 Felly, dyna ymlaen, wrth gwrs, rhai o'r llwyddiad yma. Felly, dyna ymlaen, Julie Macston. Rhaid i'r CEO ymlaen. A'r llwyddiad yma, rhaid i'r llwyddiad yma, yn y llwyddiad felanthrofiol yn y llwyddiad. Felly, mae'n gweithio Jeremy Farrow ar y cyfnod, ac mae'n gweithio i'r llwyddiad, ond mae'n llwyddiad yma, ac mae'n gweithio ar y cyfnod. Felly, mae'n gweithio i'r CEO Jeremy Farrow ar y llwyddiad, ac mae'n ddifrwng iddyn nhw'n chyfrifio'n rhoi'n sgolwyddiad yma. Ond oeddwn i'n gweithio i'r Jeremy Farrow, ond rhaid i'r cyfrifio, yn gwahodd cyflym lleolodau a'r ysgrifennu sydd yn gweithio. Rhaid i'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio'r profisiau Robin Grimes, ac mae'r cyfrifio ysgrifennu yma'r Rhwyng Gwyl Llywodraeth, he will then hand over to Jeremy. Following the lecture there will be an opportunity for Q&A, we welcome both those in the room and those of you watching online to participate using Slido. So we're asking everybody to use Slido so that it's a level playing field so that the people in the room aren't preferred to the people who are elsewhere. Y rŵl yw, mae'n gweithio i slydo.com, a mae'n gweithio i hashtag P2411, oes gan y barcode ar y cyfnod. Felly yw'r Q&A, Michael Wharton, yn ymwneud, yn ymddangos i'r cyfnod, yn ymddangos i'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio. Now I'll hand over to Robin Grimes. You're going to be a welcome to the Royal Society for all sorts of people tonight, and you are of course very welcome indeed. This is the ninth Science and Civilisation lecture. It's a series that brings together leading academics, writers, philosophers, and other renowned public figures to discuss important questions related to academic freedom. Now, it takes its name from a lecture given by Einstein in October 1933 at a major fundraising event on behalf of the Council for At-Risk Academics and actually three other organisations. And they come together as the Refugee Assistance Fund to help those expelled from Germany by the Nazis. The Royal Society are delighted to partner with Cara on this event who of course carry out really crucial, vital work in insuring at-risk academics can seek refuge from violence, conflict and persecution and reach a place where they can continue their work in safety. And I'm very pleased indeed to welcome our friends and colleagues from Cara back to the society. Now we believe that academic and scientific freedom underpin excellent science and that of course, therefore, benefits all of humanity. However, as you're all aware, these are challenging times for academic freedom and all around the world some increasingly authoritarian regimes and political movements have placed increasing pressure on already at-risk academics and have undermined their protections. Thus, the society has published a statement on the need to support academic freedom and it makes clear what we consider academic freedoms to be and how they are central to the practice of science. So it defines what academic freedom is, both for individuals and institutions, and it highlights what threats to that freedom are and what they will look like now and in the future. Society also currently holds the chair of the UK Academy's Human Rights Committee, which brings together all the academies across the UK to advocate for the academic freedom and individual rights of researchers. We also attempt to raise awareness of these issues more broadly. We also consider what responsibilities those freedoms bring. The two things, of course, go very much together. Of course, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has had a devastating impact on that country and to its academics. Academic freedoms in adjacent countries are also under threat. On Ukraine specifically, we directly and strongly support the initiative led by the British Academy, Ankara, and that's already found homes in the UK and are well in excess of 120 displaced academics and their families and that number is increasing monthly. We've also joined with the National Academies of Ukraine, Denmark, Germany, Poland and the US and set out practical steps that can be taken to rebuild a modern and globally integrated science and research system in Ukraine. The statement also recognises the challenges in making progress in the ongoing situation in Ukraine and highlights actions that can be taken. Now we hope by working with also UUKI on the institutional twinning scheme that we will be able to provide opportunities for human capital development that will make a real contribution to the future resilience of Ukraine. And then finally, a little bit of advertising here, in March 2023 the Royal Society will lead a session at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, which is in Washington, and that will be called Supporting Scientists at Risk, Now and in the Future. Now, I'm delighted to hand over to Sir Jeremy Farrow, who has been at the heart of the global fight against COVID-19. As head of welcome, Jeremy was one of the first people to hear about that mysterious new disease coming from China and to realise that it could spread rapidly between people. An attendee of Sage, the emergency group, Jeremy, was a key figure in both the UK science advisory system but also the world health organisation where he played a decisive role in forming critical decisions that were taken to meet the rapidly evolving threat of that pandemic. Now, Spike, the virus versus the people, which I suspect we might hear a little bit about shortly, is Jeremy's widely acclaimed inside story. And the book has been shortlisted for the Royal Society's Science Book Prize. Of course, there's going to be some stiff competition there, you know that. Anyway, it sets out his reflections on the pandemic and casts light on the UK government's processes to be said to follow the science. It's very interesting indeed. So the book is informed not just by Jeremy's views but by interviews with other top scientists and political figures and puts forward his ideas on how the world can be better prepared to tackle the inevitable future threats. Jeremy's experience of collaboration, particularly with China on the global issues and leading one of the world's largest research funders and his extensive experience of international collaboration as a scientist make him ideally placed to talk about the importance of academic freedom in just such a collaboration. So, with no more ado, over to you, Mr Jeremy. Thanks very much, Julie, and thanks very much indeed. It's a great pleasure, of course, to be here. I got an email what feels like years ago from Malcolm Grant and Malcolm's been a long friend for many years and we're alumni of a good university just at the top of Gower Street. But of course, when you get an email, first of all, it's from Malcolm so you know you have to respond. But you also know it's so way in the future that you don't really need to think about it for some considerable time. And then a little bit before, I mean, not just in the last half hour but you get closer to it and then you actually look what the lecture's called, where it started, who's done it in the past, the organisation that it partners with. And no matter how many talks you give, it's terrifying to come then and give it. The last time I was in this room, actually, I mean it is the welcome room, I think, isn't it? Last time I was in it and I can't remember the year, I should remember the year, but actually was at the time when I was honoured to get to become a fellow at the Royal Society. And I remember standing actually at this podium, it may have been a different podium, but it was in this place and I remember Mike Ferguson, another close friend, followed me. And that was soon after something called Bird Flu. I think it was about 2004, 2005, 2006, something like that, talking about the emergence of H5M1 in Vietnam, which is where I've been working since 1995. And talking to the world about Bird Flu and H5 and the emergence and not being sure where H5 was going to go and that they had at that time about a 60% human mortality. And here was a