This morning's Education section carries on its front page a blistering attack by Sir Harold Kroto, co-discovered of buckminsterfullerene (aka the 'buckyball'; formallly the 60-atom carbon molecule) on the lack of incentives being given to children and educators to improve our science and engineering output.
Here's how it opens:
There is food for thought in the fact that, after a decade of Labour government and at the same moment that the prime minister was making a speech about how important he considered science, the University of Reading announced the closure of its physics department.
Further on, he points out:
As well as trained engineers and scientists, we desperately need a scientifically literate general population, capable of thinking rationally - and that includes lawyers, businesspeople, farmers, politicians, journalists and athletes. This is vital if we are to secure a sustainable world for our grandchildren.
The facts that a) we use in one year an amount of fossil fuel that took a million years to accumulate, b) we may be on the verge of a climate change catastrophe of global proportions and c) powerful technologies may soon fall into the hands of disturbed individuals with minds riven with those twin cancers of nationalism and religious fanaticism, seem to concern the scientific community a lot more than they do politicians or the media. As my Sussex colleague, the Nobel laureate Sir John Cornforth, has written: "If you are a scientist, you realise before long that if the world is in anyone's hands, it is in yours."
The failure of our general science educational policy is manifest in the fact that so few are aware of the true level of our dependence on science and technology, or the truly humanitarian contributions that science and technology have made to society: from raising the health of the population (half of all 18th-century children died by the age of eight) to the advanced technologies that pervade our everyday lives (the internet and mobile phones being archetypal examples).
He doesn't have nice things to say about media studies students or the vice-chancellors who encourage them either. (In case you're wondering, I did electronic engineering.)
He thinks there's a worthwhile point to be made about a science/engineering/technology career:
A Royal Society of Chemistry/Institute of Physics study found that graduates with chemistry and physics degrees earn, for the most productive 15-20 years of their working lives, some £15,000 more annually than most other graduates. They earn thousands more than those studying psychology, that seductively popular subject diverting a large proportion of our best young people into dead-end, uncreative careers.
It's thought-provoking fare that deserves to be read in full. Bonus point, meanwhile, if you can name the object frequently seen on TV screens that shares the same shape as buckminsterfullerene..
