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MOST comment on the recent address by Jim Lovelock to Friends of the
Earth has focused naturally enough on the environmental issues. It would
be a shame, though, to ignore his comments on the state of science in Britain.
Throughout the 1980s, scientists in Britain have argued over how to deal
with a seemingly unsympathetic government that wants to tell them what to
do. Lovelock’s speech raises wider issues that deserve an airing.

Science, he says, ‘has grown fat and lazy and corrupt and like an obese
atherosclerotic man imagines that more rich food will cure his condition’.
Lovelock maintains that the fragmentation of science has created ‘a vast
array of expertises, each of them a safe secure haven for the mediocre or
an empire in which the career minded could satisfy their ambitions’. He
ascribes much of the decline of science to reductionism, specialisation
and peer review. He is missing an equally important influence. The activity
now labelled as ‘science’ is not the pursuit that it used to be.

The tag ‘scientist’ is now about as meaningful as that of ‘engineer’.
The latter is wrongly perceived by some to be a man, never a woman, in overalls
and with greasy hands – someone who mends trains. The label scientist now
attaches to men, and a few women, who wear white coats and who measure things.
They do not have to understand what they measure or, as Lovelock points
out, how their sophisticated instruments work, but if they measure something
they are scientists.

This is not to reject this important role. Technicians are often more
important than scientists in ensuring the smooth running of society; but
to mislabel them leads to misunderstanding, and helps the public to see
science as ‘a comfortable career for the mediocre, with the prospects of
tenure and pension rights and protected by trade unions’, as Lovelock puts
it.

Is it science that has picked these bad habits or is it something masquerading
under the name? Whatever the case, scientists should always ask themselves
where science is going. Is peer review ‘the most malign influence on science’?
Does the current ethic, ‘where winning prizes, getting rich or powerful
are the proper objectives of a life in science’, encourage cheating and
turn science into something ‘all too like the degraded charade of the Olympic
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