17
Examination of witness
Sir Adrian Smith.
Q1 The Chair: Welcome to this Select Committee on Science and Technology. We are very pleased to have as our witness today Sir Adrian Smith, president of the Royal Society. Can I start by wishing you a very happy birthday, Sir Adrian?
Sir Adrian Smith: This invitation is a very unusual birthday present, but thank you.
The Chair: We are very pleased that you could be here. This is really a valedictory session, in the sense that we would like you to reflect on your time as president of the Royal Society and to get your views on how you think science and technology in the UK has changed over that time. Where do you see the major challenges for science policy in the UK now? What advice would you have for your successor as president of the Royal Society?
Sir Adrian Smith: Those are simple questions. Perhaps I can start with a bit of scene setting. What is the Royal Society about? For over 360 years, it has stood for scientific excellence and the pull-through of our understanding of the world for the benefit of humanity, and that has not changed. If you have a role such as mine, we have to keep that in mind, whatever the challenges and the environments we are in.
Going back to the beginning, in my first interview when I was in this role, there was a lot of rhetoric about the UK being a science superpower. I thought that one should point to the gap between, as it were, the stated ambition and the resources to bring that about. We do not hear phrases like that quite so often now, but the reality remains that, if the UK wants to compete globally, we have to invest substantially in science and innovation.
Going back to the last spending review, people such as me write irritating letters all the time to the Chancellor and to the Times complaining about the iniquity of politicians, and so on and so forth, but also arguing for investment in science. One had to welcome the Government’s £86 billion commitment in the last spending review as a sign of support providing a degree of confidence to researchers and investors, but what has remained through the period, which we really should take note of, is that we still lag behind our G7 peers in overall investment. Looking further afield, China, up until 2026, had been increasing R&D spend by about 7% a year, without thinking about what is going on in India and elsewhere.
Contextually, one thing that should concern us, and should continue to concern us, is international positioning and competitiveness. If our science excellence is a national asset, how do we protect and grow that in an increasingly competitive international environment? Productivity and levels of R&D investment still lag. We are about 11th in the OECD for R&D investment as a percentage of GDP, which is behind Belgium, Austria and Finland.
Reflecting on things, one is the constant struggle to assert the importance of science, because you are bidding against other things for taxpayers’ money. Why should the taxpayer invest? The constant refrain is that this is a crucial investment across the piece.
Just for a moment on the international thing: I came into the job when we had left Horizon Europe and the European framework programmes, and that had destroyed a lot of co-operation and things that had been built up over the years. One of the flags that we flew was to rejoin Horizon. I would not say that we won that argument, but the logic came through in the end. I know that there was a concern among Ministers, given that we had made all this noise, about what would happen if we got back in but were not successful in bidding. It was rather gratifying that, in the first year of being back in, we outdid everybody else in winning grants, with £635 million going to UK scientists last year alone.
The other thing in terms of high-level background is long-term stability and the argument for trying to see investment in science and innovation over a 10-year framework rather than the usual political cycle. Over the years, science policy in this country has been hampered by policy churn and stop-start investment. I hope that the political class will not mind me pointing out that, during my five-year term, I have had introductory meetings with six Science Ministers.
The Chair: That is a good start. Thank you.
Q2 Lord Lucas: Sir Adrian, is UK science as a whole as efficient and effective as it should be in terms of its allocation and, if not, what mechanisms would you propose to improve that?
Sir Adrian Smith: We have to backtrack a bit and just remind ourselves of what the mechanisms are and what the landscape is. As a landscape, looking at the delivery mechanisms and simplifying somewhat, we have public sector research establishments, we have institutes, and we have universities. We put 75% to 80% of public R&D through the universities. That is unusual in international terms. In other countries, a much higher percentage goes into mission-driven institutes.
There is an interesting debate that, as far as I know, has never been bottomed out politically. That was the report that Paul Nurse did on the landscape. Do we get it right in terms of the ratio of what goes through university systems, which are, in some sense, strategically untrammelled and bottom-up, and mission-driven institutes? That remains an interesting question. Paul Nurse’s review got stuck in in-trays for a very long time, and no clear government positioning on that has come out.
There are real issues that you are hinting at in terms of efficiency, investment, and so on and so forth, which we can continue to think about. I am not sure that there is a magic wand here, but the first thing that Ian Chapman said on his appointment to UKRI was, more or less, about focus and efficiency in delivery. It is not resolvable by formulae. We need a great deal of untrammelled discovery research. Evidence over the years tells us that that is a great thing.
