Tyndall and Albemarle Street

News that the Royal Institution's magnificent headquarters in Mayfair, London may be placed on the market have caused somewhat of a divide amongst scientists.

While an editorial in the journal Nature called the RI itself "redundant" and argued for its collection of historic equipment and other resources to be bundled off to the Science Museum, other commentators, including Prof. Bruce Hood have argued, convincingly, for the institution to remain and to remain at its Mayfair location.

Hood argued in the Huffington Post that the Faraday lecture theatre at the RI has become the "iconic home of British science" and a "sacred site".

"[It is] a place that trancends a financial value, a cultural heritage that belongs to the world as much as Stonehenge" writes Hood.

Supporters rightly point to Michael Faraday, a physicist who pioneered the notion that science (and scientists) have a duty to communicate their work to a general audience. It was Faraday who began the famous RI Christmas Lectures in 1825 - they have been broadcast on TV since 1966.

Also worthy of mention here is the noted Irish-born scientist John Tyndall, who succeeded Faraday as Director of the Royal Institution in 1867.Tyndall was born in County Carlow in 1820 and studied in Britain and Germany, making significant contributions to a variety of fields including magnetism, heat and atmospherics. However, like Faraday, one of his great contributions was in science communication.

 Having joined the RI originally in 1853 (he was unsuccessful in applying for jobs at Galway, Cork and elsewhere), Tyndall delivered the RI Christmas lectures 12 times, from 1861 to 1884 and, like Faraday, was conscious of the need for science to be communicated to the public. He had developed his style of lecturing as a schoolteacher and in later years, according to Meadows, found that a drink before lectures improved his performance.

In a preface to the third edition of his book Heat: A Mode of Motion, Tyndall noted that his work on public lectures allowed him an opportunity to acquaint himself with the "knowledge and needs of England".

Tyndall and his contemporaries "deprecated and deplored the utter want of scientific knowledge, and the utter absence of sympathy with scientific studies, which mark the great bulk of our otherwise cultivated English public".

He was convinced that "if a scientific man take the trouble, which in my case is immense, of thinking and writing with life and clearness, he is sure to gain general attention. It can hardly be doubted, if fostered and strengthened in this way, that the desire for scientific knowledge will ultimately coerce the anomalies which beset our present system of education".

John Tyndall

"Science must grow", concluded Tyndall. "Its development is as necessary and as irresistible as the motion of the tides, or the flowing of the Gulf Stream. It is a phase of the energy of Nature, and as such is sure, in due time, to compel the recognition, if not to win the alliance, of those who now decry its influence and discourage its advance".

While it is not my place to tell the British scientific community what to do, Prof. Hood is correct in pointing out that the RI building is not just an important site for British science, it is of worldwide significance and would ideally be maintained for its current purpose. Would the worldwide art community permit the French government to sell off the Louvre or the British government to put the National Gallery up for sale?

In a recent letter to The Times of London, David Attenborough, along with 21 scientists wrote that "If Britain loses the Royal Institution, it loses a part of its past. This institution, with its iconic lecture room where almost all the Christmas lectures have been delivered, is just as precious as any ancient palace or famous painting".

"This must not happen in a country that cares about culture, and least of all in one that pins its hopes for future prosperity on a new generation of scientists and engineers."

There is something to be said about public engagement with science being more than just about bricks and mortar. Hands-on experimentation and web-based interaction are all tremendous leaps forward that, I'm sure, Faraday and Tyndall would have approved of. However, they do not replace a rich cultural heritage of science and scientific communication that is represented by the RI building at Albemarle Street, which is of enormous value besides its monetary one.

You can sign a petition to save 21 Albemarle Street as the home of the Royal Institution here.

No reason for Science vs. Religion posturing

During Pope Benedict’s recent visit to Britain, relations between science and religion have been brought into focus.

