Notes and Records of the Royal Society

Abstract

My involvement in the public understanding of science in the UK came through a critique of claims for a genetic basis for IQ differences between races. That led to my chairmanship of the Royal Society's Committee on the Public Understanding of Science (COPUS). The main thrust of its 1985 report was directed at the need for scientists to learn how to communicate with the general public in all its guises, and to consider it a duty to do so. The formation of COPUS brought the Royal Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science together and initiated a movement for scientific organizations to take engagement between scientists and the public seriously.

History and background to the public understanding of science (PUS)

Before the professionalization of science in the first 30–50 years of the nineteenth century, PUS could hardly even have ever been a topic of conversation. Nevertheless, the lectures at the Royal Institution (RI), started by Humphry Davy FRS in 1802, and then the famous children's Christmas Lectures started by Michael Faraday FRS in 1825, were both addressed to the non-expert. The British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA; now known as the British Science Association) was founded in 1831 but did not then have the role in communicating with the public that it later developed. At its first substantive meeting in Oxford in 1832, honorary degrees were given by Oxford University to, among others, Faraday and John Dalton FRS, at which the theologian John Keble complained that ‘the Oxford doctors have truckled sadly to the spirit of the times in receiving the hotchpotch of philosophers as they did’! These same arguments between the humanists and the scientists were continued later in the nineteenth century in the debates between the zoologist T. H. Huxley PRS and Mathew Arnold, poet and cultural critic, son of Thomas Arnold and godson of John Keble. T. H. Huxley himself was a substantial popular expositor of science, and took a great interest in education in schools and beyond.

It is notable that many key figures in the debates about science were Fellows of the Royal Society. This tradition continued well into the twentieth century with, for example, the geneticist and biochemist J. B. S. Haldane FRS, who wrote many popular books and articles on science, and J. D. Bernal FRS, whose notable 1939 book The social function of science1 already said many of the same things that were to be in the 1985 Royal Society report.2 Bernal talked about ‘Science for all’, and emphasized ‘the need for public understanding of science’, by which he meant a knowledge of how science works. He also pointed out the need for statistical understanding. Undoubtedly, both Haldane and Bernal were greatly influenced by their membership of the Communist Party. In the early years of the second half of the twentieth century Peter Medawar FRS, the notable zoologist, medical scientist and Nobel Prize winner, was probably the most well known and appreciated popularizer of science, especially through his BBC Reith Lectures on ‘The future of Man’.

However, none of this involvement of individual Fellows of the Royal Society in science popularizing—and essentially all Presidents of the British Association for the Advancement of Science have been Fellows of the Royal Society—made it central to the interests and activities of the Royal Society itself until the early 1980s. It was, presumably, more or less acceptable for a Fellow to be a popularizer, as this could hardly any more tarnish his or her scientific reputation, but for younger scientists, perhaps aspiring to election to the Royal Society, the fear of opprobrium was a definite disincentive to becoming too popular. The Royal Society corporately kept well away from formal involvement in the 1930s social-relations-of-science debates.3 However, a corporate interest in school science education is reflected in the fact that it seems that school children were first admitted to what is now called the Summer Science Exhibition in 1946.

The Royal Society did channel government money to the BA for many years, and in 1963 an important Royal Society committee chaired by the then Treasurer, Alex Fleck, was saying that reaching ‘a wider public’ was a task for the BA rather than the Royal Society.4 Presumably it was felt that in providing some money to the BA they were fulfilling any possible obligation they might have to PUS. The RI also continued to have many associated scientists who were Fellows and, again, until recently used to receive some government money through the Royal Society.

However, the Society's real interest in PUS grew out of its keen interest in science education. Roger Blin-Stoyle, a notable physicist and founder of the School of Physical Sciences at the then new University of Sussex, chaired a Royal Society committee on Science Education 11–18 in England and Wales whose report was published in November 1982. The report recommended ‘that the Council of the Royal Society should set up a small working group to investigate ways in which public understanding of science might be enhanced.’ While accepting that the basis for PUS must be the teaching of science in schools, it was the committee's view that ‘a sensible and balanced public view about science education is dependent on the development of much greater awareness and enlightenment about science and its role in society’. In December 1982 the Council of the Royal Society, under the Presidency of Sir Andrew Huxley, who was clearly sympathetic to the idea of setting up such a group, accepted the recommendation of Blin-Stoyle's committee, agreed to ask me to be its chairman, and suggested terms of reference.

