Science Show

The twenty-first century presents challenges unprecedented in human history. These challenges arise due to the successes of science, engineering, technology and medicine. Current world population is 6.8 billion. Mid-century there will be 9 billion people. David King calls for a re-thinking of priorities and questions our funding for big physics and cosmology projects over funding for solar energy and new technologies for food production.

Transcript

Robyn Williams: Earlier on in The Science Show we mentioned Sir David King who is president of the BA, how he made the statement in his presidential address that maybe we should concentrate more on really urgent issues in science rather than the basic stuff that may or may not lead to something in 10 or 20 or 30 years time. I've caught up with Sir David who of course was the advisor to Her Majesty's government here in Britain on science policy. It's a fairly far-reaching thing to say, Sir David, what did you mean by that, if I got it right?

David King: We are faced with a series of enormous challenges in this century. These challenges are quite different from anything our civilisation has had to face up to before and in an interesting sense these challenges arise because of the successes of what science, engineering, medicine, agriculture delivered in the 19th and 20th centuries. The result of all those successes is that we have a lifespan of around 75 to 80 years whereas at the beginning of the century it was about 40 to 45. The consequence of that is that we started adding another billion people to the planet every 12 years, and so we entered the 21st century at six billion, we're today at 6.8 billion, and by mid-century we're going to be at nine billion. There's the new challenge. This means that we really need to regear our thinking.

What is critically important is that we mainstream this into all of our thinking, not just science, I mean into political decision making, economics. Growing our GDP may be important but controlling emissions of carbon dioxide is even more important. We need a cultural rethink. In terms of science we need to also then examine what our priorities are. I'm really appealing to young people and saying the opportunities in science, engineering, plant sciences, right across the board, are enormous. We've got to feed nine billion people, all with the aspiration to live at the standard of living of the average Australian. Every Chinese, every Indian wants to have that and so does every African.

Our ability to understand the role of the Higgs Boson, our ability to understand very esoteric aspects of scientific interest is far greater, I would suggest, than our ability to understand how to generate efficiently more usable energy from sunlight, to deal with problems of malaria, HIV/AIDS which are causing millions of deaths in Africa every year. Our abilities, in other words, have skewed away from meeting these challenges. So I think we need to rethink funding in science, engineering, medicine, technology, and reprioritise so that we encourage the most brilliant minds to tackle these problems.

Robyn Williams: So, if I may say, if the Large Hadron Collider came up for funding and you were still advising the Prime Minister, if the space station came up for funding, enormous costs, you'd say no?

David King: I certainly worry about the fact that we find it easier to think about landing a man on Mars than to think about dealing with these problems that I'm mentioning. So the Large Hadron Collider, I wouldn't switch it off, massive investment, very exciting, you can get young people interested in science because we're all interested in cosmology, but where is the point at which we have to say to particle physicists, 'That's enough'? Because they could go on building bigger and bigger machines. Eventually do they go right around the planet, right round the equator, and then we say 'that's enough', or do we let them circle it around the Moon as well?

It may sound absurd but there's got to be a point at which we say 'enough of that, let's refocus our energy'. People say to me, but what about the World Wide Web, for example, the spin-off from CERN? Well, I would say, what about taking the brilliant new imitator of Tim Berners-Lee who developed the World Wide Web while he was at CERN, and getting him to work on these problems? He'll spin out the same things.

Robyn Williams: Another thing that has been obviously an issue in this festival has been your statement on genetically modified crops and suggesting in fact that with all those people you mentioned in the beginning who will have to be fed and have to be fed now, it is too late to put off the GM opportunity. How far would you go with that?

David King: My point is that agricultural technology can be geared up to deliver food for nine billion people at a level that would satisfy them, but if we went down the route of organic farming, if we go down the route of rejecting modern technology, not only will we struggle to do that but actually we will have to use more of our land mass to deliver the food, which means that the human footprint will actually wipe out the biodiverse system. So I'm actually putting forward the rather radical idea that we should have intensive farming of some areas of our global land and then maintain the other areas of the land for managing the biodiverse system.

Robyn Williams: How much does the green opposition to this sort of technology frustrate you?

David King: Enormously because I see people in Africa starving, year on year, I see the fatality rate from malnutrition and from disease from poor water conditions and poor hygiene with food, around 700,000 Africans a year dying, and we need to focus on that as quickly as we can. In other words, to develop new crops that are drought resistant (and maybe the state of Victoria in Australia could do with these), to deal with rice that is flood resistant, to deal with saline resistant plants as well, to develop these new crops and keep ahead of the diseases the crops are exposed to. To keep ahead of those we need a quick tool, and GM is just such a tool.

If we eschew GM technology, we can get there, we can get our knees into mud, our arms up to the armpits in mud and year after year slowly develop the new crops, but I would suggest it would take 20 years by that route compared with a couple of years by the GM route. Why would we reject that? I say this because, yes, we need good regulation on GM products, but at the same time I don't know of any single example of a human being ever suffering from eating GM foods, despite the fact that six million farmers around the world now farm GM products. So there are a large number of people eating them.

Robyn Williams: You've just become a head of a school of enterprise and environment. Is the job of that school to look at these very sorts of things where it's a green business opportunity, that you want to see how best you can put things together without paying the penalty perhaps of allowing the usual corporate route to run away with things as they have done, to some extent, as Monsanto has confessed that it did in the beginning with GM crops. So, in other words, what is the remit that you have in your school?