purely avian virus that clearly had got the ability to cross into humans. Thankfully, it didn't lead to a pandemic of humans. But here we are in 2022 and the global avian pandemic of the moment is H5M1. It doesn't get much attention, apart from the fact that Tesco's and Sainsbury's, if we're allowed to mention, supermarkets don't sell you eggs anymore, partially, because all the chickens in the country and the turkeys coming for Christmas are all having to be housed indoors because of that pandemic. So also I will talk about COVID and I'll talk about the context of COVID. We should remember that we are always at threat of the emergence of new infections. And I might argue actually that in 2022, we're a greater threat today than we've ever been in my professional career because of the state of geopolitics. Something I'll come back to in a minute. So yes, some figure called Albert Einstein started this in 1933. Just a carer, which I'm very proud as well to say, welcome also supports now and has done over the last few years. Just to give you some figures of what carer is doing, you may hear it later, but in 2020 to 21, I think you had 160 applications. In 21 to 22, you had well over a thousand. That's telling us something about the world and how it's changing. If you go back to 1933, my father was 16 at that time. I am the first generation in my family that has not had to go to war. My great-grandfather, my grandfather, my father was a prisoner of war five and a half years from January 1940 to 1945. My wife, father, was a conscript in the Austrian army on the other side of the war, and they ended the war about 100 kilometres apart, one in a prison of war camp, one as a 16 or 17-year-old escaping as a conscript. Our children hold both British and Austrian nationalities and passports. We must never underestimate how important peace is in the world and how we are living in a very privileged generation in parts of the world, but that is not true everywhere. As we have war in Europe and war in the Middle East and war in the Horn of Africa, we should just pause and think how fortunate we are to be in a country that may be politically challenged, although less now than a few weeks ago, but nevertheless history is not done with. And if we don't take the privileges of our time seriously and make sure we protect those privileges and those freedoms, we should never ever take them for granted. And I think we are going through a period, some people younger than me here and some people a little bit more senior, I've never known another time in my life when there has been such a degree of uncertainty and such a degree of disruption to many, many parts of society and civilizations around the world. Pandemics, of course, and I'll come back to pandemics, but we have inflation. We have war in Europe, as I've said, and in the Horn of Africa and in the Middle East. We have the intergenerational challenges of a generation such as mine that could go to university for free. In fact, I was given a grant to go to university. I was given a train ticket to go home at weekends. I was given a book allowance and I could buy a skeleton on the government. Say that to my children of today and they think I was living in a different... Well, they mostly think I was living in a different era, but they think I was living in a completely different time zone. We have the climate crisis, which is a crisis and yet we're incapable of seeing it as a crisis. It's something that will happen at some point in the future. Energy, water. We don't really often talk about water. With the change of climate, if the Mekong Delta becomes salinated or under water, then millions of people in Southeast Asia will no longer have a livelihood. Economic and other migration. We have the loss of hope in some parts of the world and the loss of hope in the younger generation that actually the future will be brighter than the past. Again, since 1945, in many parts of the world, most generations have felt that the future was going to be brighter. That is not true in some generations and some parts of the world. Politics is as disrupted as I can ever remember it in, certainly in my life. Institutions are being called into question and are mistrusted. The financial crisis of 2008 is still playing through in 2022 and now we're going into and in the midst of yet another crisis. There is an issue of identity and nationalism. There is fear and inequality. The challenge is that all of these, instead of happening in sequence, seem to be happening in confluence and at the same time. If I focus on my own area of expertise, pandemics, these influences are no longer affecting one part of society or at one time point, but they are affecting the whole of society in ways that are far more disruptive than we thought. There's a danger that we are losing the ability to both deal with today's big challenges, which there are very many big challenges, but also think long term for how we will deal with the crises that we know are coming and will come even more if we allow inequality and infrastructure to be denuded and lessened. The challenge of the new cycle, the challenge all organisations are facing between the generational, racial issues, diversity issues, inclusion, a feeling of identity and not being valued. Things are very precarious and very fragile. There is fear and there is a thin resilience after three years now almost of the pandemic in individuals, in organisations, in countries, in alliances. I think, again, never known another time when resilience is so thin and so challenging. Don't worry, the talk will get a bit more optimistic towards the end. On to COVID, thank you for mentioning the word, Spike, I would just like to call out my co-author Anjana, who was such an integral part of that writing of that book. On COVID, which, of course, has dominated all of our lives and certainly dominated my life in the last three years or so, there's three things to say. One is, although we did not know it would be called COVID, although we did not know where it would start, although we did not know what type of virus it would be, the warnings have been there for many, many decades that something like that was going to happen. In fact, somebody who's online, Richard Peter, just emailed me to say he couldn't come but he was listening to an interview I did in 2014, Life Scientific, talking about the coming pandemic. We knew it was coming, but we were unable, unwilling and did not think about how we might prevent or be prepared if it were to come. The second is, it is not over. Sitting in this room today, let's say, I'd like to say there's 1,000 people, but let's say there's about 100 people, 150 people here. There's about one in 60 people today that are infected with COVID. There's probably two people in this room currently infected with COVID. We've done enormously well to prevent severe disease illness, hospitalisations and death with vaccines, therapies and diagnostic tests, but we have not stopped transmission. If we do not stop transmission with one in 60 people in the country infected and presumably that's reflected across the world, population immunity varies, then we are inevitably going to have new variants and we will inevitably see variants at some point which will be able to escape our treatments and our vaccines. And although I'm all in favour of the current approach to restrictions or the lack of restrictions and I think societies have to get back to normal and I'm not in favour and in advice, within China certainly strongly advise against the continuation of zero COVID which I don't think is sustainable or tenable, nevertheless, somewhere, and this is where science has a critical role to play, critical that behind the headlines and behind the political notes that some people somewhere are working on the assumption that these vaccines will not protect us forever and we need to have vaccines which reduce transmission and stop us getting sick and ill. And that doesn't need to be in the... shouted about it doesn't need to be political policy, doesn't