Why was I chosen?

I do not, of course, know the real answer, nor who else might have been considered, and so can only respond by summarizing my own development in PUS-related activities up to that time. My first significant experience of explaining my science to a non-expert audience was a presentation as a graduate student to a graduate student society at my college, Clare, at Cambridge University, in about 1957. Some two years later, on 7 May 1959, I attended C. P. Snow's famous ‘The two cultures’ Rede Lecture.5 I sometimes wonder how many people are still alive who actually attended that lecture. At that time I still kept a diary, and the entry on the lecture reads as follows:

Went to hear CP Snow give the Rede lecture. Gulf between scientists and literary intellectuals. I don't believe it exists. More technologists. Everybody knows we need that. But a good lecture, even making the obvious a little interesting!

In retrospect, I think I was a little hasty in saying the gulf did not exist. Much of my later activity in PUS has, in effect, been directed at trying to reduce the gap envisaged by Snow and at insisting that science is an integral part of our general culture.

In 1961 I went as a postdoctoral fellow to Stanford University to work under the remarkable Nobel Prize-winning scientist, Joshua Lederberg, a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. With his encouragement I got involved in a fierce public debate about the genetic basis of racial differences in IQ, stirred up by the Nobel Prize-winning co-inventor of the transistor, William Shockley, and others. This led to John Maddox inviting me to chair a committee on Science and Public Affairs for the BA, which was the start of a more than 30-year intimate association with the BA and opportunities to give many more popular talks. Subsequently, as Director of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, I was necessarily much involved in PR activities. I also became Chairman of the then BBC Science consultative group. Thus, by the time the Royal Society's Council had to choose a chairman for their proposed PUS committee, I had acquired a good deal of relevant experience.

The Royal Society PUS committee and its report

My first tasks as Chairman were to choose the members of the group and to clarify the terms of reference. Membership would be personal, with no institutional representatives, although there was clearly a need to draw on members who were familiar, for example, with the work of the BA, the RI and the Council for Science and Society. With respect to the Council for Science and Society, John Ziman FRS was an obvious choice. It also seemed natural to include Roger Blin-Stoyle FRS, because it was through the report of his education committee that the group was set up. Other research scientists on the group were Sir John Mason TreasRS and Lord Swann FRS. Members who were either not scientists or not professional scientists in the conventional sense were Mr R. E. Artus (economist and a director of Prudential Assurance), Sir David Attenborough FRS, Sir Kenneth Durham (Chairman of Unilever), Mr M. J. Savory (head teacher at a secondary school), Professor Dorothy Wedderburn (industrial sociologist and economist and Principal of Bedford College) and Dame Margaret Weston (Director of the Science Museum). The two Peters, Collins and Cooper,6 were joint secretaries and contributed substantially to the success of the working group and its report.

The group's terms of reference were as follows:

  1. to review the nature and extent of public understanding of science and technology in the UK and its adequacy for an advanced industrialized democracy;

  2. to review the mechanisms for effecting the public understanding of science and technology and its role in society;

  3. to consider the constraints upon the processes of communication and how they might best be overcome;

  4. to make recommendations and report to Council.

Thus, the main tasks were to answer the question as to why PUS mattered, to evaluate current levels of PUS and to consider ways in which it might be improved.

We were impressed with the range and distinction not only of those who agreed to the time-consuming task of being members of the working group but also of those who gave evidence and wrote papers. Clearly PUS had struck a chord of interest. The main eventual thrust of the report, published in 1985, was directed at the need for scientists to learn how to communicate with the general public in all its guises, and to consider it a duty to do so.

The definition of ‘science’ was broad, including mathematics, engineering, technology and medicine, and all aspects of applied science. ‘Understanding’ included comprehension of the nature of scientific activity and enquiry, and not just knowledge of some of the facts. Clearly the level of understanding depends on the purpose, for example in relation to an individual's occupation and responsibility. The ‘public’ was defined at five levels:

  1. private individuals, for their personal satisfaction and well-being;

  2. individual citizens, for participation in civic responsibilities and as members of a democratic society;

  3. people employed in skilled and semi-skilled occupations, the large majority of which now have some scientific content;

  4. people employed in middle ranks of management and in professional and trades union associations;

  5. people responsible for major decision making in our society, particularly those in industry and government.

