being published, if it's been produced with public money. There was so much pressure for this report to be published, which is why it was leaked and why it came out. Taking a slightly different view on this huge conundrum, of course, science and politics interacting in so many different ways.
Scientists also advise on natural disasters, on emergency situations, the experts say. But I thought I might just comment briefly that the president of Maryland, College Professor David Clarey, was until a few years ago, the scientific adviser to the front office and was one of the team involved in the advice around the Fukushima meltdown about whether you can national should be pulled out of Tokyo.
The scientific advice was that because of the conditions, it was not necessary to evacuate Tokyo, and that proved to be the correct advice. But, Catherine, you found a scenario in which a group of scientists advising on a natural disaster got a bit of trouble. Yes, the it was the earthquake in Italy in L'Aquila in 2009. But there were some initial tremors and a panel of scientists was consulted as to whether people needed to take particular precautions or evacuate.
And based on the evidence they had from these initial tremors, they felt that no real action needed to be taken. And so that was the advice they gave, obviously, with a pinch of salt, its predictions. But that advice was taken to heart, no one did anything, and then a significant earthquake followed. People died in this earthquake and the scientists were held to be accountable for their deaths.
In fact, some of the scientists were convicted of manslaughter and imprisoned, sent to jail for six years as a result of having given evidence as a result of having. Presented their best attempt based on the science that they had in front of them since, of course, as you found, but spent time in. Yes. Yes. And so did the convictions were overturned. But it's terrible for a scientist to have ever ended up in a position where they could be convicted based on.
Their advice based on science. It sounds very RenaissanceRe, very, very Galili and almost. Rob, do you feel that there's not a good appreciation of what scientific evidence is this country's been saying it's the best guess, not irrefutable? Yeah, I think you need to be. You know, if you're going to if we are going to portray science as being our best guess, we ought to be very clear that science is not infallible. Science is a collection of findings of scientists across the world.
And I think you will always find a scientist who will back your particular lobby groups findings or at your particular lobby groups opinion. But what people need to look at is the whole picture and what's the consensus of the scientific community? So what are the majority of scientists saying? And that is our best guess at what is fact and that is our best guess at what is the right thing to do.
So when it when a scientific when the scientific community advises on particular things like climate change or nuclear energy, if you look at the literature that the scientists who produced, what are the majority of them saying? And that is really what what we should be passing on, I believe, at least. Let's go into two of the themes that have come up this hour on a little more detail, so we'll discuss the variety of different ways, including post about how scientists and government communicate.
But maybe first, let's talk about the nuclear power issue in Germany in a bit more detail. Rob, could you give us a short history reminder of the events surrounding this particular case? So Germany has has always been a strong proponent, together with France, of nuclear energy. And indeed, in 2010, Germany announced plans to increase their stake in nuclear power to build more nuclear power plants and to try to move away from fossil fuels to meet its commitment to reducing fossil fuel emissions.
But then Fukushima happened, and lobby groups that have previously been very strong came back to strength against nuclear power. And indeed, a large portion of the German population suddenly flipped in what they what they wanted. They also wanted to move away from nuclear power because they were terrified of some like Fukushima happening in Europe.
And with that, Germany flipped its decision to increase its stake in nuclear and instead decided to phase out all of its nuclear power plants by I think it was 20 20 to this since been extended to 2036. But the idea is that they would get rid of all their nuclear power plants and instead try and increase their stakeholder in renewables, which seems like a wonderful decision until you realise that actually at the time, renewable technology wasn't implemented anywhere near as much as as nuclear.
And so what's ended up happening is that in the years since this switch from nuclear to renewables, what's happened is that nuclear power has dropped by about 10 to 12 percent. Fossil fuels has also dropped by about 10 percent. And the stake in renewables has gone up from 10 percent to 30 percent. So since this decision was made, Germany have actually managed to reduce their stake in nuclear and increase their stake in renewables, and they've also reduced their their fossil fuel emissions.
But one could argue that had they kept their nuclear power, they could have reduced their fossil fuel emissions even further. And because renewable energy such as wind and solar is very fluctuating, so unreliable, they certainly in the current plan would have to keep a certain percentage of fossil fuel emissions to offset that unreliability.
Yeah, I mean, when they decided to get rid of because this was what you have to remember is that the population is constantly increasing and and people's lives are becoming ever more energy consuming people because we've got more energy than they were 10 years ago. And you have to somehow account for that in your predictions of where energy production is going to come from next year. And so Germany had originally planned to deal with this by building more nuclear.
But now that they've decided to get rid of nuclear, they've actually planned to build more coal power plants. And because things like renewables, like wind and solar are intermittent sources, you always need to have a backup for when when it's not sunny or when when it's not particularly windy.
And the argument that a lot of scientists would make would be that actually if you have nuclear as your backup, what that means is that you you reduce your fossil fuel emissions even further rather than by having extra coal power plants for when the when the when the renewables aren't producing. But of course, with nuclear power, there is this public perception of the risk of enormous catastrophe. But use that have been looking into the data about addressing nuclear vs. other types of power.