need to lead to any restrictions in our movements but we do need to make sure we're not just preparing for the most likely scenario but we're preparing for every scenario. Science moved on in COVID in ways that again none of us predicted. If you'd asked me when I first heard of the outbreak on the 31st of December 2019 would we have a vaccine being given and in vaccination in somebody's arm in 2019, I'd have said no way. But the reality was on the 10th of January 2019, I'll get the years right, 2019 the genome was released and from that moment on diagnostic tests could be done and on the 11th of January the vaccine programme started along with the therapeutics programme and by the end of the year as a result of phenomenal work from amazing number of people all around the world vaccines were available to the rich world. Unfortunately those vaccines were not available to the rest of the world until too late and the inequality that's been driven as a result of that vaccine inequality around the world has led to both public health issues but also a sense of mistrust and inequality around the world. Today again there is a debate after the release of a series of emails about the origins of the virus and I'm very happy to talk about the origins of the virus. My very strong view is that the virus origin is from a natural origin. It is I believe our very greatest threat that zoonotic viruses are moving around the world in all the time in huge numbers. We don't understand those viruses, we don't understand the mechanisms that protect the human race from those viruses and we will be continuously at risk of animal viruses crossing the species barrier into humans and unless we understand that barrier and how to prevent that we will be at constant risk. Laboratories must absolutely be transparent and safe and we started a programme with the Nuclear Threat Initiative in 2017 to initiate a regulatory environment that allowed policing and auditing of laboratories such that all laboratories were safe. Both possibilities remain true although I believe the overwhelming probability is that the origins of this virus is from an animal reservoir in wet markets in Wuhan from an illegal animal trade that crosses many borders and is all pervasive in Asia and Africa and is worth many billions a year. Both are risks but if we equate both risks with equal weight, I think we will be laying ourselves open to the natural risk at such a level that we will not be able to prevent the next pandemic. And COVID like many of the other things I talked about at the start from climate to energy to migration to water, COVID is another example which is not just about health. I talked in 2020 July about the four circles of pandemics. The first circle is the direct health consequence whether you get ill, whether you have to stay home, whether you go to hospital or tragically you die. That's the inner circle. The second circle is the disruption to the whole of healthcare that results as a result of the COVID pandemic. Cancer care, diabetic care, people who are in social care homes, people with mental health issues. The third circle of the pandemic is the impact on economies, on society, on trust, on education, on interrelationships within families, between countries and elsewhere. And then the fourth circle is geopolitics and national politics. And I think now in what are we now? November 2022 looking back on that article in July 2020, even I could not have predicted that those four circles would have been even bigger than I thought they would be at the time. Politics has changed nationally and globally. Perhaps without a pandemic who would have known what would have happened in the last US election? Who would have known what would have happened with the economics of the world had the pandemic not played through? The impact of these disruptive things are so enormous and so broad and all pervasive across the whole of society. We cannot, as a humanity, allow ourselves to not address them not in the time of crisis but in the time to make sure we're aware of what is happening, we can prevent them where we can and we're better able to respond if inevitable crises occur. Because the sense that crises are coming at us somehow unknown is a misnomer. It's untrue. We can predict. We won't get them right. We won't know it was COVID. We would not know it was Wuhan. We wouldn't know the full implications if we look to the future and we can think where are the probabilities of things happening and how can we make sure we use what we have available and this is where science is just so critical to make sure that we're better prepared, we're able to prevent and we're able to respond. COVID is just a symptom of a much wider set of issues that we have to address. COVID is the symptom as was NIPA in 1999 in Malaysia, as was SARS-1 in Southeast Asia, as was H5M1 in Vietnam as the Middle East respiratory syndrome was in 2009, Zika in South America and of course COVID now. These are the symptoms of underlying drivers in society which are climate change, biodiversity loss, habitat loss, changing of interface between humans and animals, urbanisation, trade travel exaggerating inequality. It's a very beautiful article just this week in nature talking about how bats are looking for new habitats and when they get hungry because their old habitats go the viral loads that they carry in them increases. That increases the risk that they will forage for food in places they wouldn't normally go and when they're hungry they're more likely to have higher viral loads. That is a terrifying thought as you lose their natural habitats and they will naturally gravitate where food becomes available which will often be where humans are and therefore increasing the risk of transmission. And yet in that doom and gloom on a really miserable November evening of rain and drizzle we have never had more opportunities than we've had today and I hear I pull in my inherent hands-rosling for anybody that knew him. The world is getting better. The world of my father born in 1917 and mine is better. That is not true all over the world but it's true in many, many parts of the world. We are going through a period of enlightenment where science, culture, the arts, humanities is actually not only showing a path forward but actually is becoming can become more equitable. We have a much better understanding of what underpins all sorts of areas of not just biological sciences but physics and maths, chemistry of the arts of humanities of social sciences, of economics even economics. We have a much better understanding of all of that and yet somehow we have not been able to connect it together. There is a growing gap I think between scientists or society of course excluded from this comment. There's a growing gap between scientists and society. Science is going at such a pace now that the ability of society diplomats, politicians the media, my mother my father, whatever it is to understand where that science is going is diverging I think because the ability to keep up with it is so challenging even for those of us in the world of science. I think we have to try and bring these back together again and I would have a call out here for something I've been involved in since inception grandly titled the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator What it's trying to do is look forward 5, 10, 20 years time What does being human mean? What is AI and quantum likely to do to us? What is the space impact on our daily lives likely to be? And how can we make sure not just the scientists are literate in that but that we're all somehow literate in it not only because we can therefore better grasp the opportunity but we can also make sure that the opportunities are not stopped out of fear when it hits a regulator it hits a government in a way that they cannot take on board and understand. Science really matters and I think I've never been more optimistic about what science can do and I think COVID demonstrated in one small part of science how that true is but science is