A basic thesis of the report was that better public understanding of science could be a major element in promoting national prosperity, in raising the quality of public and private decision making, and in enriching the life of the individual. In contrast to what has often been reported, we argued that better PUS

would, in our view, significantly improve the quality of public decision-making, not because the ‘right’ decisions would then be made, but because decisions made in the light of an adequate understanding of the issues are likely to be better than decisions made in the absence of such understanding.

There was clearly a strong case for Parliamentarians, in particular, to have a much better understanding of science and its relevance to their responsibilities than they then had. Unfortunately, not much has changed in the past 25 years in this respect. Will a view of the importance of science and its support for adequate decision making ever influence the result of a national election?

We also said, as had Bernal and others before us, that ‘Understanding the nature of risk and uncertainty is an important part of the scientific understanding needed both for many public policy issues and for everyday decisions in our personal lives.’ There is no such thing as ‘absolute safety’ or ‘zero risk’.

In my 1985 Presidential address to the Royal Statistical Society, entitled ‘Understanding statistics’,7 I said that there are least three levels at which the understanding of statistics is important: (i) for the individual, as a citizen in a democracy and for personal decisions in everyday life; (ii) for those professions such as medicine, economics and science, in which data interpretation and analysis are a necessary part of one's work; and (iii) for the professional statistician ranging from data-gatherers to almost pure mathematicians. Only the first level is really relevant to PUS initiatives outside school and university, for example in interpreting opinion polls, assessing news stories that switch between absolute numbers and proportions, or judging the personal implications of medical statistics. We need to convince the public of the value of statistics and the information that can be gained from them. We must try to banish forever that hoary supposed adage ‘lies, damned lies and statistics’.

Collins and Bodmer in their 1986 overview of the report8 said:

the view of science as a simple logical process producing unequivocal answers, and of scientists as correspondingly always logical, unemotional and somehow impersonal individuals removed from the messiness of ‘real life’, appears to be widespread. It surfaces in several guises. One is that lack of unanimity among scientists on a given scientific issue becomes an excuse to obscure and distort the scientific contribution to public debate.

This issue of the nature of science, that it is not just a collection of facts, must be explained in science teaching in schools, which has to be the ultimate basis for improved PUS in the population overall. It should also be made clear that science is a key part of our culture and profoundly influences the way in which we think about ourselves. There is still an extraordinary cultural asymmetry in our society with respect to the balance between science and the arts and humanities. It certainly was most unlikely, 25 years ago, that a scientist had not read Shakespeare, but how much did the average student of the arts or humanities know about, say, DNA? We advocated the teaching of science in primary schools, which has happened, but commented, as did C. P. Snow, on the appalling narrowness of education in this country for pupils over the age of 16, especially in the sixth form. Not much has changed there, apart possibly from the contribution of AS levels or their equivalents.

Has newspaper coverage changed much in the past 20 years? I think the answer must be yes, although that is not necessarily directly attributable to the 1985 report. We argued for more features, for more science in general broadcast programmes, and for editors to encourage science in their newspapers. Of the newspaper editors, only Peter Preston, the then editor of The Guardian, agreed to see us and even responded to our request for some contact, but that did change after the report. The recommendation in the report for a science book prize has been remarkably successful and gets wide media coverage.

The report argued the need for courses on science communication at all levels of scientific education. The Royal Society, to show its support for PUS activities, agreed to set up the Faraday Award to be given to working scientists who were outstanding communicators. This award has become a prestigious and prominent fixture in the annual calendar of PUS activities.

The report strongly supported the role of museums in PUS activities and of scientific competitions for school children, such as the CREST (Collaborative Research in Exploration Systems and Technology) programme. There has in the past 25 years been an extraordinary development in science centres and hands-on exhibits, helped by the Millennium Awards.

In industry, the report highlighted a need for appropriate scientific understanding at all levels from the ‘shop floor to the boardroom’. Industry should contribute to the debate on science education and encourage scientists to go into management, as reflected, for example, in the success of the pharmaceutical companies in the UK. There could be more in-service scientific training. The advocated academy–industry mobility has happened to a large extent, although clearly not due to the report, or at least not directly. Industry can also sponsor and promote PUS activities and traditionally makes many contributions to the annual British Science Festival.

The final sentence of the 1985 report, echoing what has already been said, was: ‘But our most direct and urgent message must be to the scientists themselves: Learn to communicate with the public, be willing to do so and consider it your duty to do so.’