On the other hand, just how long do you wait for that to deliver? We waited 200 years for number theorems to turn into encryption, but that is a bit long for most of the delivery. There is a real issue there, but what I would like to see is a proper debate around Paul Nurse’s review and recommendations, and how the Government and politicians see that.
Q3 Baroness Neville-Jones: Sir Adrian, you have focused on the public sector, and we have now talked about one element in that, which is the mission-driven institutions. We certainly have not focused on what organisations such as the NPL could do more of, for instance. To take another feature of the scene, what is the contribution, in your view, of the private sector? What ought it to be? We have relatively few companies now doing research, which was not true 20 or 30 years ago. The decline in private sector contributions is quite serious and ought not to go unmarked.
Sir Adrian Smith: Historically, that has certainly been true, with places such as ICI having major research departments. That is just a historical fact that that has happened, but it is still the case that an enormous amount of R&D investment takes place in the private sector. The issues there really are about scale and, again, international competitiveness. We do not have a Google. We do not have a Microsoft. You can wring your hands about it, but it is a fact.
Baroness Neville-Jones: With the greatest respect, nor do the Germans, but they do manage to do quite a lot of private sector research. It is in the area of a move to commercialisation, where it seems to me that the private sector could do a good deal more than it does.
Sir Adrian Smith: There are two slightly separate issues there. One is the scale of research that is done in private industry, the quality and the rest. Just digressing slightly, if you take frontier AI, to do that kind of frontier research, you need vast exascale computing and armies of PhD students, so there is a scale issue for some of this.
If you are going to acknowledge the scale of it, you have to come back to a very serious national debate about what we can own and be good at in a sovereign sense. There have been attempts in government to try to chunk up and look at the world, saying, “What can we really own and be great at? What are we pretty good at but need to collaborate on? What can we just not do at all, so have to buy or rent?” That is quite a useful lens, but I do not see it being systematically applied to the landscape, so that is an interesting task.
Q4 Baroness Willis of Summertown: I have many questions following on from that, but I have a specific one here, which comes back to the Royal Society’s Science 2040 project. It is an excellent piece of work. In there, it does suggest the pursuit of this long-term strategy, which has reforms to skills and education, a renewed focus on commercialisation, and reforms to research-performing organisations. What is your view on how the Government are addressing these issues? Are they taking all of these and moving them forward? Are there some that they are more focused on, or none?
Sir Adrian Smith: There are a series of separate issues. Even within the five years that I have been president, the landscape changes. Look at what has happened in the States, as an international comparison. It was an attempt, with 2040, to stand back and say, “What are the components of the ecosystem? What might we do to get out of the game over the next 15 years?”
Education and skills are not the same thing, but let us talk about them together. This is a major plank of where the Royal Society is ending up, which is really a judgment that we have not got it right. We have a structured education system. It is wrong-headed in terms of what it does at 16 years old, and half the population does not continue to be numerate or scientific. We have this absurdity of failing huge numbers of people in GCSE maths, and then making them take it again and failing them again—a monstrous, scandalous waste of effort and psychological damage—instead of inventing something that would test competence.
The education system is a very important part of that landscape. Within that, I do not know whether you have all read our marvellous report on the future of mathematics, but maths underpins this whole enterprise. The nature of maths, and what it needs to be and what people need to understand, has radically changed. Left-handed trigonometry might be good for plumbers, but most of us do not do it, whereas data and statistics, and uncertainty and probability, are absolutely pervasive.
The curriculum just does not reflect that. The curriculum in schools is as if computers were never invented and we were not in an age of data and AI. One theme that has emerged from that 2040 look at the ecosystem is a radical relook at the education system.
In terms of skills, the numeracy competences in adults in this country are out of line with most other things. Then you look at where the jobs of the future are and the growth in those. It is all data and digital, and we do not reflect that. That is one theme that we have not got right and we radically need to do something about.
Baroness Willis of Summertown: We had a short session on maths, and there are absolutely huge issues there, but, across the whole education system, are the Government approaching these issues constructively and where should that be happening?
Sir Adrian Smith: I am sorry to say that the curriculum and assessment review is timid, half-hearted and not ambitious enough. I am not a fan. For us, the education and skills agenda is a major flag wave.
The other aspect is innovation and this perennial thing of the pull-through from ideas. We are still not quite there. Many years ago, universities stood aloof from the whole interaction with business and commerce. That has changed radically, but, within the university system and within the career structure for scientists, the incentives are overwhelmingly to be academic, to be judged by your peers and to write beautiful papers that people admire. The incentives are not structured, within promotion systems and the rest, to encourage people to be more fluid and to move between universities and industry. That debate has been going on for years, and we still have not got it right, so there is a lot of unfinished business.
