I have a piece on New Scientist blogs today, about whether scientists should rule the roost when it comes to policy decisions. It comes from a talk I went to last night at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society. Just wanted to flag up something else that came up, though.

DEFRA, the dept for food, environment and rural affairs (though not necessarily in that order) has downgraded some of its research lines. One of those is animal welfare: there’s a feeling, it seems, that they now know what they need to about the subject.

I reckon that’s pretty good news. It suggests that the animal welfare campaigns of the last decade or so have succeeded in bringing these issues to the fore. Kudos to the campaigners. It’s also good news for the campaigns of now: raising public awareness works.

Other downgraded issues include noise, pesticides and transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (eg BSE and CJD). On the up? Biodiversity, food chain, soils and sustainable development, as well as the inevitable adapting to climate change.

You can get the DEFRA document here, or watch Bob Watson present it (at breakneck speed, if last night is anything to go by).

There’s a brilliant story on New Scientist today about why you should draw second in a gunfight. The best thing about it is the recollection that Neils Bohr, the father of quantum theory, used to force his colleagues to participate in gunfight experiments:

Niels Bohr once had a theory on why the good guy always won shoot-outs in Hollywood westerns. It was simple: the bad guy always drew first. That left the good guy to react unthinkingly – and therefore faster. When Bohr tested his hypothesis with toy pistols and colleagues who drew first, he always won.

Turns out Bohr was right: the circuits involved in reacting to a threat work faster than those that are self-stimulated. But it puts a whole new spin on Heisenberg’s troubled relationship with Bohr. Bohr was a big bully, and the man behind the uncertainty principle recalls one discussion over the implications of quantum theory ending “with my breaking out in tears because I just couldn't stand this pressure from Bohr.”

Heisenberg should be glad that quantum theory was invented before paintball – otherwise Bohr really would have given him something to cry about…
 

I have an article on the nuclear fusion reactor being built in the south of France in this week’s New Statesman. ITER ( the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) is an incredible project – the idea is to build something on Earth that operates at 150 million degrees, but generates useable, controllable energy through the same process that powers the sun.

The most interesting aspect of researching the piece was the fact that scientific objections are incredibly thin on the ground. There have been objections in the past, but now the project seems to have gathered enough evidence that it might just work.

It’s still an incredible longshot, though: a whole lot of factors have to come together to make it work. As someone said, "we're trying to put the sun in a box - but we don't know how to build the box." Others have been more directly scathing, and called it  “the science of wishful thinking”. Charles Seife’s book The Sun In A Bottle, for instance, concludes that, "so long as there are other energy sources available, fusion is unlikely to make a huge dent in humanity’s energy needs.” (It's a great book, by the way – Charles is an incredibly gifted writer)

For decades, people have joked that nuclear fusion is “just forty years away – and has been for forty years”. I don’t think that’s quite fair any more. Having said that, when you read the New Statesman article, you’ll find that it is still forty years away. At least...

I’m hoping that something staggering happened this morning. At 7.45 GMT, about an hour and a half ago as I write this, the spacecraft Rosetta performed a slingshot manoeuvre, using the Earth’s gravitational field to change course, rather than burning extra fuel. That’s not the staggering thing: that trick has become quite routine for spacecraft on long journeys. What is staggering is the possibility that, during the slingshot, Rosetta gained an extra 1mm/s in speed.

When the craft is travelling at 13 km/s, that doesn’t seem like a lot. But the gain in speed, if it happened, stands in defiance of all known physics. The prediction of an extra 1mm/s came from John Anderson, the man behind the NASA Pioneer missions in the 1970s. He has noticed that many spacecraft see anomalous speed changes during a slingshot. There is no law of physics that says why this should happen, but Anderson has worked out a formula that accounts for all previous speed changes in terms of spacecraft velocity, angle of approach relative to the planet’s spin, distance of closest approach and so on (you can hear him talk about it here). And, with Rosetta coming in for a near-Earth flyby, he was able to make a prediction about what would happen.