COPUS, the Royal Society and the BA

One of the key recommendations of the PUS working group was that the Royal Society should establish a standing committee for the public understanding of science. Its responsibilities should be (i) to monitor and review progress in PUS and its impact on society; (ii) to ensure the provision of advice and guidance to scientific institutions and organizations on how to promote PUS; and (iii) to oversee the Society's own activities such as lectures to the public, prizes for communication, journalists' seminars, briefings and press conferences, and contact with the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee and other similar bodies. When the report came to the Royal Society's Council, George (later Lord) Porter was the new President. He was, uniquely, then also President of the BA and Director of the RI. He therefore suggested that the new committee should have representation from all three bodies, while still having a broadly based membership, and that he would be the first chair of the committee, which was given the name COPUS. It was fortunate for the implementation of the group's PUS report that George Porter, unusually for a President of the Royal Society at that time, was a champion of PUS, based especially on his wide experience at the BA and the RI.

COPUS once and for all changed the attitude of the Society from that of aloofness from the public face of science to one of promotion of PUS, and so set an example to the scientific community as a whole. The formation of COPUS brought, especially, the Royal Society and the BA together and initiated a movement for scientific organizations to take engagement between scientists and the public seriously. One aim of this, and of the new Faraday award, was to remove the stigma of science popularization.

There was effective collaboration, through COPUS, in the delivery of PUS and related initiatives, such as the science writing competition, initially with support from the Daily Telegraph, and the science media fellowships, which enabled young working scientists to spend a period in one or other of the media over the summer, and so gain some first-hand experience of the problems of science journalists. The science writing competition has been followed as a model by many other organizations all over the country.

In the early 1990s, stimulated by the existence of COPUS, the BA proposed that there should be a National Science Week. At that time William Waldegrave was the minister in charge of science, and a group of us went to see him and explain our plans for a National Science Week and, in general, for promoting PUS. After listening attentively for a while, Waldegrave said, ‘Well, what do you want then?’ After a brief silence, I said, ‘A million pounds’—and we got it! That was the start of support by the government for PUS activities. We were fortunate in that in William Waldegrave and, later, in David Sainsbury (elected an Honorary Fellow in 2008), we had ministers in charge of science who appreciated the need for PUS and for its support from the government. The National Science Week has become an enormously successful nationwide activity.

Another major boost to PUS activities came from the 1993 report Realising our potential, prepared under the direction of Sir William Stewart when he was Chief Scientific Adviser to the Cabinet.9 This report, following advice from COPUS, declared that PUS activities should be one of the remits of the research councils, and also that the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) should undertake research on PUS, its extent and its impact. This was then the beginning of support from the government for research in this area. It is clear that the Royal Society 1985 report and its aftermath, including COPUS, had a major influence in all these developments, bringing PUS into the mainstream of scientific activities.

Gradually, however, as more and more other organizations got involved in PUS activities, there seemed to be not enough for COPUS to do and so it was disbanded. In my view, that was unfortunate. At the very least COPUS brought together the BA and the Royal Society, which I believe have quite complementary roles in PUS. I see the Society's role much more as speaking to the ‘corridors of power’ (C. P. Snow's catchphrase) and to the scientific community in the UK and abroad, whereas the BA can reach a much more diverse and dispersed audience.

The deficit model and its deficiencies

In 2000, 15 years after the Royal Society report, the House of Lords produced a report entitled Science and society under the chairmanship of Lord Jenkin.10 Starting from the premise that there was ‘a crisis of trust’ between scientists and the public, the report came to the conclusion that ‘the view of public understanding of science was demeaning and condescending and is no longer enough. Scientists need to understand the public: hence the importance of dialogue and engagement.’ This was clearly an implied criticism of the 1985 report and suggested that all that was being proposed was for scientists to feed the public with the scientific facts and they would then quietly support science. This has come to be known as the ‘deficit model’, a term apparently coined by John Ziman, who was actually a member of the Royal Society group and signed off on the final version of the report.

Typical of the earlier criticisms along these lines was Brian Wynne's 1992 article in the first issue of the journal Public Understanding of Science,11 which was founded as a direct outcome of the 1985 Royal Society report. He said, for example, ‘Two intertwined concerns permeate the construction of the public understanding of science problem, there [i.e. in the 1985 report] laid down with such presumed authority for the social scientists to follow’ and later in the article stated, ‘This pervasive lack of public identification with science is equated by scientists with the public lack of understanding of science.’ It is ironic that without the recommendations of our report and its aftermath, Brian Wynne and his colleagues would not have had the ESRC support that enabled them to do research in this area.