no longer enough we have to reach out and think where is science going not just communicate but actually evolve and engage and allow people access to where the world is going in order that the world can go there with the best way possible and bring the greatest benefits to the maximum number of people. So I think we're at one of those moments in history when things look very dark, pandemics climate change, inflation dodgy politics, economics that doesn't look very good, inequalities and living through history when you live through it remember something my father used to say when you look back and you read those history books sometimes it looks quite romantic, sometimes it looks as if it was quite enjoyable during how he used to say it was miserable it was horrible and it feels a little bit like that now at times like that I think it's absolutely crucial for those of us with the privilege of agency to actually look beyond the darkness and say where could we go where are the philosophers that we had in the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th century, what is the role of universities in pushing us forward, not in silos of their own areas and the next grant application from somebody but what is the role of universities in challenging and questioning what that future lies what is the role of foundations and the role of the Royal Society and others to lift our eyes not to ignore the problems of today, we must not do that but I think we have to lift our eyes to the possibilities of tomorrow in a way that I fear modern politics in any political system is not going to be able to do because the challenges of the new cycle the challenges of the 24-hour cycle and the very big challenges that every government faces at the moment but somewhere, someone has to look beyond that and think where do we want to be where do we want to go because the 21st century is going to throw up challenges that we cannot yet imagine and they will have some common features but also all be transnational the challenges of the 21st century are not going to be national from pandemics to climate change to energy to water use and everything else they're going to be transnational and yet we're going through a phase where nationalism is becoming more common and an inward looking identity issue is becoming more common I think we as scientists as communities engaged in science as people here in this room and online we have a responsibility to lift our eyes and say what is a better future the other thing my father did was he was an English teacher and I was forced to read I hate to admit it but often these hung in the toilet where we lived in very parts of the world having been born in Singapore and not come to this country until I was a teenager and this one quote has always stayed with me there is a tide in the affairs of man which taken at the flood leads on to fortune omitted all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries and on such a full sea we are now afloat and we must take the current where it serves or we'll lose our ventures that was brutus it didn't turn out well in that play particularly but I still love the quote and I think that is where we are today we are in the midst of a very very difficult phase we're coming out of a pandemic which has disrupted every single bit of society all of us individually all our families and all our organisations but somewhere there has to be hope and I believe that's science thank you very much thank you so much for that and for reminding us of such important matters and and ending on a note of hope which I think is very important now it is time for questions and I have a little device here which will tell me which questions have been asked so I'm just waiting for them to come through remember go to Slido put in the little hashtag P2411 and we'll start taking the questions so one of the first is to what extent are you Jeremy Abel in your capacity at the welcome to your voice and influence to advocate for academic freedom yeah I would also hear pay tribute to my predecessors who I think led in many ways the push to open publishing to ensuring that publication itself was not enough until it was also communicated and making sure that there was academic freedom within the university sector, the academic sector and where possible within the industrial sector so I I think welcome is in a position have we done it enough and enough over the last few years I would admit probably not academic freedom comes with some downsides and Julia and I were talking before we came in and as some people in the audience I know the last two years having spoken about things like COVID very openly have led to really worrying threats death threats threats against family against myself we should not think that academic freedom doesn't come with a need for some protection as well that is true in this country it is far more true in other parts of the world where some people in this audience will be from and academic freedom but so is making sure we protect academics when they are threatened or when they are abused thank you very much so we are going to take another question which is from a completely different angle the UN Secretary General mentioned the need for developed countries to support and help poorer countries as far as the vaccine is concerned yet responding to his call was slow what do you think is the role of developed countries giving this slow response so there is a sort of conflict to declare here because I was very involved in setting up and then running the act accelerator which was the attempt through the World Health Organization to make available vaccines therapeutics diagnostics and enhance health system so the slowness I am at least partially also responsible for I think seeing the ability to make equitable access to vaccines therapeutics, diagnostics, whatever it is if you start that in a crisis you will always be far too slow and it is true actually across the whole of a crisis if you get behind a curve of an epidemic in fact of most things you will never catch up with that curve because you can't move at the pace when in my world of infections something has this famous hour of maybe eight, nine, ten now it's too slow so if the world is going to change the inequitable access it's going to have to shift the centre of gravity to both where the science is done rural society plays a huge role in that and it's also going to have to shift the centre of gravity into where the manufacturing is and if you want to do that in a crisis you can't the time to do that is now and to make sure that is sustained over time by providing utility all the time in other words it's not an ivory tower which is set up, a ribbon is cut and everyone feels happy and takes a photograph but it's actually providing value and utility all the time I think there is now an opportunity to do that and I would if pay tribute she's leaving, I think this week is her last day at the WHO Dr Sumir who has led the calls for the setting up of vaccine hubs around the world including in the continent of Africa I think that deserves all our support Thanks very much questions are coming in quite regularly now what more can universities both in the UK and abroad do to combat some of the transnational challenges you mentioned what role can they play I think universities and the broader sector it's not just about universities it's also about funders it's about learning societies I think this is something that actually universities do very well I think they do it very well in this country I think in the whole they do it very well around the world and it really pains me in any political system but it's also true here when governments kick universities for all sorts of reasons Universities are at the heart of enlightenment, they're at the heart of progress I also believe in this country around the world they're at the heart of this so-called levelling up agenda the opportunities we get from whatever background we came from is crucial and all universities I think play a role not just in their