It’s scientific progress, right here, right now. We’ll find out what Rosetta did in a few days or maybe a few weeks. If Anderson is right, we have spotted a phenomenon that defies explanation. The history of science is full of such things; that’s how we got quantum theory started, for instance. If Anderson’s formula also works for Rosetta, maybe we will see the birth of something fundamentally new in science. It’s not often you can say that. Watch this space!
 

So, if you have a genetic predisposition to aggression, you can get a reduced sentence for murder. In Italy, at least.

As I mention in 13 Things, Patrick Haggard is trying to avoid a similar problem: defence lawyers want to use scientific arguments (such as “he has no free will”) to sway legal judgements. Haggard, an expert on the neuroscience of free will, says he can’t be sure enough of anything that neuroscience is saying to testify about it in court.

What’s more, would we even want him to? I don’t think anybody in their right mind likes the idea of a murderer being released earlier because he is predisposed to aggressive behaviour.  And we feel that way precisely because of what the science says, not in spite of it!

At the risk of repeating myself, this all plays into the same tricky territory as the Nutt case. Who says science is a neutral, implication-free pursuit of the truth, or that we should blindly say that if the scientific evidence says something, that trumps experience, culture and context?

On yesterday's George Lamb show, I mentioned how researchers have discovered that there might be gene variants that can make you a bad driver. Does this mean these people should be excused from prosecution if they kill someone in an accident? Or does it mean that they shouldn’t be allowed to drive?
 

The government’s scientific advisory panel on Free Will has made it clear that science has shown there’s no such thing. Despite this, the government insists on holding people responsible for their actions. Should the chair of the panel resign?

Here’s the thing. Just because you’re a scientific expert on a particular subject, does that mean people should do what you say? Or should they take your scientific opinion and weigh it up against other, non-scientific factors that also matter to them?

If you’re a believer in the supremacy of science, then I guess you’re going to be astonished and exasperated when people shrug their shoulders and decide that, despite what you say, they’re going to stick with their own worldview. I’m not a believer in the supremacy of science as a viewpoint: I think it’s one (very important) angle on how to run a society. There’s more to being human (and being in a human society) than can be measured and reported in scientific terms.

I’m talking, of course, about the David Nutt affair. The UK government’s advisor on drugs resigned last week after the government decided not to follow his advice. I won’t repeat the story: there’s loads of stuff about the controversy at the Guardian.

Yes, science says that alcohol and tobacco are worse than cannabis in terms of harm. But we have a cultural tradition of accepting their use – and we have developed ways of coping with the impact. With cannabis, it’s different: we don’t know how to deal with it. Science has little or nothing to say about the various ways our culture deals with these issues, and so a simple measure of harm can’t be the only factor involved in deciding how we deal with their use.

Everyone is weighing in on the latest Ida fossil news, so here’s my take. For me, what’s interesting is how times have changed. When the original story came out, it smelled wrong. Not from a scientific perspective  - I don’t have enough information to comment on that – but the fact that publication of a peer-reviewed paper was not the focus. Instead there was a David Attenborough-voiced documentary on the BBC, a book, a press conference…it was SO much worse than the whole cold fusion debacle that is held up as the worst case of bad science, basically because a press conference preceded their peer-reviewed paper.

So how come it’s OK to do it like this now?

Well, maybe it isn’t – if you ask Jørn Hurum’s scientific peers, many will say he’s a showman (and that’s not a good thing among scientists – I once heard Michio Kaku described as “the Jerry Springer of string theory”, and it wasn’t meant as a compliment). But the fact is, everyone now expects, or even wants, a bit of showmanship from their scientists (hence Kaku’s popularity?).

So, in many ways, Pons and Fleischmann were simply ahead of their time. I wonder what would happen if their announcement of a potentially revolutionary new energy source had come in 2009, not 1989?
 

What's in the bag, two evolutionary lines, or one? Because I’m a difficult character, I enjoyed reading this at Nature. Donald Williamson of Liverpool University had a paper accepted by the National Academy of Sciences for online publication. Then the Academy decided not to put it in the print edition because so many members thought it was rubbish.

