 Well, thank you so much for that, Sheila. I think it's customary in situations like that to do some thank-y's, it won't be like the Oscars. But I do need to mention some people who have helped me on my trajectory over the last 20 years or so. My colleagues at UCL, apparently most of them are in the front two rows, who I think are only here to heckle me and point out when I get things wrong. Over the last few years, many of them, including people here today, have done incredible primary research and published it in the literature, and then I've taken that research, rewritten it into English, and sold books off the back of it. So thank you to Mark and Nick and everyone else. Also, thank you to my colleagues at the BBC, who also over the last 15 years or so have enabled me to do whatever it is that I do. Particularly to Hannah Frye, who is in the Venn diagram. She's in the middle of my colleagues at UCL and being a colleague at the BBC. I also need to thank you and Bernie and Mackie Cobb, who nominated me for this award. I really want to emphasise, though, the producers and the editors on radio and TV who took a punt on me and others like Hannah to tell stories about science. And also to my editor at Widenfelt, Jenny Lord. It was her idea to write How to Argo with a Racist, and it was her title as well, which is a good title, even though it's quite inaccurate. So all of those people have really helped, and many others have helped, the trajectory which has ended up in me standing in front of you right now. OK, so point of order. I have an almost pathological ability to criticise organisations who are being very kind to me. And as a result of that, I feel it's my duty to point out that this very lovely poster, which has been doing the rounds on social media and the website, is, well, why don't you tell me what's wrong with it? The DNA there is twisting to the left, which does not occur in nature. All DNA is a right-handing twist. And of course, it's not the worst error in the world, but it is something that one becomes very sensitive about, especially when committing this in high-profile science communication landmarks. This was me in the programme, The Cell broadcast in 2010, where there I am standing, sitting in the Eagle pub in Cambridge, with two left-handed DNA. I apologise on that, they weren't actually there, they were added in post-production, but I did actually see them in post-production and still managed to sign off on them. OK, so it does happen. OK, now, years ago, at a party in this very room, we think it was 2006, but we're not sure. There was an infamous party that happened once a year called the Science Media Party, where a bunch of scientist types and a bunch of media types would get together and get super drunk. And I was in this room and I was there with Alice Roberts and Brian Cox, and just in case you're wondering if there's a sort of cronious clique going on here, as Sheila mentioned, Alice did win this award next year, we can only imagine that Brian is qualified to win this award next year. But two things happened, two significant things happened that evening. The first, and this is really important but utterly irrelevant, is we spent quite a lot of the evening trying to find the Nazi swastika that is under the carpets somewhere in this building. Now, if you're unaware of this, you are currently sitting in what was the Third Reich's embassy in London until 1936. The staircase, two rooms down, was donated by Mussolini. And somewhere in this building, under a carpet, there is a swastika. I have never seen it. I was talking to Sarah Jane Blakemore on the way down here. She has seen it, so it does actually exist. But on your way out, actually, have a look at this. If you just look to your left, left that way, right that way, out of the window, my left, then that balcony that you're now looking at is what you're looking at here. And this was the funeral of Leopold von Hirsch, who I'm told was a moderate Nazi. I don't really know what that means. And he was a confidant of Anthony Eden's, died in 1936. And this was his state funeral, as you can see, with Nazi solutes on the balcony that you can actually see to your right. There is one Nazi memorial in London left, and it is 25 yards from the front door. And it is of Leopold von Hirsch's dog, Gero. So on your way out, I want you to pay respects to the only Nazi grave in London, Gero the dog, beloved of Leopold von Hirsch, a faithful companion died in 1934, chewed an electrical cable. None of that is relevant at all to what I'm talking about, although that is not the last time Nazis are going to come up over the next quarter, three quarters of an hour. Now, the other thing that we discussed that evening is that we carved out a drunken plan to work in the science media, to work in TV, in radio, in books, with the intention of doing something very specific which was to normalise the role of science and scientists in culture and to move away from the stereotypes of scientists being aloof or asocial brainiacs, men in white coats who are disengaged from the repercussions of their work and indeed society more general. Instead, what we wanted is for science to be part of culture, to be the backbone of civilisation, to be recognised and celebrated and studied and questioned and challenged and to be represented by scientists who were normal people. I mean exceptionally attractive, but essentially normal people. Now, I don't know whether we succeeded in that mission, it is an ongoing project, but I think it's fair to say that there is more science in the media today than any time in history. The quality of that science, I believe, in my opinion, is significantly better than it has been at any time in history, in books, in radio, in TV. I've stepped down from my role as the presenter of Inside Science on Radio 4, the weekly science flagship programme. I decided after lockdown that it was time to let someone else have a go, someone who was younger, someone who was less white, someone with more ex chromosomes than me. And I think that is a work in progress as well. I was rewarded by Radio 4 with being given the job of presenting Start the Week instead, first scientist to do so, and I'm very grateful to the BBC for that. In our plan, in this very secret plan that I'm telling the world about now, a major part of it was and remains the BBC. And as an organisation which is being systematically eviscerated on a week-by-week basis, we must remember that the greatest science and