Steve Miller, writing in 2001,12 after the publication of the House of Lords Science and society report, claimed that nothing had been achieved in the intervening 15 years, which as I have tried to make clear is simply not true. He went on to say, ‘In part, the Bodmer Report reflected a concern amongst the scientific establishment that this retreat had reached such proportions that it made funding for scientific research politically vulnerable.’ Presumably by retreat he was referring to an apparent public disaffection with science, for which there is, in any case, no real evidence. He clearly had not read Collins and Bodmer's comment that ‘while the need for public support for science is important, that is not the primary theme of the Royal Society report.’13 Further on he said:

Increasingly, the finger of guilt pointed toward what had become known as the ‘deficit model’, which assumed ‘public deficiency, but scientific sufficiency’. This model adopted a one-way, top-down communication process, in which scientists—with all the required information—filled the knowledge vacuum in the scientifically illiterate general public as they saw fit. There was a flow of knowledge, from the ‘pure’ source of science in the laboratory to a (somewhat tainted) Bowdlerized variety that was fit for public consumption and was usually disseminated through the mass media. The scientific community was most definitely in control of this flow. Scientific facts and methods were the vital components of public understanding for the deficit model.

It is hard to see where these views on PUS can come from, other than a misreading, hopefully not wilfully so, of what was actually written.

In an interesting analysis of the interaction between political and scientific knowledge, entitled ‘Science in society: re-evaluating the deficit model of public attitudes’, Sturgis and Allum14 concluded that ‘whatever leads knowledge of science to increase one's favorability towards it, is even more effective when people are familiar with the complex range of circumstances surrounding scientific and technological development within the wider political landscape.’

It is clear that the public engagement advocated in Patrick Jenkin's report is very important in a democratic society. Sir David King FRS, the then Chief Scientific Adviser to HM Government, said in a 2003 discussion15 of the Science and Society report, ‘The old approach to the public understanding of science is now well left behind. The new approach is public engagement with science and technology, which recognises the need for a dialogue in which both scientists and the public can contribute to the debate.’ But how can there be the dialogue that this requires, without some understanding of the scientific issues involved? It is necessarily the scientist who has the relevant information, especially of the latest advances whether pure or applied, and so the onus to explain the scientific issues must fall on the scientist. Without the ability to explain science in a way that the non-expert can understand and a willingness to get involved in the dialogue, there can be no public engagement. That is the key issue that the 1985 report was addressing. As David Dickson wrote in 2005:

Substantial and effective dialogue will only take place when those on both sides have a sound understanding of the relevant factual evidence; indeed evidence-based decision-making is an ideal that we should aspire to at every level of society, from local communities to the top levels of government.16

I have sometimes asked the question in public: ‘Does anyone have an argument against the public understanding of science?’ I have never received a reply!

Outcomes

Patrick Jenkin's report brought engagement into the PUS debate but, as I have argued above, that does not replace the need for scientists to learn how to communicate with the public and consider it a responsibility to do so. At least now it is much less likely that a head of a science laboratory would berate a junior member of his or her group for taking part in PUS activities, as I have heard was the case more than once when we first started, for example, with the media fellows. Indeed, all applications to the research councils now have to include a non-technical statement explaining the underlying science and what the aims of the research are. The Wellcome Trust also has a major role in this area, through its own activities and the support it has provided. But getting enough support for continuing these PUS activities and engagement with the public remains a struggle.

Focus groups are an important vehicle for engagement between scientists and the public. When I was Chairman of the National Radiological Protection Board I instigated the creation of a whole division for communication with the public, which included the development of a user-friendly website on radiation problems and their underlying science. This was the stimulus for Sir William Stewart's mobile phones committee to make use of focus groups, an approach that was also initiated by John (now Lord) Krebs FRS when he was Chairman of the Foods Standards Agency.

Measuring the impact of any particular activity on improving PUS is virtually impossible, especially with the enormous increase in university attendance, which necessarily implies an increase in the proportion of people who learn something about science. What can be measured are the many different activities mentioned above. In all these areas it is clear that the 1985 Royal Society report has made a major contribution.

