Science Fundamentalists

The choice not being great on TV last night, I ended up watching the Richard Dimbleby lecture, delivered this year by the Nobel Prize winner, Sir Paul Nurse. Talk about evangelism, he was as good as Billy Graham, but no altar (should that be 'test tube') call. As a scientist (at least by training) myself I was encouraged to hear his powerful advocacy for pure science, science for science sake, and to feel his obvious excitement about scientific enquiry.

But then I started to get worried. He crossed the line. I have come across Muslim fundamentalists, Hindu fundamentalists, and a good few Christian fundamentalists but now I found myself being frightened by a science fundamentalist. According to Nurse science has ALL the answers and there is really no place for politics, religion, belief or conviction, in fact they only get in the way and mess things up.

Towards the end he also drifted into a scary nationalism. Science is to be used to advance the cause of Britain, to make Britain great, to overcome our 'competitors' - he used that word a lot. For me that did not even ring true with science because, in my limited experience, many of the great scientific advances of recent years have come from trans-national cooperation.

Amen, we need more good science ... but science which knows how to talk to faith, to politics and to community. I thought we were learning to live in a joined up world. Obviously not Sir Paul Nurse. "Science is great, long live science"!