Archives for February 2009

The Prime Minister will deliver a ringing endorsement of British science later today when he gives the prestigious Romanes Lecture in Oxford.

"We have a scientific record to be proud of," Gordon Brown will say. "The question now is how we build on this strength to make Britain the best country in the world in which to be a scientist".

And there's the rub. Few in the invited audience of the City's great and good will dispute the Prime Minister's assessment of Britain's great history of scientific achievement. Few will find fault with his ambition to ensure we produce the great scientists of tomorrow. Fewer still will argue with his promise to protect science funding in the economic downturn.

The question hanging over the Sheldonian Theatre today is about what all this science is for, and whether Ministers can direct it to drive economic growth.

It's a simple fact that the Government has transformed science funding over the last 10 years. By 2010/11 spending in real terms will have doubled to almost £6 billion.

But as the budget has swelled, so has the emphasis on tangible benefits and quantifiable results. Gordon Brown's vision, as both Chancellor and Prime Minister, has positioned science as a key driver of the UK economy, securing the country's place at the heart of a European knowledge economy.

The science minister Lord Drayson threw down the gauntlet at the Royal Society earlier this month when he claimed the time had come to make choices about the balance of investment in science "...as part of a clear economic strategy".

"Given that this global economic downturn is radically reshaping the economic strength of nations - and that other nations are making choices about which areas to focus on in order to drive future growth - shouldn't we do the same to boost the economic impact of our science base?"

For many this emphasis on applied research and measurable economic returns smacks of picking winners - the doomed industrial strategy of the 1970's.

It's notoriously difficult to predict the uses a scientific discovery will be put to before the research has been done, and without the speculative "blue skies" research to drive the whole process forwards there's a danger that scientific progress will grind to a halt.

The star of the show on the first day of the AAAS here in Chicago was undoubtedly a delegate no one has seen for more than 20,000 years - Neanderthal man.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Germany have sequenced more than 60% of the genome of this extinct hominid - our closest relative - from fossilised bone fragments found at six archaeological sites around Europe.

This "first draft" of the Neanderthal genome shows that we shared a common ancestor as recently as 800,000 years ago (by comparison the split with chimpanzees occurred some 6.5 million years ago), and that Neanderthal man possessed many of the traits we regard as essentially human.

Professor Svante Paabo confirmed that Neanderthals shared the FoxP2 gene associated with language in modern humans.

"There's no reason to believe they couldn't speak like us" he said. "But of course there are many other genes involved in speech and language, so there are many more studies to be done."

While chimpanzees and other primates might not be able to talk, they can certainly do their sums.

Researchers at Duke University in North Carolina have been using videos featuring sets of items that disappear behind a screen to assess how good Macaque monkeys are at adding up and subtracting the total number of items.

Offered a choice between a right and a wrong answer the Macaques performed at least as well as human subjects, leading Dr Jessica Cantlon to conclude that arithmetic may well have been invented by our animal ancestors rather than the Babylonians.

The biggest science conference in the world gets underway here in Chicago later today, but already the President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science has warned we may have just four years to save the planet.

Professor James McCarthy was talking about the weight of expectation that now surrounds Barack Obama.

The new president, he said, had appointed an exceptional team of science advisors, and that presented a great chance to make real progress on issues like energy policy and climate change.

But if president Obama failed to seize the moment then we would have lost an extraordinary opportunity.

"The calibre of scientific advice that is close to this man is truly exceptional, and if in his first term, in the next four years, we don't make significant progress in these areas, then I think the planet is in huge trouble."

It was a barnstorming start to what promises to be an exciting conference. Later today, we'll be hearing about the progress researchers in Germany have made in sequencing the genome of Neanderthal man, and getting an update on the complex chemistry that's a vital pre-requisite for life swirling around the interstellar dust clouds where stars and planets form.

And all this on the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, a bicentenary he shares with Abraham Lincoln. While the majority of people across America will be celebrating their 16th President's birthday, here at the AAAS it's the Victorian scientist who holds court.

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

This sentiment, from John Keats "Ode on a Grecian Urn", is one that many physicists would share - which is ironic considering that Keats regarded science (and particularly physics) as a destructive force, unweaving the rainbow of God's creation.

And yet an appreciation of beauty is central to Paul Dirac's understanding of the material world. Often referred to as the British Einstein, Dirac was one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, linking relativity and quantum mechanics for the first time and predicting the existence of antimatter.

Who? That's Paul Dirac: who alongside Bohr, Heisenberg and Schrodinger opened up the field of quantum physics, and in 1933 became the youngest theoretician to win the Nobel prize at the age of 31.

Don't worry if you've never heard of him, you're not alone. Dirac was pathologically averse to publicity. Silent and retiring, even his fellow physicists complained that he worked in a deliberately mystifying private language. At Cambridge his fellow students invented a new unit - the Dirac - for the smallest possible number of words someone could utter in an hour.

All of which might seem to make Dirac a poor subject for a biography and until now, 25 years after his death, there wasn't one. Graham Farmelo's "The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac" changes that, revealing for the first time what a remarkable man he really was.

Which brings us back to beauty. What Graham Farmelo manages to capture is how similar Dirac's methods seem to those of a poet. It was an intuitive sense of the beauty of his mathematical equations that convinced Dirac of their truth, and when colleagues ridiculed his description of the electron - because it necessitated the existence of an anti-electron - he persisted, arguing that the entire universe must be composed of equal parts matter and antimatter.

We know today, from experiments conducted in giant atom smashing particle accelerators, that Dirac was on the right track, and that the elegant simplicity of an abstract idea can be both beautiful and true.

It's a remarkable lesson coming from a man who had little time for literature, and who once remarked of an impressionist painting "this boat looks as if it was not finished".

According to researchers at Edinburgh University we share the galaxy with at least another 361 intelligent civilisations, and there may be as many as 38,000 planets supporting alien lifeforms.

Something about the preciseness of the first figure (how can they be so sure it's not 362?) and the vagueness of the second, gives you a clue as to the nature of this research: we're talking statistical probabilities here - mathematical extrapolations - rather than hard empirical evidence.

Even so, that doesn't mean that the data being fed into the computer model is entirely spurious. The Edinburgh team combined the latest criteria on the conditions thought to be necessary for life - the so called "Goldilocks zone" around a star where it's neither too hot nor to cold - with the latest information about planetary formation from astronomical observations.

The researchers looked at three scenarios for how life could develop. In the first they assumed that it was relatively difficult for life to get started, but easy for it to evolve once established - that scenario produced the figure of 361 intelligent civilisations.

A second scenario assumed that life was a much more common phenomenon, but that intelligence was rare. In a third, they included the possibility that life could be transferred from one planet to another by asteroid collisions. That scenario produced the figure of 38,000 planets supporting life.

Duncan Forgan, who led the team, says: "It's important to realise that the picture we've built up is still incomplete, and even if alien life forms do exist, we have no idea what form they would take."

Still, it's an encouraging thought to know that, statistically speaking, we're probably not alone.