natural history programmes in the public domain that have ever existed have been on the BBC. The BBC is not an organisation without its faults, but by God, you are going to miss it when it's gone. I am very happy to give way to the next generation of science communicators and retreat into books and back to academia, for I am very tired. We're 21 series into the curious cases of Rutherford and Freynau, and neither Hannah nor I can actually remember what subjects we've done. We can't remember who we've interviewed, we can't remember what crappy jokes or anecdotes we've told, we've definitely told them on multiple occasions when we record the programme. Hannah nor I will start telling a story and then immediately go, have you heard this one before, have you? Yes, we've almost run out. And yet they keep asking us to do more. They informed us yesterday that we've got another series due in January, so look forward to that. Now I want to tell you a little bit about my inspiration before I get stuck into the politics of DNA as is the title. I want to talk about the inspiration of how I became a scientist and why I'm a scientist. And why I'm a science communicator and broadcaster. My inspirations started early. This is a picture of me and my dad. That's him on the right in 1975. Now my dad's a very handsome man, but I chose this picture because he looks like a 1970 serial killer. And he's on holiday at the moment, so he's not watching that. Dad was a psychologist and by his own admission, he described psychology as barely a science at the best of times. Just checking there are any psychologists in the audience. I know that there are. I guess my second inspiration is science fiction and more broadly Doc Brown from Back to the Future. I really wanted to create a time machine and if you're going to make a time machine, then you might as well make it out of a delorean. And then when I came to university, I actually came to university to read medicine because I came from a very medical family and it was quite easy to get into medicine at UCL in 1993, but I had no intention of being a doctor. The only person that inspired me to stay in, to join a proper science. Oh, are there any, are there any doctors in the audience? Yeah, sorry about that. Was Steve Jones, who was my undergraduate tutor and my mentor. And here is a photo that I took of him backstage at one of Brian Cox's gigs talking to an actual wizard. That's Alan Moore, who also represents an inspiration in terms of science fiction as well. Now, if you're getting the impression that all of my inspirations were men, then I need to pay homage and respect to my two PhD supervisors, Jane Salden at the Institute of Child Health and Hazel Smith, who's still at UCL in the same department as I am today. Whilst those other men were inspirations to become a scientist, it is Jane who taught me how to be a scientist and I'm forever grateful to her. But the fourth, and alongside my dad, one of the earliest inspirations for my lifelong passion for science and evolution was of course the chap in this picture. In the middle of this picture, David Attenborough himself. It is no lie to say that I do what I do because he did what he did. I know I'm not unique in thinking of that as well. I know many scientists whose main inspiration was primary inspiration for a love and a passion for evolution and natural history was David Attenborough. So it is an extreme honour to receive this award from him. Life on Earth came out when I was four. It was first broadcast on the day after my fourth birthday in 1979. I watched it on the sofa with my dad as many people have done over the last 40 or 50 years. I know I'm not unique to this, but I think for many people, Attenborough was the gateway drug to a lifetime commitment to science and a passion for studying evolution. Now I've met David on several occasions. I'm sorry he couldn't be here tonight. I think he's probably doing something better than this, to be honest. He's always been very kind about my work and my books, but I never have actually worked with him. Six years ago, Blue Planet 2 came out. And just as I had sat on the sofa in the 1970s and 80s with my dad watching Life on Earth, I sat on the sofa with my daughter at the time, two years old, watching Blue Planet 2. Now Juno is a chatty thing. She was particularly chatty aged two. And she started commenting. She started commentating over David Attenborough about what she was watching on screen. And I recorded it because it was funny. And I posted it on Twitter, and it became a sort of minor viral sensation. I was picked up by various newspapers. And then a week or so later, the one show got in touch, and they asked if Juno would like to come on and meet David Attenborough. And I'm going to play the clip, aren't I? This is about two minutes long. But this is the closest I've come to working with David. But you were the icing on top of a cake, you see? Yeah. Now, we have a little girl who's two, and she's had a go at putting her own commentary on some planet Earth. So let's just have a look at this. Are you lonely too? So, David, do you think Juno's got potential? Are you worried now? You might as a retire finally now, so, David. Exactly so. Remarkable, though, isn't it? Age two? She can't have seen any of these cases except on television. I know. Perhaps not then, even then. But she's been such a hit on social media, we thought we'd get her in this afternoon, and she's had a look at the episode that goes out on Sunday to see what she thought. So this is what her reaction was. Oh, look, that's a monkey. She's something there in her womb. Oh, look, he's eating. Look, he's going like this. That's me. That was a baby monkey. But it's your programme, isn't it? That's really very clever and perceptive, isn't it? It is, very much so. She would have loved to have stayed and met you, but he was well past her bedtime. So, unfortunately, Dad Adam, thanks for bringing her in, but he's had to take her home. She's also got a meeting with her agent to discuss her next DVD deal with us. Now, Planet Earth 2 is out on DVD, and you can see the final... Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. Yeah, Dad Adam is... That's the nearest I ever got to working with David Asenbro, the side of my face on the one show. OK, now, I've softened you up with some thank yous and a nice cute video of some monkeys and my monkey, and now I'm going to talk about what I actually want to talk about. The title of this talk, as you saw at the beginning, is The Politics of DNA, and when I wrote in the blurb for it, I assert a statement, which is one that always provokes ire from scientists, which is that all science is political. And I want you to hold this idea... Dad, you were the ice in a... I want you to hold this idea in your head, as I'm talking for the next 45 minutes. It's a provocation, it's a suggestion. I don't know how weddard I am to this as an idea, but I want you to think about this, because it's something that scientists often reject or push back against particularly physicists and engineers who pretend to be scientists. Sorry, that's a joke. I posted this on Twitter yesterday, when the Royal Society put an advert out on Twitter. It was hundreds of responses, all from men, there's always men rejected and said that's a ridiculous proposition to make. And I want to justify why I think this and why this is an argument. Science is political because it's done by humans, right? I mean, this seems a statement so trivial and obvious that it's hard to believe that anyone could possibly contest it by insisting that science isn't biased, that doesn't have inherent biases in it, because humans come with psychological, sociological baggage and society is crammed full of baggage and prejudices that are built into the way we operate in society and science is not outside of society. So it seems like a very obvious thing to say. If you regard epistemologically, science as a way of knowing, then you can acknowledge that the universe exists in an empirical and objective way, but the best way for us to interrogate its existence is inherently a human activity. Now this doesn't mean that I support the politicisation of science, quite the opposite. I think that we should do everything in our power to minimise the role of personal and cultural biases into our understanding of nature and our testing, crucially, of nature. But to assert that science is above the grubby world of politics or the psychological bagages that we carry around with ourselves is to deny the reality of how science actually works. Now part of my inspiration for taking this view over the last few years actually comes from David Attenborough. Now his programmes showcase the very best of the natural world, as you very well know, the most glorious examples of Darwinian evolution and he's done this for more than half a century, but they were always about humankind's role in nature, in the natural world. And the most glorious examples of Darwinian evolution, how they have been the result of, or how they have been affected by human interaction. This became more and more apparent in the 1980s and 1990s when the desecration of the rainforest and climate change and environmental decline became more and more part of the public discourse. Do any of you remember in 1998 the Life of Birds, one of the classic life series? Do you remember the songbird, the lyre bird? Do you remember this clip? This incredible mimic can make the sound of almost anything that it hears. And in this clip, which I won't show, it makes the noise of a car siren going off. It makes the noise of a camera and a camera with a motor. And then it makes the noise of a chainsaw as the foresters were cutting down the trees in its local habitat. Now we marveled at this at the time because it's an astonishing ability for a bird to emulate very accurately the sound of a chainsaw. But what a shameful thing that that is. To display that on BBC One and to have nine million people watch that, I checked, in the UK alone is an example of showing our humankind's interaction with nature and the desecration of nature that we have perpetrated over the last few years. Of course, Attenborough has his attachments to campaigns against climate change and for the recognition of anthropogenic global warming has been an undeniable political swanson of a 60 year career, perhaps best exemplified by his repeated programmes and performances alongside Greta Thunberg and saying very explicitly that she has done things that others himself, meaning himself, have been working on for many, many years. So the idea that we can have science separate from politics, from society and from culture is clearly not something shared by David Attenborough, who is the name bearing this award. Now for me, my work has ended up talking about two specific areas of the history of biology, the history of eugenics and the history of race science. And this is a sort of inevitability, I think, as an evolutionary biologist who started at the Galton Laboratory in 1994. Just a bit of backgrounds, Francis Galton, FRS, fellow of the Royal Society, was Charles Darwin's half-cousin and amongst a very varied career of inventing astonishing things such as a ventilated hat to help with one's thinking. He invented the dog whistle. He invented the weather map, although it was for the day after the weather, which sort of arguably of limited use. But his greatest legacy along with the statistical techniques that he invented to serve his interest in this subject was to coin and scienceify the principles of population control that went by the name of eugenics. He came up with a name, eugenics, himself in 1883. I've ended up spending my life talking about Francis Galton, I suppose inevitably because as an undergraduate, I was in the Galton Laboratory. I was taught by Steve Jones, who was the head of the Galton Institute and teaches this history to undergraduates from the 1980s to this day. And I now teach on that course as well. In a minute, I'll talk about many of Galton's supporters, who are also eugenicists and also founding fathers of many of the major principles of evolutionary biology that we rely on today as well as statistics and psychology. I'll talk about those in just a minute. But the other area that I've ended up writing and talking extensively about is the invention of race science in the 17th and 18th centuries. And it's my contention that these are both incredibly significant and damaging, perhaps responsible ideas that are responsible for some of the worst, most heinous crimes that humanity has ever perpetrated. But in both cases, the invention of biology and subsequently the invention of evolutionary genetics and evolutionary biology emerge out of these political ideologies, not in parallel, but in service of them. So biology emerges out of race science in order to serve racist ideologies of European expansion and colonialisation. And genetics and psychology effectively emerge out of a