local communities which is critical but also in playing a role in making the case that the challenges of the 21st century are transnational Thank you I'll just take another question which is on the same kind of theme do you think UK based organisations such as funders, scientific societies publishers should be playing a greater role in inclusion of the global south in the scientific endeavour I guess there are some harder questions to come which may be more absolutely right it's a phrase which I know people at welcome if you're online get really fed up with me hearing but I think it is about the shift in the centre of gravity it is about questions being asked decisions being made peer reviewing processes for grants is shifted and the sense of ownership is shifted I do think the UK through what was DFID I hope it remains true in the FCDO has actually played a leading role in support for low and middle income countries and I really regret the fall from 0.7 to 0.5 as UK government supports and I dearly hope that the DFID ethos and commitment to evidence is remains true now that it's incorporated into the foreign office but universities funders have got a role to play in that here I'd call out two things I've been involved in over the last few years one of which we were on the call with this morning called the India Reliance where the system and Julie and Dr Vijay from India played such a critical role in this is shifting the transparency the peer reviewing processes the quality the feeling that if you're on this university and you're reviewed by somebody from that university there will be a level playing field I think that India Reliance with the Department of Biotechnology in Delhi has been transformative and hugely positive and I'd like us to call out the Science for Africa program actually based in Nairobi many people fund that we do and many others do I would love to see that as the model going forward and shifting the stuff out of London, Geneva, Washington, Paris Seattle to where the needs are the greatest because I think until you own the questions, the answers, the reviewing processes and then the implementation I don't think that is not, sorry to go on that is not a risk to the high excellence and quality of let's say UK universities this is not a choice of one or the other I think you can have both Excellent Questions are getting harder Jeremy How about trying this one How in practical terms can scientists give politicians and diplomats the kind of scientific understanding they will need this century if the gap between science and society is growing Somebody from a science background that chooses not to pursue a full time career in science and moves into policy making should be celebrated If we as scientists all stay as I have done until 2013 in the scientific arena and that is the only career that any of us value and celebrate and give kudos to I fear we will lose the policy and political and diplomatic very important to others who are all lovely people but may not quite get are not or quantum or AI and I think that's crucially important so I think as scientists I speak for myself here we can't complain about political and policy decision making if we are not part of the process so my plea would be to get involved and for those of you in very senior positions who are mentoring others don't portray that shift as for those that can't quite make it in the scientific world there is a fantastic opportunity there to get involved and for the very best amongst you because if we leave it we can't then complain there's no point throwing stones at the glass house from outside so my plea would be to get involved and engage that's not just true about policy it's true about the media it's true about teachers it's true about education and the more that we can get involved the better and the sooner we do that the better because I fear we're diverging because the knowledge base around the scientific agenda is going at such a pace now or even just a little bit outside your own field to keep up with it so how do we expect somebody coming out and into the political and policy arena didn't even have any of our backgrounds your backgrounds to then catch up something I'm passionate about excellent somewhat similar vein you talked about the current state of politics what role do you think science and scientists have for challenging where we are politically for example on the dangers of populism and some of the anti-science rhetoric we see firstly populism hasn't developed whatever you think populism is it might be your popular view or my popular view populism hasn't evolved in an abstract or in a vacuum it's evolved because rightly or wrongly people were able to offer apparently populist agendas because of issues that we in our elite world have chosen to ignore so my answer to that would not be to say populism is all wrong but let's address the issues that drove to that populist agenda rather than just saying you're all wrong and again to me that comes back in actually making sure that we are involved in that political debate science is political you can't it's not party political necessarily but it's certainly political it's not about being naive and innocent and just going on in a nice way and independent of what is happening in the rest of society I think is nonsense very good you spoke of an interconnected world but knowledge generation is fragmented split by disciplines there's been talk of transdisciplinarity for 50 years but we see little of it your views please I don't suppose he will be online but there's a few people in the room as well my PhD supervisors here for some reason which I'm pleased to see but I would just call out somebody that I worked for in Edinburgh in some point in the 1980s who was the first person I remember where I was sitting at the time there are certain moments in your life when you just remember you heard something which was profound because I originally trained as a neurologist there was a character in Edinburgh called Charles Wallo Charles said to me I remember in some annual appraisal review just remember Jerry the really interesting place of science is at the interfaces between things that don't realise they overlap and I remember him telling me I remember the chair I was sitting in and that must have been something like 87 or 88 after I graduated and that has stayed with me it's two things to comment on that I really believe that to be true the most exciting science I've done has been when I've been working with people who are not naturally in the sweet spot of where my knowledge is that's been the most exciting area of science and the second comment I'd make that is over 30 years ago and that is the importance of mentorship that has stayed with me all of those years and drove a lot of the things I've done so another plea mentorship is hugely important and you should also thank your mentors at some point because most of them are getting towards a certain age when you may not see them that much longer again Charles is very well by the way but a mentorship is critical to all of us even to people my age or older secondly appreciate your mentors because they play such an important life and their comments stay with you for decades I should have said there are lots of compliments coming in as well for your talk lots of people describing it as inspirational and a very nice talk so that's just by way of coming to this question nothing demonstrates the growing divergence between science and government then the battles Kate Bingham had to fight to persevere with her task why was she not more publicly defended by the scientific establishment through the process what could have been done better how long have you got a little while yet so I'm either certainly agnostic if not anasys but Kate deserves sainthood at some point a because of what she did on vaccines that was quite important but for how she dealt with the political system and she's written about it if you haven't read a book I encourage you to do so the welcome book shops opening soon so it