Speaking at St. Mary's University College in London on the second day of his visit, the pontiff addressed 4,000 students: "Never allow yourselves to become narrow. The world needs good scientists, but a scientific outlook becomes dangerously narrow if it ignores the religious or ethical dimension of life, just as religion becomes narrow if it rejects the legitimate contribution of science to our understanding of the world."

These words will be seen by some as an olive branch to a vocal community of scientists and sceptics who have opposed this visit.(contd...)

Read the rest of this post here in the Euroscientist, the official publication of the Euroscience organisation. It publishes articles on a variety of topics based on science and science policy.

Anti-GM campaigners can't have it both ways

British scientists are to set up a 1,000-square-metre plot of genetically modified potatoes in Norfolk. The potato plants have been genetically modified by scientists at The Sainsbury Laboratory (TSL) to be resistant to "Late Blight" which is caused by a fungi-like organism called Phytophthora infestans.

The experiment is designed to tell whether GM potato plants that are resistant to late blight in vitro (that's in the laboratory) are also resistant to the pathogen in vivo (i.e. in the field), where there are a much larger number of different strains of P. infestans. If a fully resistant potato variety can be found, it could at least put a dent in the estimated £3.5 billion worth of losses that the disease causes worldwide every year.

Much of that cost is related to the use of fungicides - chemicals used to control fungi or fungi-like organisms. (By the way, although it's most appropriate to refer to P. infestans as a "fungi-like organism" and not as a fungi, the difference is very minor and one with which we need not concern ourselves here.)

Professor Jonathan Jones of TSL explains: "We have isolated genes from two different wild potato species that confer blight resistance Similar genes are found in all plants, and we are now testing whether these ones work in a field environment to protect a commercial potato variety, Desiree, against this destructive potato disease".

The group of scientists screened about 100 different wild species of Solanum, the grouping of plants to which potatoes belong and identified just a handful that were resistant. The next step was to isolate genes and insert them into the commercially available potato variety Desiree. Watch a video of the process here.

The modified plants can now recognise the onset of late blight attack and can trigger the plant to switch on its own defence mechanisms. By switching on these plant-based defences, it may drastically reduce the levels of fungicide which need to be applied.

Despite this good news, anti-GM campaigners have once again come out against such trials. Kirtana Chandrasekaren, Friend of the Earth's Food Campaigner accused the British government of "wasting millions of pounds of taxpayers' money by forging ahead with unnecessary and unpopular GM trials.
"We can feed a growing global population without trashing the planet or resorting to factory farms and GM crops - the Government must help farmers shift to planet-friendly farming" said Chanrasekaren.

Dr. Helen Wallace of the campaign group GeneWatch also called the trial a "waste opf public money" and suggested that "it is possible to breed blight-resistant potatoes using conventional methods, so there is no need to use GM technology".

"anti-GM campaigners need to make a choice"What Dr. Wallace and the campaign groups fail to grasp is that it has been nearly 160 years since the end of the Irish Potato Famine when one million people died of starvation and further one million people emigrated to survive. In those 160 years of conventional breeding, a tiny handful of varieties have been produced with full resistance to the pathogen and their propagation has been severely limited by consumers opting for older, more familiar varieties.

So, anti-GM campaigners need to make a choice. Either we stick with existing varieties and pump millions of tonnes of fungicides into them every year or we opt for a slightly modified version of a commercially relatively successful variety which can defend itself from late blight, reducing fungicide use significantly in the process. The campaigners can't have it both ways.

A previous post on this blog also dealt with the issue of consumer acceptance of GM crops.

Number of the Week: £20 million

The amount spent by the British NHS on refurbishing the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital despite the complete lack of scientific evidence to suggest that it works any better than a placebo. A commitee of British MPs have urged that homeopathic medicine no longer be funded by the taxpayer. In a dig at the Prince of Wales (whos Foundation for Integrated Health funds homeopathy) Edzard Ernst, a long standing critic of homeopathic medicicine told New Scientist this week: "Either we are governed by evidence and science, or by Prince Charles."