political desire to enforce eugenic sterilisation across the British population. I'll deal with the race issue very briefly because you can read about that in how to argue with the racists and I worry you want to focus on eugenics tonight. But our entire taxonomic system is based on the work of Carl Ineas who came up with the binomial system that we use to this day universally in biology, which is to have genus and species. We are homo sapiens. In his major work, System I Naturi and the 10th edition, in 1758, he introduced four subcategories, subspecies of humans, which were, in reverse order, Africanus, which describes the phenotype of having black hair, a black skin, frizzled hair, but also a flat nose, females without shame, and governed by Caprice. Asiatica, so people from East Asia, as we've described and say with yellow skin, stiff black hair, haughty greedy and ruled by opinions. Americanus, indigenous Americans or Native Americans, red-skinned, black straight hair, stubborn zealous and regulated by customs. Now the initial phenotype, the physical characteristic, skin colour, pigmentation used to describe these people, these peoples is obviously absurd, but has long-standing cultural resonance in that we recognise these as racist terminology to this day, although we have adopted, as society, the term black, to describe people of recent African descent. But I'm missing one here, which is homo sapiens, oh sorry, I'm on the slide behind you, aren't I? Sorry, homo sapiens, Europeanus, which is white-skinned people with blue eyes who are gentle, acute, inventive and governed by laws. Now, of the, glad you find that amusing, of the many scientists and studio scientists that continued in this work in trying to classify the races of humankind, all of them shared one very specific category, which is that they weren't simply classificational taxonomy, they were hierarchical in their nature, and there isn't a single example between the 17th and the 20th century where these types of classifications aren't hierarchical and they don't put white Europeans at the top of the tree. Now, biology emerges from Linnaeus's classification system in part, but it is a classification system that we continue to use to this day, and it is hierarchical and in its true sense, white supremacist in its nature. So the foundations of biology that emerged in halls like this in the Royal Society, not this actual place, it was in Burlington House back then, are the foundations of modern science, of modern biology as we use them today, and yet have this root which is fundamentally racist and racist in order to serve the political ideology of European expansion. So the foundations of biology are political in their very roots. This is an undeniable fact. That's enough about race, let me talk about eugenics, which is going to make up most of the rest of this talk which I think is going to go on for about two hours. Francis Galton, there he is, miserable old git study is. Galton was a genius in many respects, but did have a very clear typical, but fairly extreme white supremacist ideology for the 19th century, but he was brilliant. He was a brilliant psychologist, sorry, a brilliant statistician. He invented many of the statistical techniques that we continue to use to this day. He was very clear, though, that the invention of these techniques from his work in 1869 onwards, a registry genius, that the reason that he was inventing these types of techniques which have become the mainstays of the tools of statistics that we use, the reasons for them were in service of his ideas about population improvement, which are characterized under his term eugenics. This is unequivocal, this is an undeniable fact. It's very explicitly written. He founded the Galton Laboratory effectively in 1904 with a legacy and a will, which I'll come on to in just a second, but in the foundation in 1904 in Gower Street at UCL, in the same department that I am in today, founded National Eugenics Records Office. And he also, at his death in 1911, with an endowment installed the Galton Professor, the first Galton Professor was Carl Pearson, the second was Ronald Fisher, and that position continues until this day. The money has been reallocated and it pays for my salary, which I will never not find amusing. But let's look at those people. Carl Pearson was the first one installed, and again, an absolute genius, a genius on whose shoulders much of modern science relies entirely. He was extremely racist, extremely anti-Semitic, and he was also very, very clear that his work in developing new statistical techniques that we continue to use to this day were in service of his views about eugenics and the improvement of the British stock of people. He was replaced in 1932 by Ronald Fisher, another absolute titan responsible, one of the three men responsible for what we refer to as the modern synthesis of the fusion of the newly rediscovered Mendelian inheritance and understanding of genetics with Darwinian natural selection, and really fundamentally the framework of all the evolutionary biology and many other statistical techniques and areas from the 1920s onwards. He was also a lifelong committed eugenicist from his days as an undergraduate at Cambridge, where he was a founding member of the eugenics society. At Cambridge, he needed to be a eugenicist until my microphone got off. It's fine, thank you, okay. So let's just go back to Galton for a bit and just talk about what eugenics actually was. Galton imagined that society could be structured in terms of the quality of people in a sort of a bell curve, a normal distribution of people where he saw that there was a small group of hegemonic power brokers who tended to be white upper class men, a large respectable working class who did most of the work, and then a small and hopefully diminishing return of undesirable members of society at the bottom end of society. And his idea for eugenics was to shift the mean away from the wrong end of society. I'm not going to remember in the 1890s, this is a very texty slide for which I apologise, but the social context for the emergence and the popularity of this idea is that you have Victorian turmoil, there's industrialisation happening at foot, urbanisation which comes with increasing sizes of cities, and with that a more visible poor. The Tudor poor laws which had been introduced a couple of centuries earlier where the church took responsibility for the bottom end of society, the poorest and most impoverished