Williamson’s idea is that larvae and their adults have a different evolutionary history. You can read about it in New Scientist here. The really interesting thing is that, when New Scientist published a feature (sorry, only a preview to non-subscribers) about the messy nature of modern evolutionary biology in general, it got into all kinds of trouble.

The fact is, no one likes to admit that evolutionary science does not yet have a straightforward and, most importantly, complete narrative. It’s not just a tree of life, it’s a whole tangle of branches. But, as one of the reviewers who accepted Williamson’s paper put it in the Nature piece, evolutionary biologists are an “entrenched group" who can be reluctant to "consider alternate ideas". No wonder progress in the subject, which relies on first admitting there is still a lot of work to do, is so slow.

Scientists, eh?
 

OK, listen up – this is important. This story may be a bit UK-centric, but I'm doing it anyway. The Times Higher has highlighted a report out today that says business interests are having undue influence on science (you can download a summary or the full report from that link).

“The rise in industrial funding of university science is compromising its quality as well as inhibiting research for the wider public good,” says the Higher. The report comes from the pressure group Scientists for Global Responsibility. One of the authors told the Higher that, “The trustworthiness of science and scientists is at stake.”

In areas ranging across the pharmaceutical, tobacco, military, oil and gas and biotechnology industries they found evidence of bias in commercially funded studies. Basically, if the sponsor likes the results, they see the light of day. If it doesn’t, they don’t.

At a time when government policy is to fund things that have a higher chance of producing economic wealth, someone, somewhere in government surely needs a reality check. History makes it clear that basic science pays off in the end – take this year’s Nobel Prize for physics, for example. But, the thing is, you can’t predict where this will happen.  And what about the hard-to-estimate (in financial terms) benefits that come from doing basic biochemistry? So much has come out of that – but nobody knew what spin-out companies they were going to start before they began the research (or asked for the money)!

It’s not news (to me at least) that we need a radical re-think on how science is funded. One of the report’s recommendations is that a new scientific organisation to distribute funds based on the public interest should be set up. Yeah, said that. To almost universal derision.

It is government’s job to do a better job of ensuring that science continues to do well what it has always done well. In this respect, at least, government has been shirking its responsibilities.

So, what now? Do we sit back and say, yeah, well, that’s just how it is? Who is finally going to stand up and do something about this? The Royal Society, perhaps? Its President, Martin Rees, is a sponsor of the pressure group, so maybe. But I'm not confident. Who is championing science’s cause in government?

Almost nobody, because governments don’t live or die by their attitude towards science. Which is a pity. Although no one gets elected on the basis of what they are going to do for science, it is an implicit part of the responsibility of being in government. What is happening at the moment is not unlike implementing a policy of only providing secondary education to children who show extraordinary academic ability in primary school. And don’t think that any government who thought they could get away with that wouldn’t give it a try.

The bottom line is, science matters, but it is simply not being given enough thought. It’s not even about money; for me, it’s about the way the present amount of money is shared out. I want to be a part of a conversation about this, at the very least. Who’s in?

So, the Nobel committee has refused the call to instigate new Nobels for public health and environment. It’s an interesting development, because it shows that the committee are not particularly bothered about making  the prizes more populist.

That has to be a good thing, in my opinion. In an age when scientists are under ever more pressure to do research that has headline-grabbing potential, it’s great that the greatest prize goes to those who are almost certainly not household names – and, in most cases, never will be – for research that rarely has immediate resonance with the public. It’s a nightmare for journalists, because we have to make that link between where the breakthrough happens and where it might lead. Perhaps this year, with prizes for research involving optical fibre, digital image capture and ageing, things have been a little easier than usual. But the research that leads to Nobel prizes is still at the cutting edge of science, the bleak frontier where it is incredibly difficult to make world-changing progress (as I've explained here). The amazing thing is, people do make that progress, and they do it because the process of discovery, though unbelievably hard-going, is its own reward.