There is another major theme that emerged when we were thinking about 2040. I was not thinking about it 50 years ago, but, apart from perhaps religious fanatics, I am not sure that anybody in general would have challenged science per se. Now the whole notion of the enlightenment values of evidence-based, rational thinking is under attack in misinformation, disinformation and social media. We cannot be smug in thinking that, because we are clever scientists, the world will respect and listen to us. We have to fight for it and fight back.
There are three themes there, really. The skills agenda is wrong; the incentive structures could do with relooking at; and what are we going to do about misinformation and disinformation, and to get back somehow to teaching kids critical thinking? That was a slight rant; I am sorry.
Q5 Lord Berkeley: Sir Adrian, you have given us some very interesting statistics about government expenditure on science and technology not just here but in other countries. Many of us would be quite surprised at how even the smaller ones that you mentioned seem to be going ahead of us in terms of expenditure. What is the future here? Would you advise the Government to up their expenditure on science and technology by so much a year, or can we go further than that? We have to have some kind of a target to go for, and we seem to be lagging behind many others on that.
Sir Adrian Smith: One could argue that in two ways. First, you have to look at international positioning and competitiveness. This is if you accept that investment in science is fundamental to everything, as it were. If you look at the five missions that the current Government have come up with in terms of growth and health, and so on and so forth, each one of those is not going to be transformed without science and the innovation that comes through science, so this is the most crucial underpinning investment. It is awkward if I stand up and say, “Spend more money on me than on nurses”, but they should, actually. That is the international comparison.
Secondly, if missions are the structure in which you are going to test delivery, none of those can be properly delivered without a huge amount of science and innovation. It is an all-pervasive thing. It is not just one little box, in which you choose to invest or not. It underpins everything. Investing in nurses is fine, but investing in science gives you new drugs and solutions, which is a far bigger return.
Q6 Baroness Northover: You have made some relevant comments already in this area. The Science 2040 interim report made five key recommendations setting out a vision for how a better science system in the UK could work. One of these was on making the UK a leading nation in which to innovate and translate knowledge, for which a key recommendation was removing barriers to innovation and commercialisation. I wondered whether you could expand a bit further on your earlier comments on how the Government should remove these barriers.
Sir Adrian Smith: You will have your own list, but two obvious barriers are in terms of people and something that I mentioned earlier, which is the fluidity of movement between academia and industry, and the flow of ideas. Maybe the other major heading is regulation. Examine piece by piece whether regulation that may have started off with a great intention, in terms of safety or whatever, is a brake on innovation per se. In an international context, are we regulating in a way that is a brake on innovation in the UK, where other countries are not? There are two things, really, in terms of people and regulation.
The bigger issue of finance, and the perennial thing that we are good at start-ups but bad at scale-ups, is outwith the pay grade, I am afraid, of the Royal Society. Nick and I sit on the Council for Science and Technology, and there is a higher level of the great and the good who can solve that one, but there is a serious financial issue in terms of investment.
If I understand the world properly, the climate that induces investment and stable, long-term commitment is part of our background mantra that will contribute to that. There is a new office that David Willetts is chairing. I cannot remember its title, but it is looking systematically at whether various forms of regulation put a brake on innovation. That is quite important.
Baroness Northover: Could you give an example of an area that ought to be addressed in terms of regulation?
Sir Adrian Smith: I have to be slightly careful, because, particularly if we are talking in human terms, we get into ethical considerations. If we forget about humans for a minute, understanding in genomics, proteomics and molecular structures opens up huge potential for transformation in agriculture, for example, but there may be regulations in place, which were originally to do with fears about genetic manipulation in humans, that have led to brakes on uses of genetics in other areas. If the David Willetts outfit does its job properly, we might get some progress there.
Q7 Lord Stern of Brentford: Thank you, Adrian, for coming. As you know, I am off the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology now, but it is an important vehicle. I wanted to ask about relationships between the academies such as the Royal Society, the British Academy, the engineers and the medics. Particularly in the context of AI, climate, biodiversity, pandemics and biogenetics, the last 15 or 20 years have seen science and technology issues push their way right to the centre of public discussion. You just fall over them. You cannot ignore them.
At the same time, a big chunk of the barriers—and I do not want to give a percentage, but it is a very large chunk—to handling those kinds of issues lie in the economy, politics and society. It really puts the searchlight on the way in which scientists and technologists interact with the economy, politics and society, and much more powerfully than I remember it in 50 years or more of academic life.