members of society, that was being transferred to the government with laws which had names like the Madhouse Act. We have the expanding empires and imperial assimilation, ongoing battles in places like the Boer Wars where we are having our asses handed to us by people who were deemed to be inferior to white British people. Scientific racism was a big part of that. A continual but fashionable at the time idea of declineism, everything in the past was better and everything today is getting worse often to do with replacement theory which is the working classes or the undesirable classes have many more children than the middle or upper classes and therefore the upper and middle classes are subject to being replaced and that is what we must fight against. Eugenics was seen as both a conservative and simultaneously radical idea. In order to maintain the status quo we have to do something radical which is to restrict the fundamental reproductive rights of people deemed undesirable, people that we decide as the powerful should not have the right to reproduce. And what happens in that situation is it starts as a positive idea. The word eugenics means good genes, it means well-born. You, the Greek prefix meaning good and genics, well, genos meaning birth or born on illnesses. So it starts off as a positive idea but who gets to decide who is desirable and who is undesirable? What we see in every tiny genics has been discussed or enacted around the world is exactly the same pattern happening almost instantaneously which is that it starts off with people with severe disabilities but very soon after that it becomes people with less severe disabilities and things like mongolism as it was termed then what we now call people with Down syndrome or trisomy 21. And then it becomes non-specific health diagnoses in sort of catch-all titles like the feeble-minded. Then it becomes women with menstrual troubles, then it becomes racialized minority groups, alcoholics, epileptics, itinerant criminals and it always ends up of course with the Jews. Now at that time, we look at this as an idea as being so abhorrent to us. Such a toxic idea that I can stand up here and you can frown and tutt at these ideas which were just poisonous as I described them to you. But at the time they were enormously, almost universally popular across the political spectrum. Here's a couple of examples that demonstrate their universal popularity. This is a Valentine's card for eugenics suggesting that people who are eugenically healthy should be the ones that you mate with. Now on the next slide, I'm going to give you just a few, I'm just going to go through a few examples because they're sort of fun in a sense. On this next slide, when I show audiences and students, there are five people on the next slide and I challenge anyone in this audience to get all five of them. Put your hand up if you can name all five people and the first person to do so will receive a brand new copy of Minan Hannah's latest book which is not out yet. Okay, a couple in the top left, top right and then two politicians at the bottom. And you don't please don't answer if you've seen this bit of the lecture before or if you're an undergraduate in the biology department. I expected better from the royal. Yes, the man in the pink shirt and you're missing one? The woman? Oh, the woman with the woman? Sitting in... Bears for a Sway. Five out of five. That is the first time that has happened. Hannah, pass. I mean, I'm not sure how I feel about you missing out the only woman to have appeared in this slide deck on slide 25 so far. But there you go. Oh, look, it's another woman. It's Mary Stopes. Mary Stopes best known for her clinics over the last 20 or 30 years offering reproductive health and rights and abortions to women. The reasons that she became interested in the reproductive health of women in the 1910s and 20s was because she was an arch-racist a neo-Nazi. No, a neo-Nazi. She was a pre-Nazi and extreme fascist who hated the Irish and wanted the Irish to be sterilised out of existence in London. The quote at the bottom is a bit of poetry that she wrote in a book and sent to Adolf Hitler proclaiming that love is the greatest thing in the world. That was sent in 1938. So not even late in the day. First wave feminism was very closely associated with Eugenics Margaret Sanger in the States was also a keen eugenicist, the founder of what eventually would become the title X and what's the name of the organisation? Planned Parenthood, thank you. OK, now this one, you've got to brace yourself for this one. This comes from D.H. Lawrence and this is a quote from a love letter a letter in which he was wooing a children's author in which he says, if I had my way I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace with a military band playing softly and a cinematograph working brightly. And then I go out into the back streets and the main streets and bring them all in. The sick halt, the maimed, I would lead them gently and they would smile me a weary thanks and the brass band would softly bubble out the Alleluia chorus. 1906, that. The popularity of Eugenics, we sometimes think fell away when the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed to the world in the years following 1945. I think it did in a sense. I think it did at least in the word Eugenics itself, but the idea persisted and indeed persists to this day. It also continued to persist amongst scientists themselves. This is a letter from Francis Crick, fellow of the Royal Society, in which he states that the main difficulty is that when thinking about Eugenics most people associated with the Nazis who gave it a bad name. Or perhaps you could use a different example, Julian Huxley, fellow of the Royal Society, also president of the British Humanist Association, a position last year held by Alice Roberts, this year held by me. In which again he's espousing views which are effectively Eugenics in action. Eugenics is generally considered to be most closely associated with right wing or with fascist ideology, but it was popular on the left as well as demonstrated by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, but also William Beverage and many other right, sorry, left wing and socialist politicians were very supportive of Eugenics as a policy. But it was Winston Churchill who was the biggest political driver of Eugenics in the years, the first two decades of the 20th century. He proposed in 1910 in legislation that's the compulsory