will be available through there and all best retailers I'm sure Kate's book is an eye opener she claims she was blunt and to the truth I think the truth was a little bit more worse than she thought it was but Julia I think it goes back to what I was saying earlier which is in a crisis what you have before you go into a crisis is just so critical and if that isn't and does not have any emotional and intellectual inside you sort of visceral understanding of complex scientific things I don't think we can expect the whole system to suddenly understand the importance of what anybody including Kate was able to get across so again if you want to respond to a crisis don't look at what you've got on the first day of the crisis look what you had and was functional in the week, the year, the month the decade beforehand and if you undermine those institutions and structures they will not be there when you need them and the second is to make sure that you don't see those as some sort of thing you have on a shelf and you take off the shelf when you need it those things have got to be functional all the time they've got to be providing utility all the time they've got to be providing benefit because otherwise they'll never ever be sustained and I think what the challenge I don't want to speak for Kate I'll speak more personally the challenge we had and I'd absolute tribute here to the role of Patrick Valence and Chris Whitty throughout the pandemic the great challenge was coming into a system semi from the outside into a system that couldn't quite accept what was being said let's fix the system rather than thinking you'll put that right next time round if we continue with the same system if you use the same system again you'll end up with the same result so I'm going to put two questions together here in the next one because they're kind of similar again compliments to you for the talk you talked about all the warning signs for a pandemic which turned out to be COVID-19 yet we didn't do enough what should we have done how hard did we as scientists working in emerging infections push for these changes are we doing enough now and the second question which I think is similar what do you think going through the COVID pandemic has prepared us for upcoming pandemic what's the most important lesson that the latest pandemic taught us I'll start with the last one because it's still in my memory these are not these don't come out of I don't think it's been reported anyway but they don't come out of space they come from here overwhelmingly they come from the animal sector and into the human community across the species barrier we should we need to I don't think we are better prepared today than we necessarily were in 2019 although we've made enormous progress in things like RNA technologies and all of those sorts of things but if we don't continue to invest in those if we don't continue to use those if we don't make them part of our health and scientific systems in the future I'll promise you what will happen is what's happened after every epidemic that I've been involved in since Nipavirus in 2019 is everybody will talk about it for about a year or two or maybe three and then gradually it'll slip off the agenda and the only way to avoid that in my view is to make sure is bringing value all the time that might be scientific knowledge it might be pushing the barriers of science it may be very fundamental science that allows us to understand whatever it is that we're looking from viruses to astrophysics investment in basic science is absolutely critical as is investment in making sure we've got the tools available through competent health systems surveillance and that we can make the interventions that we need whether therapeutic, diagnostic and around all of that as we've seen in the pandemic if you don't incorporate social sciences and understanding communication trust and communication into politics and into society you can have all the tools you want but they won't be used yeah another question about the scientific endeavour really do you think we've made progress in making the public comfortable with uncertainty I don't know that I've made progress in making myself uncomfortable or comfortable with uncertainty we are going through a very uncertain time and we've been through a period in many parts of the world actually of reasonable certainty and I think that's one of the challenges we've got we've gone from a period even if it didn't feel it at the time of relative certainty we've now in a period of quite profound uncertainty and that is very difficult to cope with that is a little bit what I'm talking about when I say we've got to raise our eyes and we've got to look to the future and how can we return a bit of certainty to people's lives in a more equitable way than we had before but that depends all of us to realise going back to your comment about populism what drove why we are where we are today and if we don't address those the fundamental underpinnings of inequality of lack of opportunity rather than we will not be able to address the challenges that we face in the future this is a slightly different angle can scientists and leaders in higher education do more to challenge the ongoing hostile environment towards forced migrants and those seeking sanctuary in the UK I might turn to my right to a much more informed to answer on that language is really important it's amazing how I lived 20 years in Vietnam and it was there people, friends and family or not family but friends of the family et cetera used to call me an expat if you're here you're a migrant those words tell you everything about how things are seen do you remember sorry I can't remember the year but I remember the picture of that horrific picture of a child on a beach in Greece dead it moved us all for a week, a month, a year and yet in the newspaper I respect and like and read regularly just last week somebody died and the headline in the newspaper I respect was a migrant being process died that's inhumane that is not the world we want and who's going to argue for that when there is such an argument in favour in identity politics of us and them just remember where this series started in 1933 that's not the world we want but unless we argue for it unless we are courageous enough to argue for something different we will lose what we have these things are very fragile who would have thought in my generation coming through who I could not conceive it used that word that the United States would overturn Roe versus Wade but it happened the pendulum was reset the pendulum was reset and then suddenly you think that's the norm that's the midpoint and you wake up one Tuesday and you think how on earth did we get there let's not get there let's raise our voice of pandemics or what the world is going to and raise the voices before that pendulum is reset because once the pendulum is here it's bloody difficult to put it back there and the complacency of all of us in allowing pendulums to reset I think is one of the greatest dangers we face we were speaking before you came in tonight about China and working with China but the question I have here is short but pissy one any ideas on how to persuade the Russians to come back to the party I can cope with China I don't understand China but I have worked in China for much of my life since 1995 and before that I can't comment on Russia I cannot comment on one European country that chooses to invade another and inflict such suffering on a sovereign nation I find that very difficult to understand and to contemplate how one does reach out at some point both in Ukraine and in Russia that one is way above my pay grade but at some point I suspect we will have to reach out I know there's a lot of controversy about China origins of the virus etc etc but with China which I know more about China seems the competitor China seems the invasion of the South China Sea the Taiwan etc I do believe that science has got a role to play in reaching out to those parts of the world that may seem wrong I don't