More generally, but putting it in the context of the four academies, how can they work together to make the case for research quantitatively, to look at the nature of that case, and to tackle the political difficulties and, indeed, the whole education side? Will there be a moment when the academies will be much more powerful if they work together still more intensively than in the past?
Sir Adrian Smith: I would say that that has transformed in the last five years. I should be careful with what I say, but I inherited something where there were mutual suspicions. It just did not work. It depends partly on people, but, during my time, we have had presidents and chief execs working together at a totally different level than they were at least five years ago. We meet regularly. The CEOs meet regularly. This Thursday, we are all meeting together with Patrick Vallance. There is a unified way in which we are linking up with Ministers and civil servants.
Intellectually, it is as you said. It is completely obvious. Hardly anything is a purely scientific or technical issue. We get into social science, behavioural science, economics and legal aspects. That is much more on the table and working a lot better than it was a few years ago. We meet very regularly. We have joint enterprises of various kinds. There is certainly a lot of interaction with the British Academy on the social implications of AI. We have workings with the Royal Academy of Engineering on defence security and so on.
You are right. In some sense, like all divisions, there are pluses and minuses. The Royal Society is not going to give up being the Royal Society for science, but there are very few issues where, when we form a working party, we do not need social scientists or medics.
Lord Stern of Brentford: It is very good to hear that it is working well together. I venture to note that, when I was the president of the British Academy, I worked very closely with Paul Nurse when he was then president of the Royal Society, including in raising resources from the Treasury. Given the way in which you have been moving, which is wholly to be welcomed, do you have a strategic agenda in which, as the four, you say, “These are our priorities over the coming years”?
Sir Adrian Smith: We have not got that far in terms of fighting for money from the Chancellor. We are still a bit territorial in that.
Lord Stern of Brentford: I think that that is a mistake.
Sir Adrian Smith: We are not yet there. It is the direction of travel. With what is going on in the States, there are two things that are an opportunity for the UK. One is significant figures in the US wanting out. The other is the hordes of the brightest and best around the world who would have seen the United States as a destination for PhDs or post-docs but who do not want to go there any more.
We were instrumental in working across the academies and putting schemes, as it were, to Government. They are not called “poaching from America” schemes. They are called international agility fellowships or something like that. We got the Government to put up £54 million, and the Royal Society is putting up about £30 million. It was not about putting pressure on Government, but making the case to Government, which we did collectively.
Lord Stern of Brentford: You need to put the money in the universities to attract those people, because that is where many would want to be.
Sir Adrian Smith: That is where the money would go.
Lord Stern of Brentford: I am not sure that we have the time to pursue that.
Sir Adrian Smith: The general point that you are making—I was going to say “subtle criticism”—is that there is more to do in joining up, for sure. If you asked me, “What is the job for the next president?”, it would be that.
The Chair: Lord Lucas, Sir Adrian has already talked about maths education.
Q8 Lord Lucas: Yes, he has, and I am sad that you think the curriculum review will not be the answer to your prayers. One of the big blockers on change in schools has been universities, which just say, “Stay with what you are doing. That is what we want”. Is there any hope of any mechanism for changing that?
Sir Adrian Smith: That is absolutely right. It has to shift. If we are going to shift it, it has to shift as a holistic system. Where did A-levels come from? Basically, they are an entrance exam for the universities. The universities are driving all sorts of structural things and we have to de-incentivise them from doing that.
Q9 Baroness Walmsley: The Institute of Physics has recently made the point that we have a chronic shortage of specialist STEM teachers. They are not the only people who have pointed that out. What would you urge the Government to do to address these shortfalls, in terms of not just personnel, but the physics curriculum in schools and in universities?
Sir Adrian Smith: Yes, I am slightly more expert at the maths than the physics, but the overall problems are the same: shortages of teachers. I forget the percentage, but there are a horrendous number of schools that do not have a trained physicist to teach A-levels or GCSEs. As for incentives, you do what you can to increase the teacher supply, but I would have to say that, in mathematics, you are never going to solve it, because the increase in much more lucrative jobs is going to outpace whatever the supply coming out of universities is, so you have to do a rethink.
Certainly in the maths bit, our thinking about the change of the curriculum to data and digital, et cetera, is embedded implicitly in other subjects. It is in biology, in psychology, in whatever. The biology teacher becomes the teacher of maths, and there is a distinction between maths teachers and teachers of maths. There is a huge resource there to teach the kind of maths that we are advocating, who are not classical maths teachers. Physics is a slightly more difficult problem, and I do not know the answer to that one.