And you came up with an event that I'm very ashamed that I'm not of. I don't think I've heard of it over about the biggest renewable energy natural disaster that no one seems to know about. Yeah, I mean, the thing with nuclear is that nuclear is it's always been an extremely polarising topic because nuclear is a technology that is born out of war. It's born out of, you know, the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And so people have always had a fear associated with this. And in some ways, it's actually a it's a fear which which is is valid but is overstated. And some particular what you're referring to is that, you know, people look at Chernobyl or Three Mile Island or Fukushima as being some of the worst disasters from energy production to date.
But if you look at the actual death toll from all of the nuclear accidents that have occurred, those those three main ones at least, and the death toll for all of those lives somewhere in the region of a few, a few thousand, maybe a few tens of thousands, whereas the worst disaster from an energy producing point of view was actually the collapsing of the bank down, probably pronouncing that wrong, but the bank done disaster.
This is a hydraulic dam in China which remains to this date the worst technical disaster in history. It killed about one hundred seventy one thousand people and it rendered another 11 million homeless. And but it's not anywhere near as well known as Fukushima or Chernobyl.
And I suppose the reason for that is that, you know, people talk about the long term effects of radiation exposure and indeed the people who went into Chernobyl to try and clean it out after the meltdown or the same for the government to Fukushima. Certainly there would be long term effects for people who were close to the disaster. But the long term effects of the area surrounding are entirely different.
The long term effects that you would, you would guess are nowhere near what people are predicting. It's the total death toll is orders of magnitude less than from this damn disaster. And the amount of radiation that one would get from just living next to a nuclear power station is also less than people might expect. Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing is that if you particularly technology like coal, coal is a really dirty technology.
And what people don't realise is that you actually get a higher dose of radiation if you live within 50 miles of a coal power plant than you do from living within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant. Because the regulations on nuclear power are so strict that they emit radiation they can't miss is anything above a completely infinitesimal amount.
Whereas burning coal actually burn certain compounds which release radiation does a really pragmatic, you can call it, or a cynical way of looking at the whole thing, which is deaths per kilowatt hour. So this is a wonderful I say wonderful. This was a piece of research that was done in the last decade where they looked at what is the actual cost, the cost to the lives of producing energy.
So if you look at all of the different methods of producing energy and you look at for every single kilowatt hour of energy that's generated or in this case every trillion kilowatt hours that are generated, how many people die as a result of that, whether that be coal mining deaths, whether that be a nuclear power plant, explosions like Fukushima, Chernobyl, whether that be people falling off the side of a wind turbine when they're constructing it, everything taken into account.
About 90 people will die from nuclear accidents for every one trillion kilowatt hours of energy produced, but for the same amount of energy produced by coal power, 100000 people die. That's five orders of magnitude. It's it's massive and actually it turns out that if you stack all the different ways of producing energy together, nuclear has the lowest amount of debt per trillion kilowatt hours produced.
So if you were to look at it from a scientific point of view, nuclear is the safest energy that we know today. Safer than solar, safer than wind, safer than hydro electric. There is, of course, the nuclear waste issue, which we're not quite sure what to do with it. So, yeah, nuclear waste is definitely something which gets overlooked by a lot of pro nuclear proponents. And to be certain, nuclear waste is not to be not to be sniffed, that it's very radioactive.
And in some cases, particularly for a lot of the reactors that were built in the 70s and 80s, that nuclear waste be ran for tens of thousands of years. But what people forget is that there are new generations of reactors coming online, in particular fourth generation reactors which have the potential to reprocess some of that food fuel.
Moreover, the more modern reactors don't produce anywhere near as much nuclear waste and the great waste that they do produce actually deteriorates much quicker than the waste produced by the earlier reactors. If I might paraphrase what you're suggesting, there is a whole wealth of scientific evidence out there, a lot of it in favour of nuclear, even regarding the nuclear waste issue, which should certainly be much more in the public eye, in the eye of our lawmakers than it currently is.
Absolutely. I think you as well take that would a pinch of salt that, you know, there is thousands of tons of nuclear waste around the world stored, waiting to be treated. And that will be a problem that we'll have to face. But I suppose it comes down to looking at the current situation that we have on our planet, which is, you know, a warming climate and an increase in fossil fuel emissions a year on year.
And how do you how do you solve that? And one one option is to go down the nuclear route because the nuclear route cuts out fossil fuel emissions. And puts the problem underground for the moment until we have a chance to deal with it. Let's now go to the second strand that I promised 10 minutes ago, but we've heard a little from Katherine about how it works, but that's just one of the ways in which scientists and politicians in the U.K. at least interact.
Yes, that's true. I mean, it's the most pertinent to me because I spent time there. But there are a lot of different ways that scientists can get in touch with employees and that employees can take note of science. A lot of the government science policy or all of the government science policy is scrutinised, of course, and it's scrutinised by the Science and Technology Select Committee.
