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It’s Autumn 1970, the leaves are turning, kids are back at school, it’s British Science Festival season, and the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science (BSSRS, Bisrus to its friends) is itching for a fight.
BSSRS had been founded about 18 months previously, a largely establishment affair, with a Nobel Prize winning chair (Maurice Wilkins), an inaugural conference held at the Royal Society and a letter of support signed by such luminaries as JD Bernal, Lawrence Bragg, Francis Crick, Richard Doll, Julian Huxley, Hans Krebs, Lionel Penrose, Max Perutz and Bertrand Russell. However, the core of BSSRS was a group of quite radical activists. They weren’t just the old-school science Left like Bernal or Huxley, but a product of 1968, and more sceptical of both science and the state.
Earlier that year, during the General Election, BSSRS had provoked a small spat with John Maddox - editor of Nature - over whether or not it was ok to talk about science being neutral on public policy. But they wanted to dare to do something a bit more disruptive. Inspired by scientist-activists in the US invading a AAAS meeting in Chicago earlier that year - you can read the FBI file on this - they decided to occupy the equivalent event of the British Science Association (then known as the BA) under a banner “Science is not Neutral.”
They started by just asking questions. But the panel chairman and speakers stifled any attempts of debate, dismissing political discussion as irrelevant. The BA seemed to be built on an inflexible culture and internal structure, too reliant on industrial sponsorship to positively challenge debate on the social implications of science. Frustrated, they occupied a mid-conference teach-in. It was designed to be the anti-thesis of how they saw a BA session, with no set-piece speeches, and no restrictions on what could or could not be asked.
Possibly most mischievous, they also got an advance press-copy of Lord Todd’s Presidential address and distributed it to the audience, with added annotations. Or “rude comments” as one activist recently described it. Lord Todd had been one of the original signatures to the founding of BSSRS, so this was an explicit turn in policy as much as anything else. It’s one of the better embargo break stories in the history of science, and arguably a reaction to the BA media machine as much as anything else. As Steven and Hilary Rose wrote in 1973, looking back: “Street theatre and interventions at lectures brought some relief from the boredom of the BA meeting which, while of little significance to scientists, continued to command an inordinate amount of space in newspaper coverage. The journalists, with an almost audible sigh of relief, joined the BSSRS criticisms to some of their own.”
Then, as the audience streamed out of Todd’s speech, they were met by a radical street theatre group, acting the effects of the chemical and biological warfare. Partly the product of an arts/ science collective that had been meeting in Maurice Wilkins’ lab since the inception of BSSRS, this dramatic activity apparently embarrassed and angered many of the people attending the festival. Still, apparently several senior scientists later took BSSRS members aside to assure them of their support. Even several years later, when the BA festival was held at Aston University in Birmingham, BAAS reported people coming up to them with fond memories and support for the Durham intervention. A few days after the festival, the BSSRS activists even received a mention in the Bishop of Durham’s sermon - went as far as to say the cries of the actors would prove as significant for both science and theology as the Huxley-Wilberforce confrontation at the Oxford BA meeting in 1860. That was probably taking it a bit far, but was a statement of the impact it had on people attending event at least. It was also compared to the Aldermaston Marches by an opinion piece in New Scientist, an article the then New Scientist editor, Bernard Dixon, was later keen to point out was not official magazine policy (but he did also agree with a lot of it).
As BSSRS member Jonathan Rosenhead later wrote, explaining their actions, many in the scientific community see the BA is “a mere fusty shell of its historic self, going mindlessly through the traditional motions in an age when its popularising function has been taken over by universal education, press and television” but, these activists hoped, the BA could be seen “rather as a slumbering giant, well intentioned but forgetful of the world changing around it, scarcely dreaming of what it might do if it awoke. For the BA has appreciable (non-financial) assets. It still has the nostalgic affection of many members of the scientific establishment, and those imbued with a sense of the history of science. And it has the ear of the media. Revitalised, it could be a formidable ally.”
They went in hope. But they can’t have found what they were looking for. As in 1976, David Dickson offered a rather unfavorable review of a BA meeting in Lancaster in the BSSRS magazine, now titled Science for People. He argued the BA “has long ceased to play any effective role in the development of science, either in a scientific or in a political sense. But its propagandist function, given the extent to which the traditionally lavish media coverage of its annual meeting helps to reproduce popular ideas of the scientists and his social function, does require to be taken seriously.” He went on to argue that the scientific community was playing into a wrong headed R&D policy which maybe offered them more money, but only if they pushed their activities to help the so-called free market (which really wasn’t so free, and focused scientific energies to some very choice industries). The BA meeting, as Dickson put it “not only demonstrated yet again current tendencies both in research and higher education towards an increasingly close relationship with the corporate interests” but publicly legitimised such work as a good, apparently “neutral” way to run science.
He concluded with a point that might easily made of much science policy discourse today, arguing the approach taken by the BA “ignores the extent to which the current crisis has an important political component, that is it a crisis of capitalism’s making whose apparent economic nature is being used to legitimise massive cuts in public spending,ad the maintenance of high levels of unemployment at the expense of increasing the profitability of private industry”
David Dickson went on to become a highly respected science journalist and founder of SciDevNet. He sadly died last year and will be remembered with a special event at the British Science Festival today in Birmingham. I think he’d still be hopeful that the BA could be a place to ask difficult questions, rather than close them off. A good tribute to him would be to ask some. Street theatrical die-ins are optional.
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