Baroness Walmsley: I suppose it means that you have to have a more relevant biology degree as well.
Sir Adrian Smith: Most people who do biology or psychology degrees will do quite a bit of statistics, let us say, in their degree, so they are implicitly able to teach some of the stuff that we want to move towards. This is not just about the curriculum. It goes some way to easing the teacher problem, but physics is a really difficult one.
Q10 Lord Ranger of Northwood: Sir Adrian, thank you for your time today. First, I just want to pick up a comment that you made earlier in your intro about science being under attack. What are your thoughts on that? Is it because we live in a world where science has become marketable, and because the public are sometimes beginning to question more the science that they see because of who is funding it or where it is coming from? I would appreciate your thoughts on that.
Moving on to science and AI, I know that the Royal Society has published various pieces on AI, but how can the UK make the most of the developments in AI to benefit scientific endeavour? Coming back to that first point, how does it make sure that it is done in a way that is trusted?
Sir Adrian Smith: There are two slightly separate things there. We are calling it the attack on science, but the more general thing is misinformation and disinformation, and, if you like, a blurring of distinctions. Are there some things that are “true”, meaning overwhelmingly probable or likely, such as that the sun will rise tomorrow, or is everything up for grabs and debatable on an individualistic or political basis?
That is a challenge to science per se, but it is a challenge to all sorts of other disciplines and authorities. There is a slight paradox that the enlightenment that we celebrate was an overthrowing of the authority of books, as it were, but I have to raise the flag and say that the authority of the Royal Society is a kind of authority, and we have to assert it, but we just need to have a certain degree of humility. You cannot say, “Believe me; I am a scientist”. We have to find ways of communicating and demonstrating.
The ultimate solution is if you had a generation of kids who left school and who knew how to think critically, because, if the individual will reject the nonsense, we have solved it, but we are not quite there.
In the AI space, this is hugely interesting in general, but also for the Royal Society, because, in many ways, AI potentially alters the very nature of how you do science. In a slight parody of the past, you sit in an armchair and you have a hypothesis, and you go out with a fishing rod or something and collect 30 pieces of data. You plot them on a piece of paper, and it says that your hypothesis is right or wrong, or whatever.
Now, if you go from cosmology at the one end to biobank genetics at the other, the data is there to give you the hypotheses. That is the machine learning stuff. It inverts the whole nature of how you might do science. That is exciting in one way. It speeds up drug discovery, for example.
In another way, if you have a black box telling you what is happening, how does that fit with our canons of reproducibility, openness and understanding? You say, “I have this fabulous thing. I don’t understand how it works. I don’t understand how it beats chess champions. Nobody really cares, but it is very exciting”. If it was doing surgery and could not explain why it was doing it, you might be more worried. There are explainability issues, but the effect on science would be quite dramatic.
In more general social terms, it is this whole thing about safety and regulation again. The regulation debate comes home almost to a focus in the AI context. In some sense, you want the innovation. We want to be able to explore whether AI will lead to miraculous medical treatments, but, on the other hand, we have had committees of safety of medicines in the past, so do we need a committee of the safety of algorithms for medicine? There is a whole regulatory thing there that needs thinking about. Going back to Nick’s point, that is not just for the Royal Society. That is a much wider social debate.
Q11 The Chair: What do you think about the peer review and grant application question? Are grant applications going to be more and more engineered by AI?
Sir Adrian Smith: The applications or the assessment of the applications?
The Chair: Both.
Sir Adrian Smith: In terms of peer review, as a jobbing academic, it is part of your job and your duty, as it were, that you submit papers. You then, of course, ought to do your bit of reading and commenting on other people’s, joining committees and so on. All organisations find it increasingly difficult to get that kind of altruistic input, and so the peer review system is almost breaking down. If you have a 300-page paper in pure mathematics, you would need people to give up their own careers for a year to read and assess it. There is considerable potential for AI-driven triaging in peer review, but, again, we are at a frontier. We will suck it and see.
The Chair: What about grant applications?
Sir Adrian Smith: If you have a brilliant academic who could feed a few sentences to a chatbot about what they want in their next grant application, bring it on. They can get on with doing the research while it writes it. It is like going to a GP. If they have the right piece of software, they mutter as they do it and, at the end of it, the application has written the report. Bring it on—unless you are employed in those jobs, in which case you are going to get very nervous.