sterilisation of the feeble-mindedness. Again that sort of bucket definition. In 1912 in legislation he proposed using Roentgen rays, X-rays that had only been discovered, what, 16 years before that to sterilise men and women. And in the early drafts of what would come to be law in 1913, the Mental Deficiencies Act, he also included enforced sterilisation of people deemed undesirable, unworthy of reproductive rights. They were removed from early drafts of legislation in the years preceding that, primarily after the campaigning of G.K. Chesterton directed at the MP Josiah Wedgwood, also of the Darwin Wedgwood Galton clan, who recognised that this was a legislation for the sake of a scientific creed, he said, which in 10 years may be discredited, which is indeed what happened. Now that's how close we came to having Eugenics legislations on our books in this country, a whisker, just one line of text edited out of legislation which would run until 1959. Other countries around the world did not show such caution, and apart from Nazi Germany, which I'll come to in due course, America, the USA, was the most enthusiastic embracer of Eugenics policy, which was enacted throughout the course, the majority of the 20th century in the majority of states. This is a quote from Teddy Roosevelt after he was president, in which he describes how it is, wow, you can read it for yourself, but the inescapable duty of the good citizen to leave his blood behind and that should be of the right type. So let's go back to the idea of the social context for the emergence of Eugenics, and particularly this last point, replacement theory. It's an idea which is as old as the hills. Plato talks about it in Republic, but it became formalised in the late 19th century and early 20th century and became a really major part of the emerging Eugenics fears, and indeed persists to this day. In fact, replacement theory was cited by one of the spree killers in recent shootings a couple of months ago in Buffalo in New York, and you can probably remember in 2017 these people carrying tiki torches and shouting the Jews will not replace us in Charlottesville. Now, this is a long standing part of how Eugenics was campaigned for and to a certain extent enacted in the States and in various countries around the world. I want to take a brief interlude to talk about the social context of this as an idea as it emerged with something which is, I guess, kind of funny. There are very few jokes in the history of Eugenics, but John Harvey Kellogg is one of them. He was an extremely keen Eugenicist. Now, just a bit of background on Kellogg himself. So Kellogg, right, he invented the cornflake. He actually co-invented the cornflake with his brother William Kellogg in the 1890s, but John Harvey was an extraordinarily weird man who believed in the preservation of the vital fluids, meaning sperm, of white Americans being preserved primarily through not allowing teenage boys to masturbate. And almost all of his food products that we continue to eat to this day, I know this sounds ridiculous, but this is absolutely true, almost all of the food products that we eat today that were manufactured by cornflakes in those days were invented as a suppressor of the libido to stop the spillage of teenage boys' semen during the night. Now, he split up with his brother William Kellogg because John Harvey believed that all flavours, sugar, salt, caffeine, cinnamon, pretty much everything, tea and coffee would stimulate the libido of white Americans and therefore they would spill their seed. And he wanted to protect against that, so he invented the cornflake. William Kellogg thought that cornflakes tasted like shit. So he added sugar to them and thus invented the frosty. Now, they never really spoke again after this point, but those trajectories went on and next time you're having cornflakes tomorrow morning, you can think about the vital fluids of teenage boys. He was an extraordinarily weird man. He was a man who was married for 30-odd years but boasted about never having had sex with his wife once. He adopted eight children and had a daily enema. I just think that's... I just think they're red flags. I mean, I don't know why you're silent about that. He used his enormous wealth, his extreme wealth as a result of the anti-libido cornflakes that he invented to fund at Battle Creek in America, the Race Betterment Foundation, which was also funded by the Rockefellers and the Carnegie's, but it was an institute dedicated to pursuing racial purification of white Americans through the policies of eugenics. So, there you go. Next time you're having cereals in the morning, you're just endorsing white supremacy. Now, who's read one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, The Great Gatsby? Everyone. If you haven't read it, you should, because it is one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. Who has noticed that there is a strong eugenics theme starting on page four, one person? I didn't know two people. I didn't notice that having read it several times during my youth. I didn't notice until I started reading this, I started writing my book on the history of eugenics. But it's right there. Tom Buchanan says, if we don't look out, the white race will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff. It's been proved. It hasn't been proved. It wasn't proved at the time and it never has been since. But he was quoting from a fictional scientist who was the amalgam of two actual writers of the time, who are Madison Grant and Lothrop T Stoddart, who written two really heavily influential books, both bestsellers in the 1916 and 1920, The Passing of the Great Race and the Rising Tide of Colour. Both formalisations of the racial policies that would become the benchmarks and the cornerstones of white supremacy in America and indeed later in Nazi Germany. The Passing of the Great Race is a mad book. It's worth having a look at. It's deeply weird and sort of comically so in that he asserts that the great civilisations of Greece, Rome and Egypt were ceded by Nordic people who walked down from their forest homes and ceded these great civilisations and then retreated back to the forests. He asserted that Michelangelo and Leonardo were actually German based on skull measurements of their busts. Now, I know we laugh at that now, but Madison Grant was extraordinarily influential and indeed was one of the key texts that Hitler read in the years running up to him seizing power in 1933. It was the