Science and Technology: Economy

Baroness Freeman of Steventon Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Freeman of Steventon (CB) (Maiden Speech)]

I thank the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, for initiating this debate and giving me an opportunity to introduce myself to your Lordships’ House. This is a very welcoming place, with its wonderful staff—especially the doorkeepers, with their encyclopaedic knowledge—and also all the noble Lords who have come to introduce themselves to me and make me feel welcome. I thank them.

I thank especially my mentor and supporter, the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross. We were colleagues at BBC Science, where we were documentary-makers trying to communicate the importance of scientific ideas and make them relevant to people’s lives. Some people might say I have come a long way from my first job there, “Walking with Dinosaurs”—

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Baroness Freeman of Steventon (CB)]

Moving swiftly on.

I worked both at BBC Science and at the BBC Natural History Unit after doing a doctorate in what my father—initially, concernedly—thought was “not a proper science”. He was trained as a chemist; my sister is a mathematician; my mother is a theoretical physicist. I, of course, was a biologist—and, worse, I studied animal behaviour. But, under the firm tutelage of Professor Richard Dawkins, I learned to apply scientific ideas to any subject, and even my father finally admitted that the scientific method applies everywhere.

The other supporter I was honoured to have at my introduction to your Lordships’ House was Onora—the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill. When I moved from the BBC to Cambridge University to study the slightly different art of evidence communication, it was her philosophy that guided our work. She says that, to be trusted, you must be trustworthy, and, to demonstrate trustworthiness, you must be open and clear about all the processes that lead you to your conclusions, so that people can follow them, understand them and assess them—wise words that I try to live by.

At the Winton Centre in Cambridge, we worked on how to communicate evidence in a trustworthy way to support decision-making. We all need evidence, whether we are patients choosing treatment options, parents choosing education or police chiefs choosing policies, and that evidence comes from the application of scientific methods. So, although science can obviously bring us great inventions with direct economic benefits, it is much broader than that.

Working at the statistics department in Cambridge helped me realise that science as a method is a way of us learning from past experiences to foresee likely futures, and even to put some kind of likelihoods on those possible futures. By applying scientific methods, we can understand and tease apart cause and effect: the link between smoking and lung cancer, or between CFCs and the ozone layer. The field you apply it in does not matter. We even do it in animal behaviour—and human behaviour.

At the Winton Centre, we worked with the UK’s wonderful What Works Network to help communicate the evidence it brings together from experiments done on all sorts of problems—education, crime prevention, tackling homelessness—to test potential policies. Science not only helps us understand causality from past experience and get glimpses, however fuzzy, of possible futures; it allows us to make decisions that are most likely to take us along the paths we want to follow. How can you calculate the value to the economy of being able to foresee the future and how you might be able to affect it?

When talking about science’s contribution to the economy, or industrial strategy, or science policy, we often talk about the great inventions, with their direct economic benefits. And we often also talk about the value of curiosity-driven research. But I want to make sure we recognise a third category in the middle: researchers seeing how something could be of direct societal or environmental benefit, with no direct economic benefit but huge economic benefits anyway—like getting people fit and active, children being better educated, reducing crime, or testing existing drugs and treatments for Covid, as in the UK’s world-leading recovery trial, which discovered that the commonly used steroid dexamethasone was very effective. This kind of science does not aim to make direct profits for anybody: it is probably invisible to the Treasury. It is bypassing the Treasury and directly benefiting society—but that saves the Treasury money.

The Minister knows this kind of research well from his previous roles, so, with this in mind, I have two asks for him. First, I know from own experience that, when you are a researcher at a university, there is all sorts of support for you to spin out enterprise into profit-making companies. But, if you are doing the kind of research that would be better served as a not for profit or a social venture, there is a lot less obvious support for you. Secondly, can the Minister help communicate that scientific methods, applied to all fields, are crucial to both society and the economy, through helping us choose and reach the futures we want?