Lord Ranger of Northwood: I love the concept of talking about grant applications and peer reviews, because is it not just the point that the world is going to change? You are highlighting, Sir Adrian, explainability. Does the scientific community now have to find those new ways, using this new technology, to explain what it is going to do and how it is going to do it?
Sir Adrian Smith: Explainability is becoming a discipline now—explainable AI. A bigger thing even than explainable is sustainable. Given the worries about general intelligent AI, bigger and bigger exascale computers, et cetera, the brake on that will simply be sustainability. You will not be able to generate enough electricity and find enough cooling water to continually expand the data centres and the computers, so it will come to a natural end.
Lord Lucas: Could AI give us a better replacement for the REF?
Sir Adrian Smith: Forget AI for a moment. When I was involved in something or other about 20 years ago, we did an experiment in physics and chemistry, where, running in parallel with the REF, we did a statistical fitting analysis. In physics and chemistry, it reproduced the results of the REF in five minutes on a computer, instead of 10 million person hours.
Baroness Walmsley: That is very interesting.
Sir Adrian Smith: I have to be careful. I do not believe that the REF is the best use of human brain power.
The Chair: Most academics would agree with you.
Q12 Baroness Neville-Jones: Sir Adrian, when we wrote our report on the financing and scaling-up of science and technology, we touched on the role of UKRI and Innovate UK as organisations that help the Government deliver on commercialisation, which is the area where we do not always do as well as we should. Both have new leadership. I just wondered what advice you would give the incoming leadership on the role that they should play to prioritise their effectiveness, if you think that it is the right structure. Have we got this one right? Can we make them even more useful organisations?
Sir Adrian Smith: My understanding is that nobody is going to interfere with the current structure of the seven research councils and Innovate UK.
Baroness Neville-Jones: That is good.
Sir Adrian Smith: You could debate whether that is the right structure. We have also spawned catapults over the years. I see Paul Drayson is here. Did you invent the word “catapult”, Paul? I cannot remember. You might have done.
Lord Drayson: No, that was not me.
Sir Adrian Smith: We keep inventing structures. We had regional development agencies. We keep inventing pull-through agencies and then dismembering them. If I were coming into UKRI, I would not interfere with the structure, but do we have the right kind of interaction between Innovate UK and the research councils? Do we have the right incentives to researchers to have half an eye over the horizon on the innovate agenda? I do not know. I did not spend the last few years trying to run that kind of organisation, but I do not think that we have got it right yet.
Baroness Neville-Jones: Where do you put your finger on the difficulty, even if you do not know what the right answer is?
Sir Adrian Smith: There are several components. One is the interrelationship between the research and the innovation. The other is, if you like, big-picture strategic stuff. In my view, UKRI never properly owned AI strategically. For example, when I was running the Turing Institute, I had an umbilical cord to one of the research councils, the EPSRC, whereas AI is all-pervasive in medicine, environment, and the rest of it. It did not have the right strategic structure, and it does not have the right interaction of the research and the innovation. Good luck to Ian Chapman.
Q13 Lord Drayson: Adrian, it would be really useful to get your perspective on the machinery of government changes that have taken place and have affected science and innovation. In particular, I am thinking of the creation of DSIT. Could you comment on how effective the moving out of science and innovation from the Department for Business into a separate department has been? A recent change is where the Science Minister is now split with a role at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. How well is the organisational championing of science taking place within Government?
Sir Adrian Smith: Winding the clock back, the noise that people such as me used to make was that it was a scandal that there was no representative of science in the Cabinet. When I was director-general of science and research, David Willetts, who was the Science Minister, was allowed to attend Cabinet, but there was no Secretary of State, so the Secretary of State for Business was there. In some sense, the creation of a department that has a Secretary of State who is in the Cabinet, ostensibly rooting for science, is a positive. I am not sure that it has been going long enough for an overall judgment, but I do not have any negatives at the moment.
The real issue is, as usual, the difficulty of joining up across departments. If you take the universities, which we have talked about several times, the responsibility lies in DfE, and yet that is your major research engine, which is the business of DSIT, so we have these mismatches across the piece. Having data and digital in one place, potentially with links to AI and science, ought to be a good thing, but it has not been there very long, and yet again we have a change of Secretary of State. Stability and long-term stuff is important. It is not a definitive answer, Paul, but it could be positive.
Q14 Viscount Stansgate: It has been a long time since we had a Science Minister in place for a number of years. David Sainsbury probably holds the most recent record in that regard.