David King: You describe it quite well. We have two sides to the remit, and it may be surprising. Here's the oldest university in Britain, possibly in the world, facing the 21st century. In establishing the school, the university is saying every undergraduate coming to study whatever subject, whether it's philosophy, politics, economics, physics or engineering will be exposed to the 21st century challenges I've been talking about, so I have to mainstream these environmental issues into all parts of the university. This will involve establishing new chairs of environmental economics, env ironmental philosophy, environmental engineering et cetera.

At the same time we're creating a global hub, under the brand name of Oxford, to bring together the private sector, governments and academics to find solutions to our 21st century problems and to assist other people to find solutions. The idea is not that we will produce all the solutions but that we will become a hub where people can gather and discuss how these solutions may emerge. A critical part of this (and I know of no other part of a university in the world which is doing this) is bringing the private sector heavily on board. So I'm developing a very big partnership board with the world's main companies sitting on it, so that we can deliver. Of course the private sector needs the legislation from governments to drive this though, which is why we're also working with government.

I'm also establishing within the school a new futures laboratory, and the futures laboratory will have two parts to it; one is developing futures methodologies. We're not predicting the future, we're working on developing scenarios into the future so that we can become more robust in government and private sector decision making. And then the other half of the futures laboratory will be working on futures programs. So a program of work might be; what is the appropriate mix on the electric grids for each country in Europe after 2050? And then of course we'd be working with all of the utilities around Europe, with the energy companies.

Robyn Williams: How have you found the recruits, both in business and in the environmental movement? Who's the most reluctant to join you?

David King: Interestingly my biggest problem in the first six months in the job of establishing the school has been managing expectations because I've had literally 100 emails a day, still coming in, from people around the world. So quite clearly there is a general recognition that what we're doing is needed. So in October we will officially launch the new Smith school of enterprise and the environment at Oxford, and when we launch it I will have got 25 staff on board. I will then, I think, begin to be able to deliver into what everyone feels is necessary.

Robyn Williams: Sir David, when I arrived in Liverpool just now I saw a giant spider crawling up a building. How much in Britain have you had these giant objects running around and what effect have they had?

David King: This is a French company. The first giant object they developed was a giant elephant, the sultan's elephant that had a building on top of its back. The elephant, about three storeys high, walked all around London for about three days. No prior announcement was made, but one day in the middle of London a great big hole appeared in one of the main roads with the tar all burnt around the edges of the hole where a rocket had apparently smashed into London and this elephant and somebody called a 'little girl' emerged.

Now, the little girl is also about three storeys high, and these puppets, managed with the most amazing engineering, spent three days walking around London. And in the end, Saturday and Sunday that week, there were about half a million people following them as they walked around. The spider is, again, wonderful that it's happening during our festival of science because it's a wonderful piece of engineering. There was this enormous creature hanging off the side of a building as you arrived at the railway station.

Robyn Williams: It was really sensational. You come from Liverpool actually, originally South Africa which is why you're speaking about the African problem with creating food and so on. What was your experience like here at the university?

David King: I spent 14 years here, arriving as a young man aged 34, I was a professor of physical chemistry, and Liverpool had got itself into the doldrums, frankly. This great city...it was once the richest city in Europe and, I have to say, largely because of the slave trade, but also because the trade with America was largely through Liverpool. But the manufacturing base had been lost, the dockyards had been lost, and so the city was in the doldrums.

Since 1970 or thereabouts, the city has been rebuilding itself. It's no fluke that this is the city where the Beatles emerged. Many, many playwrights, poets, musicians, it's an international, global docklands city with all of these cultures mixing, and that has remained. So it's still culturally a very lively city. It's very appropriate that this year it's Europe's City of Culture.

Robyn Williams: It's really vibrant. My final question to you...Lord Martin Rees, the president of the Royal Society, did a book called Our Final Century with no question mark. How do you feel about our prospect for solving these global problems? Are we going to make it?

David King: Yes, we are going to make it and I say that almost with the same certainty as the way he omitted the query at the end of his title. I think we are already seeing a tremendous interest around the world in the climate change problem, the biggest problem we've ever been faced with. We have to decarbonise our energy sources around the world within 50 years if we're going to manage this problem. I think we can do it. The excitement that this will generate in the scientific, technological, engineering community is enormous, but also the excitement in the private sector because this is a new opportunity for the private sector. Those people who read the opportunity correctly will be doing very well for themselves, and I think this is already happening.

Just a final aside on that, we have a European Union trading scheme in carbon dioxide, a cap and trade scheme, and there were many sceptics. Last year the total amount of money traded through the city of London was around five billion euro. I thought that was quite a lot. Let me tell you, it's just beginning to take off. Today it's 60 billion euro. I believe in no more than ten years we'll see the global trade valued at around one trillion dollars and this means that we will have a new commodity, and it will be the only fully internationally traded commodity. The reason I'm raising this is because this would have been unthinkable ten years ago, and here we are already moving rapidly into a new cultural sphere in which we're trading in a negative commodity in a way we've traded nothing else before.

Robyn Williams: Sir David, good to see you again.

David King: Thank you very much, Robyn, wonderful to see you too.

Robyn Williams: That was Dr David King who happens to be president of the British Association, and formally he was Chief Scientist to the British government, and now he runs the new school in Oxford of business and environment.

Guests

David King
President British Association for the Advancement of Science UK
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_King_(scientist)

Director Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment Oxford University UK
http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_releases_for_journalists/071129_1.html

Presenter

Robyn Williams

Producer

David Fisher

Radio National often provides links to external websites to complement program information. While producers have taken care with all selections, we can neither endorse nor take final responsibility for the content of those sites.