Main changes in the past 25 years

PUS and public engagement are now very much on the agenda of any scientifically related activity, and in particular of the Royal Society—everybody is doing it. In an address to the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee in July 198517 I said, ‘Traditionally there has been something of a stigma for a scientist to be involved in the public communication of science at whatever level.’ I certainly hope and believe that this is no longer true and feel sure that the 1985 report made a substantial contribution to the change in attitude, led from the front in many ways by the Royal Society. However, there have in addition been two major changes over the past 25 years that will have a profound influence on how we deal with PUS and public engagement.

The first is the huge increase in education beyond the age of 16 years and especially in university participation, which is now almost 45%. In spite of the concerns about the relative lack of ‘hard’ science in many university courses, it must be the case that at least half of university courses at whatever level involve some further science education. This suggests that in the future there may be a substantial increase in the proportion of the public that is ‘scientifically attentive’ in the Jon Miller sense.18

The second major change is the extraordinary, explosive increase in information available on the Web. This is both a blessing and a problem. It enormously increases the opportunity for self-education on the Web but raises the question of which of the millions of sources of information can be trusted. I imagine that, for example, few patients nowadays will not search the Web for information about their own diseases or the drugs they have been prescribed. Perhaps there should be some sort of ‘kitemark’ for quality, at least of the scientific and medical information on the Web. In some cases a respectable charity such as Cancer Research UK, or a body such as the Health Protection Agency at arm's length from the government, may provide the relevant quality control.

These two developments clearly have major implications for how we deal with PUS and engagement questions in the future. To what extent do people now get their information on scientific questions from the Web? What is the actual change in attentiveness as a result of Web access, and how has it influenced attitudes to science? How can one control the quality of what is out there, and guide use? How can one best take advantage of the interactive possibilities that the Web offers, including various sorts of bulletin board?

Another major change is in the proportion of the population that is over, say, 65 years old and supposedly retired. Adult education for the ‘third age’ is already a major activity and will also be very significantly influenced by Web access.

The next major inquiry in PUS and public engagement should I believe be into the implication of these issues, namely the increase in education beyond 16 years, access to the Web and the increase in the proportion of the population over 65 years of age. I would couple this with a further plea to broaden pre-university education and to make it more challenging for the abler and more academically inclined student, and to bring together again the British Science Association and the Royal Society.

Footnotes

Notes

1 J. D. Bernal, The social function of science (George Routledge & Sons, London, 1939).

2 The public understanding of science: report of the Royal Society's ad hoc group (The Royal Society, London, 1985).

3 Peter Collins, personal communication.

4 Peter Collins, personal communication.

5 C. P. Snow, The two cultures (introduction by S. Collini), 12th printing (Cambridge University Press, 2009). See also G. G. Ortolano, The two cultures controversy: science, literature and cultural politics in postwar Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

6 Then, respectively, Head of the Policy Studies Unit and Assistant Secretary, National Affairs, at the Society.

7 W. F. Bodmer, ‘Understanding statistics’, J. R. Statist. Soc. A 148 (2), 69–81 (1985).

8 P. M. D. Collins and W. F. Bodmer, ‘The public understanding of science’, Stud. Sci. Educ. 13, 96–104 (1986).

9 Realising our potential: a strategy for science, engineering and technology (Her Majesty's Stationery Office, London, 1993).

10 House of Lords, Science and society (Her Majesty's Stationery Office, London, 2000).

11 B. Wynne, ‘Public understanding of science research: new horizons or hall of mirrors?’, Public Understand. Sci. 1, 37–43 (1992).

12 S. Miller, ‘Public understanding of science at the cross roads’, Public Understand. Sci. 10, 115–120 (2001).

13 Collins and Bodmer, op. cit. (note 8).

14 P. Sturgis and N. Allum, ‘Science in society: re-evaluating the deficit model of public attitudes’, Public Understand. Sci. 13, 55–74 (2004).

15 Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, ‘Science and Society, 3 years on’ (POST, London, 2003). See http://www.parliament.uk/documents/post/13-may-proceedings.pdf

16 D. Dickson, ‘The case for a “deficit model” of science communication’, SciDev.Net (27 June 2005). See http://www.scidev.net/en/editorials/the-case-for-a-deficit-model-of-science-communic.html

17 W. F. Bodmer, Address to the Parliamentary and scientific committee, 16 July 1985, Science in Parliament vol. 43, no. 182 (October 1985).

18 ‘Scientifically attentive’ refers to the most scientifically engaged 20% of the population. See J. D. Miller, ‘Scientific literacy in the United States’, in Communicating science to the public (ed. D. Evered and M. O'Connor), pp. 14–19 (Wiley, Chichester, 1987).