An underlying theme in much of our recent inquiry, and, incidentally, in inquiries in other areas in Parliament, has been what you might call the changing geopolitical landscape in which we find ourselves this year. We are questioning things that, up to now, we had not thought we needed to question—for example what is happening in the United States, to which you already referred. Some of us feel that what the United States is doing to itself in science is deeply damaging. You have referred to this already, including the lovely reference to international agility fellowships.
This presents challenges and opportunities for the UK. How should the UK view its role on the international stage in science? Are the current Government adopting the right policies, especially, for example, in relation to visas, which we have been very critical of in the past in this committee, but also science diplomacy and international collaborations? In the course of the five years you have been in this post, how have your views evolved in these areas, and what lessons would you like to draw to our attention, given the new geopolitical circumstances in which we find ourselves?
Sir Adrian Smith: I referred early on in the piece to Brexit and the removal of the European dimension of our co-operations, but that has been restored to some extent. The overall context for big global issues, such as climate, pandemics and the rest of it, requires global scientific co-operation. The US stuff is pretty recent, and that is perturbing a lot of that—for example, long-term data collections. If you go back to data now being the pervasive driver of how you do science through AI, that is fundamentally important.
We do not have something from Government that we could see as a joined-up international strategy. You have noises about, “Yes, we want to be terrific at science, so we want to attract the brightest and best from around the world”, and then you invent a visa cost system, which is, on average, 17 times more expensive than any other country. It is insane. Again, it keeps going back to the lack of joined-up stuff across Government. DSIT will say, “We want global talent”, and the Home Office will say, “We will try to put you off”.
Viscount Stansgate: That has made your view perfectly clear. Thank you very much.
Q15 Lord Borwick: What role does the Royal Society see for itself in weighing in on political subjects? They directly affect science, and science is needed for developing decent policies.
Sir Adrian Smith: We would have to slightly debate what is and is not political.
Lord Borwick: It is difficult to come out with a scientific analysis.
Sir Adrian Smith: The role and duty of the Royal Society is to convene the brainpower that we have to provide to decision-makers and policymakers the very best scientific advice. What do we really think we understand? What are the uncertainties? For me, that is the red line. You stop there.
The science will tell you, “The effects of global warming will be this, that and the other”. What it does not tell you is what your policy should be on gas boilers. That is a line that the Royal Society should never go over. We provide scientific advice to policymakers. Elected policymakers make the decisions.
Lord Borwick: It is a bit difficult to work out where that line is. That, in itself, is a political decision, because the authority of the Royal Society is still enormous.
Sir Adrian Smith: The political decision of this president is to not be political.
Lord Borwick: That is very important.
Sir Adrian Smith: Think of Cretan barbers shaving themselves, or whatever. There is a very clear distinction between advocating closing down fossil fuel companies and pointing out that, scientifically, it might be a good thing if we reduced dependence on fossil fuels. The implications of policies that do that might be very damaging to working-class budgets. That is not territory for the Royal Society, but it is a fuzzy line. As you might expect, the Royal Society has 1,800 fellows, not all of whom agree on where that line is in any particular case. During my presidency, I have erred on the side of, “Don’t go there”.
Lord Borwick: Will that remain in the long term, or do you see the Royal Society becoming more political?
Sir Adrian Smith: The quickest way for the Royal Society to lose its reputation and coherence will be to get into that space.
Lord Stern of Brentford: That is a very understandable position on getting directly into that space, but whether the clean is cheaper than the dirty, and what you have to do to make the clean cheaper than the dirty, is deep into science and technology. It is directly relevant to the question.
Sir Adrian Smith: You say “science and technology”. Here is an interesting one. There is a movement between the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering. A lot of the implementable solutions are technological and engineering, not science.
Lord Stern of Brentford: That is probably often true. It is up to the scientists to think whether that is true.
Sir Adrian Smith: Yes. I work very closely with John Lazar on precisely this sort of debate, so that one is yours, John.
Q16 Baroness Walmsley: Sir Adrian, twice during this session, in response to Baroness Willis and Lord Ranger, you have suggested concern about misinformation on social media about scientific issues, and you have suggested that there is a need for a fightback. In addition to your absolutely right conclusion that we need to teach critical thinking in schools, what else can be done by the scientific community itself while we wait for that? It strikes me that gaining the trust of those who read social media is pretty crucial.
Is part of it shouting about how good UK scientific work is? For example, right at the beginning, you talked about the fact that the UK has been more successful than any other country in getting Horizon grants since we went back in. That is the sort of thing that the general public do not know anything about. How does the scientific community gain more trust through any social media communications that it puts out than those who put out misinformation?