believe Russia is there today and I don't believe that's possible but I hope it becomes possible at some point and science I think it's got a role to play in that Now I'm going to take you back to the pandemic and I'm going to make this the last question and I'm sorry for those of you who've asked questions but I think Jeremy's given us 25 minutes of answers to questions and I could take him all over the place with the questions I've got in fact I think I probably have already a little but here's a final question Jeremy why did we not see sociologists cultural analysts and ethicists flanking the Prime Minister during the Covid crisis the difficult matters you've identified are surely social and ethical in nature I would ask the Prime Minister that question if I was you Well we have to be quick before we get another change I suppose to do that I think it's a really good question this is no as I've said before both Patrick Valence, Chris Whitty and many of the others that appeared there I think under incredibly difficult circumstances which will probably never be fully known I think did an absolutely staggering job but Sage in itself and the people that were there certainly in the early days was not diverse enough in terms of the input into it including but not limited to the social sciences and beyond and as the Covid pandemic has demonstrated in every single community in every single society if you don't embrace that it doesn't matter how many vaccines you'll have you'll not solve the problem and that has to be to the earlier question what are we going to have to do differently in the future if you try and integrate social science and social scientists that means because I'm never quite sure what social science means in terms of who's in it but if you try and integrate that into in my world a biomedical inner crisis again you'll always fail because we're training people too young to go into their silos and you're defining yourself certainly in this country usually at the age of 15 or 16 which sort of track you're going in your language, your culture your interests change and diverge and diverge and diverge and trying to regain that at some future date is really difficult so it's not that social scientists should suddenly have been popped into place in Down and Curate during the pandemic the lesson to me is let's stop thinking of social science as something we add on at a later date when we want to get a vaccine into a community but it's about the interfaces that we create in our education systems and beyond now rather than inner crisis Thank you so much Jeremy I'll come back with my final thanks but meantime I'm going to ask Michael Wharton to come up to the lectern and to offer some closing remarks Thanks Julie That really was an enormously illuminating and thought provoking and at times enormously moving lecture for which I think we're all very very grateful Jeremy and from a carer point of view I think that you've actually raised all kinds of you've touched on on areas which we think about and then don't think on about for instance when you are talking about the fact that that if you like we're always at risk of new infections we also know in what we do that we are always there are always going to be new conflicts and yet that's not something that we prepare for your point about the importance of preparation was I think so important and it's one of the things in fact that we at carer are thinking about at the moment how can we actually plan better in what is essentially a reactive world where we are reacting to crisis how do we actually prepare for that, how do you prepare for Ukraine when you thought you were preparing for Afghanistan after Yemen or Syria whatever and also I think that your point about interdisciplinarity working across transdisciplinarity what I like to think of as radical interdisciplinarity rather than purely the cognate interdisciplinarity that just nudges us forward a little bit we do need to be in the radical space but that's one thing that we can do and that we're increasingly doing in our regional programs in the Iraq program the Zimbabwe program I'm now in the Syria program where we are more intervening ourselves in actually the training of at risk academics as we try and bring them into the world of global science and research and it's interesting how difficult it is especially for people in the Middle East to understand where or indeed in South Asia and especially in Southeast Asia issues of resistance to the blurring of titles and of disciplines and so on and above all for us certainly in the Middle East the big issue of trying to get people to understand the real importance of research ethics and that it's not a question of just filling in a form and ticking boxes or not ticking boxes but actually thinking through so I think you've set us off thinking a lot about actually in the hopeful bit at the end you've given us hope that you know the things that you said have certainly triggered in me and I'm sure in my colleagues indication of how we can perhaps actually respond better certainly more swiftly as you indicated that science has to respond we know we have to respond swiftly but then we don't know how do we actually respond more swiftly than we do because we don't have money the great advantage of a charity as you've said somewhere else is that a charity can be fairly nimble can be fairly fast moving but when you're a small one dependent on others we've got to follow the money as well or at least try and persuade others that the urgency is really upon us but we do we do undoubtedly owe you an enormous debt for this evening so thank you very much on behalf of I think you will see thinking the thinking that you have shared with us today actually beginning to have effect in the way we move forward and notably again with your point about shifting centres of gravity and also thank you for the half a million that you're giving us over the next three years for which we are enormously grateful but I would like to thank also our partner in hosting the lecture of the Royal Society it's always a pleasure to work with the Royal Society it's wonderful to come here and while my more natural home is along the street at the British Academy I always feel I'm coming into hallowed portals when I come through the door of the Royal Society there's always something very special about this ancient and marvelously modern institution I would just like to thank a few other people one is the collective universities of the UK who are our main partners and there are a few people from universities here without the UK universities we couldn't really do what we do all of the fellows that we bring that we rescue we bring to the sanctuary of UK universities and we're all enormously proud of the way that the UK universities keep finding ways of helping us more constantly and also the fact that academics and professional services colleagues in universities keep coming to volunteer with us we now have nearly a thousand people from working in UK universities who are working with us on our programmes the fellowship programme the Syria programme or whatever it is quite astonishing just to see how much compassion and also how much concern there is for academic freedom still very vibrant in this country I despair at times about where we are with academic freedom in the UK I must admit and certainly when governments try to interfere with it my despair grows ever more dark but one of the things about working in CARA is that for a lot of the people for perhaps the majority of the people that we are trying to rescue and help and help them to find a new life actually academic freedom is genuinely not literally not figuratively not emotionally it is physically a question of life and death and when we kind of fuss on about wokeness and so on let's just remember that actually we need to go back to the reality of what what life and death means when you are actually trying to express yourself we are enormously fortunate to work with so many partners and I think one of the great