So that's a group of a group of MPs who have particular interest in science, either because their constituency contains a lot of scientists or has a big focus on research or because they have a particular interest in science being a scientist, for example. And they will scrutinise the government's plans, decisions, actions on anything scientific related, and they put out calls for evidence.
So particularly the recent hot topic has, of course, been Brexit and the effect that that will have on science and technology in the UK. And the committee put out a call for evidence for anyone. Anyone with any thoughts, feelings, opinions, experiences about Brexit and science, how Brexit was going to affect them as a scientist, affect their research and to effectively write them a letter and tell them that.
And then they compile reports on the topics that they've been discussing, which will will criticise government as appropriate and will present evidence about science and technology directly to government from their own benches. There's also something called the Royal Society Pound Scheme, which sounds like a jolly good idea from what I hear.
So it sounds like a lovely scheme. The idea of that is that what we really need is for employees to talk to scientists and for scientists to have more understanding of what employees do and how scientists can help employees.
So the scheme simply pairs up a scientist with an MP and the scientist will spend some time in parliament talking to the MP, explaining their research, understanding the workings of parliament, and how as a scientist they can have an impact, how they can make their voice heard. And in turn, an MP meets a scientist, as I was saying, MVP's. Most employees are not scientists, most people in Westminster are not scientists, employees generally don't meet scientists.
So this scheme makes a deliberate attempt to overcome those barriers. It gives a human face to science. It's very easy for science to be seen as this. Strange, bizarre system that people on the outside don't really understand, and it's populated by experts who wear white coats and don't talk to anyone, and that's not what science is.
But that's a common misconception. And by directing an MP to a specific scientist who who is a human, who has may have a family, who has a house, who has interests, who goes running off to work, who likes tofu, I mean, it gives her an immediacy and a reality to science that perhaps people outside of science don't see a really good point, actually, that most people don't realise that scientists are actually real people and that it's not just a
massive computer crunching the numbers like it's it's I think it's a really good idea as a scheme. And I'd hope that most employees would sign up and kind of try and get an insight into what's driving a knowledge economy.
The UK is aiming to be, you know. So moving towards the end of all time, we've skirted around the issue of global warming, a vast area of our modern life in which scientific opinion is often coming in direct conflict with various political agendas, maybe it is better that we've left for another time. But there's a particular event that, Rob, you mentioned regarding the American Senate and global warming, which I found the bizarre, confusing and entertaining all at once.
Yeah, it was a particularly odd thing to happen. I mean, America has been one of the country's most fighting against, or at least certainly the politicians in America have been most loath to take up this idea of global warming, at least in previous decades. One in the Senate, it was in 2015, was that they had a vote on climate change.
Forget to vote on climate change in the same day. And a lot of members of the Senate were extremely opposed to climate change, actually voted in favour of the bill, stated as climate change is real and not a hoax. So firstly, that's an incredible way to to the reef any actually to to to phrase that.
But real and not a hoax as previously thought. And but on the same day, within 15 minutes of that vote, they voted on a second a second proposal, which was that climate change is real and manmade or at least caused primarily by man, and to that they voted against. And so within the same day, they voted that both climate change is real and not real and that it was not a hoax, but not caused by humankind. When I when I heard the first vote, I was, you know, thankfully there accepting it.
And the second vote, I stopped writing about climate change altogether because the Senate told me it wasn't real or at least not not caused by by human humankind. And so it's just a really bizarre thing. It's a it's it's an issue that I don't feel is the right kind of issue to be voted on by nonscientists. But it's yeah, it's just a bizarre situation. And finally, Catherine, if I'm a disgruntled constituent and there's some scientific issue in my constituency that is affecting me greatly,
there's something to me as well, isn't it? Yes. So your first port of call would, of course, be your MP. If your MP is not a scientist, your MP can get in touch with the parliamentary library service and the parliamentary library services. I mean, to be honest that their main role is to put together debate packs. So if there's an upcoming debate, they will produce a lot of material.
Do the research for MP essentially. But if you have a particular burning scientific question that your MP doesn't know the answer to, they can pass that question onto the library service and the library service will provide an answer to whatever your your scientific question might be, whether it's something genuinely interesting and concerning or whether it's something.
For example, whether the badger cull is having an effect on hedgehog populations, there is a devoted library researcher who will look that up for you and provide you with that answer that you need need being the operative word there, because it would be a waste of public resources. Otherwise wouldn't say just imagine a scenario where you've got people like ringy and prank calling the library service to ask ridiculous scientific question.
Well, if you go through your MP, then they have to provide an answer. But it is a really good service where if dark matter are sent to Miami having a really existential moment in the library services. Well, thank you very much, both of you. It's been a very enjoyable afternoon. We've covered a huge range of different angles on this one topic and yet also perhaps barely begun to scratch the surface. Thank you very much for listening. Join us next week on In Our Spare Time.