first book translated into German after he took power in 1933. He described The Passing of the Great Race as his Bible. I'm aware that you're looking at your notes. I've got half an hour to go. It's going on for a long time. Sorry about this. There's the doors in the back, please. The funding of Eugenics in America came primarily from three organisations. One was Rockefeller, the Rockefeller Foundation at that time, the richest man in America, possibly the richest man who's ever been lived in America. But also from Mary Harriman, who was the widow of E.L. Harriman, the railroad magnate. And Eugenics was such a normalised idea. Scott Fitzgerald was hanging out with people like that, which is the basis of many of the stories told in The Great Gatsby. And so the idea of Eugenics was part of the conversation of these aristocrats, these extraordinarily wealthy aristocrats who are hanging around upstate New York at this time. And Harriman and Rockefeller and the Carnegie funded the man on the left here who's called Charles Davenport and two others who I'll come to in the next few minutes. I'll speed up a bit. In order to set up from 1907 onwards the Eugenics Records Office in Cold Spring Harbour, which is a lab which still exists in one of the great labs in genetics over the last 50 years or so. Davenport himself was a zoologist. He'd done his PhD at Harvard. He met Galton in the 1890s in London and then went back to America and set up, devoted the rest of his life to his pursuit of Eugenics policy. Right from the beginning it was clearly an interaction between what they thought was a pure science and a political agenda. There's a headline from the New York Times in 1912. Social problems have a proven basis in heredity. The principles of the Eugenics Records Office in Cold Spring Harbour were that they recognized that this looked like a top-down strategy, a top-down policy that politicians and scientists in their white coats and rich establishments were proclaiming on the rest of the population that they should not reproduce or that deeming who is worthy of reproduction or not. So they did a very clever thing, which is to go out to rural communities, especially farming communities. Eugenics has always been compared to agriculture and they went out, they sent women out to farming communities to who were in agricultural fairs in places like Kansas and Iowa, were competing to have the best freezing cow or the best backface sheep or whatever and they would introduce better baby or fit of family competitions in order to spread the idea of Eugenics but also to do something separate, which was to harvest the pedigrees of the American people. That was the secret project behind Eugenics Records Office and what they would do is ask families to fill out forms in which they'd describe any mental health or physical health problems in their families and their extended families and describe their family treats and carbon copies of these records were sent back to the Records Office there, shown at the bottom and there the idea was Eugenics Records Office under Charles Davenport would constructs a pedigree for the entirety of the American people and in doing so could identify the inheritance patterns, the Mendelian inheritance patterns of all positive and negative traits across the American people such that Eugenics policies could be enacted on those and that is effectively what happened. From 1907 onwards legislation was passed first in the state of Arizona and over the next 20 or 30 years, 31 states passed official Eugenics legislation. We estimate that up to 80,000 people, almost all of whom were from descendants of the enslaved or indigenous Americans were sterilized against their knowledge or will, the last of which were happening on mass in the 1960s but it should be pointed out that women undergo involuntary sterilization in American prisons last year under the ICE detention centers. So Eugenics as a legacy continues to this day in America. Now cast your mind back to your school days of biology and thinking about Mendel and his peas, the Moravian, he wasn't actually a monk, he was a friar, there is a difference, he was a friar in Moravia who came up with the rules of genetic inheritance by breeding together 29,000 pea plants in the 1860s. I love this picture, you never see this picture, you see the picture of Mendel, he's second from the right and the back row looking at a, he's actually holding a petunia there but I love this picture because these are all the rest of the friars in the monastery at that time and I just love the poses that they're pulling. Look at the guy on the far left. What's he pointing at? Anyway, this idea which was first constructed by Mendel in the 1860s and then was sort of rediscovered by Western, by European scientists in 1900 is the foundation of genetics, the rules of inheritance that we teach to GCSE students to this day and it is foundational in our understanding of heredity. What we teach is an incredibly simplified version. I argue in other words, simplified to the point of not being useful and not being instructive but Charles Davenport adopted this idea of Mendelian inheritance with such fervor that it became the basis of tracking the inheritance patterns of all diseases or all desirable traits whether they were caused by a single gene, unknown at the time or multiple genes as most complex traits and disorders are but everything was down to a single gene that could be tracked in a Mendelian way and that was the project of the Eugenics Records Office. It's an idea which is so sticky and so attractive that it is maintained to this day. We talk about the gene for something where something is a complex behaviour. It's in my years as writing for various newspapers it's something which I've become extraordinarily annoyed by over many years here's a collection of some of the headlines from various news outlets over the years, the telegraph, the gene that makes you good at taking risky decisions, the happiness gene discovered, the middle row from the male, the gene that can scale out to remind the gene that makes you lean politically to the left, the love gene, one in four born to be unfaithful claimed scientist. I point out those three because it's all the same gene, imagine having that phenotype. And in the left wing media, the Guardian talks about a gene for cocaine addiction. The Atlantic went with, a gene predicts what time of day you will die. I mean, I've read that article several times so I have no idea