things that happened over the last decade but especially over the last three years has been how CARA has been changed as an organization through the many many many partnerships that we have who are all bringing in very very different principles different perspectives and so we are actually becoming an organization which is constantly obliged to rethink everything that we think of as core so thank you to all of the universities and their leaders and also thank you to all of the many volunteers and to our many other supporters there's one last thank you I'd like to make which is one which is heartfelt that Malcolm Grant thanked earlier for his intervention in hooking Jeremy Jeremy to come along this evening but Malcolm is stepping down as our president next month he has been a marvelous champion of CARA always and ever wise councillor to us an indefatigable networker on our behalf and I was thinking as Jeremy came towards into his coder of the lecture and we began to see if not uplift uplift plans we were at least seeing some raise of optimism Malcolm has always been a wonderful voice of sanity and a wonderful voice of optimism so thank you so much Malcolm we shall miss you and we shall think of you in the sunlight uplands of New Zealand as we go into our next meeting I'd just like to remind you a little bit about CARA and I'm only going to speak for three or four minutes minutes on this but we quite often talk about the fact that we go back to 1933 to bringing people out of Nazi Germany but we are on the one hand we are a rescue mission rescuing people who are at risk of oppression throughout the world wherever they are and the only key priority for us is the level of their risk that is absolutely what is fundamental and we have chosen not to be a campaigning group not to be an advocacy group but just to help those who are persecuted for whatever reason be it faith, ethnicity, political position for whatever reason it is the risk they are under because of who they are that brings them to our attention the other thing which we have been developing increasingly over the last 15 years but which was very much in our founders view was advancing higher education with a view to advancing it globally one of the ways that we do this is of course by bringing people over here to work in the west mainly in the UK but also increasingly we are finding placements in western Europe in Canada and so on but it is terribly important for people to see what life is like in kind of western modes of research but the strengthening mission is one where we are supporting academics who are still who are in exile from their countries but are still living in the region so at the moment we run a theory program which is essentially based in Turkey for the Syrians who are in exile from Syria itself it launched in 2016 is still running and providing Syrian exiles with opportunities to develop but we also have to think about where are we going next what is coming next this time last year we didn't know Afghanistan was coming and then there was an enormous an enormous amount of compassion shown by UK universities we were astonished at how the universities responded to our request to them to help us more in helping us if we could ever get Afghans out of the country to come to us quite astonishing what they did and then people have forgotten about Afghanistan because the Ukraine came and the Ukraine is much much more difficult for some people the one of the issues that some of our our fellows raised with us is why is it so easy for a Ukrainian to come to the UK than it is for a Syrian or a Yemeni or a Myanmar inhabitant and it's true why have we responded in a very different way to Ukraine than we have with Afghanistan Afghanistan was essentially we're going to give ourselves a small window to bring people out who are useful to us who have been useful to us and a few dogs but it is worrying what what can we say to them we can say these are political decisions and I was glad I didn't have to take the question that was thrown at Jeremy about how do we persuade our politicians actually to think more ethically that it is one of the big challenges that we have and it's one of the things that we are increasingly thinking about and where our partnership working is increasingly helpful to us we know for instance that we are setting up partnerships in the UK and elsewhere for Afghanis once they can once we can get them out once they can come out with Ukraine it's the same thing but under Marshall law of course men between 18 and 60 cannot leave many women don't want to leave to get their children out their elderly relatives out but then they want to resist as well but the places will be here for them and that is something that we can increasingly do but it's not enough and I think one of the things of having of being in carer is a sense of how do we develop more agency when what we feel almost every day is our impotence we do have agency we just need to be able to mobilise it a bit more as Jeremy pointed out the number of applications has just skyrocketed it is quite astonishing by almost a well factor of nine but it's not just that it's the fact that we are dealing now with increasingly complex issues dealing with Ukraine is completely different from dealing with Afghanistan it's completely different from dealing with people from Hong Kong and that is one thing where the more people who are working with us the more perspectives are being and more lights are being shown onto our practices so we're very grateful to everyone for what they're doing the Secretary General of the United Nations was mentioned but I'd actually like to go back to a former Secretary General and Ban Ki-moon who as you will all know was a passionate advocate of changing the way that we think about migration and he wrote at one point and I've always found this enormously moving that for him migration is as he puts it an expression of human dignity of safety and of a better future it is the expression of the human migration for dignity, for safety and a better future that is what all our fellows want that's what we all want for ourselves but it's what the fellows want in much more real and much more visceral ways and our mission at CARA will always be to do what we can to ensure that the forced migration of our fellows find results in them finding some kind of dignity some kind of safety and a better academic and personal future of the sanctuary of a UK university thank you for all that you have been doing thank you for all the compassion that you show but we do need more help there has to be a pitch for money please help us more if you can individually through our 20 10 by 20 campaign where what we're hoping to do is actually get 10% of people working in universities to give 20 pounds per year 3, 4 cups of coffee but 20 pounds just a year that's all we ask if we do that we can transform the scale of what we're doing but also if you can we have so much need of the mentoring schemes that we're now rolling out both in our fellowship programme and in the the Syria programme and again as Jeremy pointed out in his lecture mentorship is such a precious gift to give to the people that we work with especially to younger people so thank you very much everyone for what you're doing and now we just need to hand over to depart but I hand over to Julie first who's going to close everything for us but thank you again Jeremy so thank you Michael for those really interesting and reflective closing remarks all it remains for me to do is to thank you all for being here in person to thank those watching online for tuning in to say that those of you who are here in person may enjoy refreshments which will be through the door at the back and I'm sorry those of you online will not be able to but the final thanks for today need to go of course to Jeremy for a magisterial and inspiring talk for being so generous with his time in taking questions from right across the spectrum and for giving us his wisdom it's been a privilege to be here Jeremy thank you very much