Sir Adrian Smith: This is a live issue and debate within the society. In terms of comms, we would historically have links with the science correspondent of the Times and the Financial Times, and with Pallab Ghosh at the BBC. The mass of the people we are talking about who communicate on social media and do all the bad stuff do not read the Times or listen to the BBC.
There is an issue around whether we need to think more radically about how we influence the influencers on social media. We are debating that. Historically, we have not been in the world of podcasts and so on. For my successor to land, we have certainly started thinking about it.
We are not an old, stultified thing, but we have been there since 1660. It is quite a step to start ranting on X or social media. How do you retain the very values that we want? If you get into those verbal fisticuffs, are you losing those values per se? It is a very difficult one.
Baroness Walmsley: House of Lords committees have become a bit more radical recently in producing podcasts about their reports, so maybe there is a lesson there.
Sir Adrian Smith: We will learn from you.
Q17 Baroness Young of Old Scone: If this is a real threat that you are worried about, should there be some sort of strategic approach to this by Government, harnessing all the resources from scientists and from others who are concerned about education, business, or whatever? It seems to me that quite a lot of the misinformation that is available on social media is incredibly well co-ordinated and very well planned and structured. Do we need to get smarter? Should somebody be leading all this with a master plan?
Sir Adrian Smith: We need to get smarter. There is a difficult debate about who leads it. Do you really think that Ministers leading the charge would work? I am not sure that that is true.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: I would not necessarily want to see them on the front line.
Sir Adrian Smith: With some of the things that we are thinking about, you want people who are visible—not exactly pop or showbiz personalities, but people who are out there in the public eye and are regarded affectionately or whatever. That may be the way in which you need to do it. You need Taylor Swift or somebody like that advocating. I am serious.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: That could be your next career.
Sir Adrian Smith: If you are earning $1 million an hour singing, are you going to take time off to promulgate the virtues of science? It is an issue that we have to confront, and we do not yet know how to confront it.
Lord Stern of Brentford: There are many examples in people such as Melvyn Bragg, David Attenborough, and Martin Lewis in finance.
Baroness Walmsley: Or Gary Lineker.
Lord Stern of Brentford: I was not going to give that example. We have some material to understand how intellectual trust can be built. It is not as if we have nothing. I know that it is hard, but that seems to be something that universities, with many examples, would be good at. What you do not want to do is to get a structure where those who think that there is a deep state say, “Aha, that is exactly what is happening”. Examples and heterogeneity, it seems to me, where different universities are studying misinformation in medicine or climate, or wherever, could be a way forward.
Sir Adrian Smith: We should have our own value. What do we try to do? We try to collect data and understand things, and we have not really done that properly.
Baroness Neville-Jones: I have a suggestion on this very topic. One thing that you might think of doing is cross-disciplinary. On the current website of the Royal United Services Institute, there is an article about the worries that it has about disinformation in the defence field and, indeed, the running of democracy generally. It is advocating for a parallel organisation to the one that exists at the moment on cybersecurity. That comes in a different sphere, but it does seem to me that there are some common issues here. This is a suggestion not so much for government regulation but for organisation at the governmental level to combat untruth and distortion.
Sir Adrian Smith: One of our current working groups under the 2040 project is precisely on misinformation and is attempting to think that through. It is work in progress. It is something that we must not be smug about.
Baroness Neville-Jones: It might be worth talking to that community about their approach.
Sir Adrian Smith: I am sure that the working group will take that up, but thanks for that.
Q18 The Chair: Sir Adrian, you have been terrific. Thank you very much. This committee is shortly going to consider its topics for our next inquiry. What areas of government policy would benefit from an inquiry from this committee? What would you want to investigate if you were in our shoes?
Sir Adrian Smith: I did make myself a little list, which I probably cannot find now. Top of my list would be the education and skills agenda. Within that, going beyond maths and data, it is a resurrection of something that you might just call critical thinking. That could apply equally to historical texts or whatever, but, maybe at secondary level, critical thinking ought to be a central thing, alongside all the things that feed into giving you the intellectual apparatus. Education and skills, and critical thinking, would be very high on my list.
The problem with saying AI is that it is amorphous and huge, but I think about the new David Willetts group. How do we strike the balance between regulation in general and innovation?
The Chair: Thank you very much. You have answered so many of our questions. We are very grateful. We congratulate you on your five-year presidency and wish you a very enjoyable rest of the day on your birthday. Thank you very much.
Sir Adrian Smith: Thank you very much.
