Why don't people like me?
نویسنده
چکیده
Why are the British public so suspicious of science and scientists? These days many might point to ‘mad cow’ disease and genetically modified foods as primary causes, but the public’s mistrust of science goes back much further and runs much deeper than these recent scares. As a child in Britain, most of my classmates seemed instinctively to know that science was difficult and boring, and that only nerdy brain boxes did it. Even now, I often feel slightly embarrassed at social occasions when I have to confess to being a scientist. This dim view of science and scientists in the UK is so ingrained that we rarely question it. Indeed, who could argue that extra public money should be spent on refurbishing our academic institutions when we can’t afford to keep our hospitals and schools in a decent condition, or that scientists deserve a bigger slice of the public pay packet when nurses and teachers are paid so poorly? Yet, the lowly social status of science is not a universal phenomenon. When I went to work as a postdoc at the University of California in San Francisco in 1990, I was shocked to find that the American public had a completely different attitude to science. The top scientists at UCSF were highly respected members of the local community. They were invited to the major social events in the city and they were on first name terms with many of the local political and social leaders. And it wasn’t just the senior scientists. Many of my new non-scientist friends in the US were interested to hear that I was a scientist and wanted to know more about what I did. They seemed proud to know someone who is a scientist. This public support for science directly translates into the remarkably generous level of political and financial support for basic research in the US. Even when the economy was running an enormous budget deficit and there were large cuts in welfare, health and defence spending, the basic science budget was largely protected. What is most remarkable about this is not just that it is the exact opposite of the political priorities we take for granted in the UK, but that protecting the science budget was one of the few issues on which the Republicans and Democrats agreed. Now that the American economy is booming again, both parties are falling over themselves to be the ones that propose the biggest increase in the science budget.
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ورودعنوان ژورنال:
- Current Biology
دوره 9 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 1999