how that could work and even in 2017 this is from the very august scientific American they went with schizophrenia gene, shed's light on possible causes. Now as we know, as everyone knows, schizophrenia and most of the traits or disorders described here are influenced by dozens if not hundreds of genes that account for a small proportion of the heritability of those disorders much of which is moderated and mediated by the environment. The idea that there is a schizophrenia gene is something that within genetics we ruled out maybe decades ago possibly by people sitting in the second row right now. I suppose scientific American at least had the good grade in scare quotes. Now, let me briefly talk about the person on the right, Herbert Goddard, H.H. Goddard who is very significant player in the particular part of the story that I want to get to in order to get to the end of this now very over long lecture. Goddard is significant for a number of reasons. He's a psychologist based in New Jersey at this time. He was the first person to translate the IQ test. The IQ test was formulated in France by Binet and Simon and he translated it into American English and it became a mainstay of intelligence and cognitive abilities testing throughout the course of the 20th century. He was also used in Ellis Island to test the cognitive abilities of one of the migrants into America. That's not the point of his presence in this story. He influenced by Davenport, was interested in the monogenic, the supposed monogenic inheritance of complex behaviours and complex disorders. So much of it was founded around his interest in treating this woman, Deborah Callacac. I hear pictured as an adult but he'd been treating Deborah since she was six or seven years old. And she was described in Goddard's notes as being a standard grade imbecile, the types of girl that we see in our reformatries. A nonspecific pseudo-psychiatric diagnosis as we'd see it today but feeble mindedness was the thing that was identified by Goddard as being the root cause of all her problems. Now what Goddard set out to do was to track using her family tree was to track the inheritance pattern of Deborah's feeble mindedness through the generations to try and isolate the pattern by which she was passed from generation to generation and to see if he could actually identify the root cause of it. So that is what he set out to do over many years. Does my mic keep going off? Do I need to shout or shall I use this one? Thank you. Use of that. And that is what he set out to do. So he tracks back the family of Deborah Callacac and came up with a Callacac family tree which went back right into the 1700s and published this an extremely best-selling book called The Callacacac Family. In which he demonstrated that Deborah Callacac was the great, great, great, great granddaughter of a returning revolutionary war hero called Martin Callacac. Actually Callacac was a pseudonym that Goddard adopted. But on the way back from the revolutionary war, Martin Callacac stopped off in a bar and impregnated what he described as an attractive but feeble-minded barmaid. He then returned back to his home and his wife, who was a Quakeress and they had a successful family as a result of that. But the attractive but feeble-minded barmaid, she also had a family. And what Herbert Goddard did is to establish that there were these two, these bifocation events where he dallied with this barmaid and then went back to his upstanding Quaker wife. Created a bifocation of his family tree, one branch of which was extremely dysfunctional and the other branch of which was extremely successful. And this became such a popular idea in popularised by this book published in 1912 that it remained in textbooks right up until the 1950s. This is a psychology textbook from 55 and you probably can't read it. It says on the left it says he dallied with a feeble-minded taffan girl. She bore a son known as Old Horror who had 10 children. From Old Horror's 10 children came hundreds of the lowest types of human being. And the other side, he married a worthy Quakeress who bore seven upright worthy children and hundreds of the highest types of human beings came from her. Now I want you to hold on to that thought for just a second because when we think about disorders like feeble-mindedness and as they would be described in those years, they're not caused by a single gene. We know that very well. They're influenced very much by the environment. But the notion that this could be passed down in this very Mendelian clear way is clearly false according to a contemporary understanding of genetics. And so we can say, we can look back on this and say, well, he was clearly wrong about this. This was an adherence to a form of Mendelian biology which is simply not true. None of that matters because the feeble-minded but attractive barmaid didn't actually exist. The family that was the descendants of the feeble-minded barmaid according to Goddard was an entirely different family unrelated to Martin Calacac at all who were highly successful. In some ways, they did have some inheritable diseases. Many of them were extremely poor which of course is the greatest correlate of most illnesses and most mental health problems. In the photos of the Calacac family which are available in the book itself, it's quite clear to second year medical geneticists that many of the children had what is broadly described as fetal alcohol syndrome, which of course is not genetically determined but is environmentally determined by extreme drinking of during pregnancy. So not only was this affixion constructed on misunderstood and misplaced science, it was affixion constructed on an entire imaginary basis. Five minutes. Can I have five minutes? Okay, thanks. 10 minutes. I mean, I've got to do the whole of Nazi eugenics now. Let's switch over to the Third Reich, the emergence of the Nazi eugenics programme. The equivalent to Charles Davenport and Francis Galton in Germany was a chap called Alfred Plutz. And he was enamored of the work of Darwin but also of Heichhol and started off as a socialist, went to a farm, a socialist farm, a communal farm in Iowa, but he was so appalled by what he described as the low quality of the people there that he returned to Germany and dedicated the rest of his life to eugenic purification of the German people. He also met Galton and was inspired to set up the first eugenics journal and the second eugenics institute after the one on Gower Street. And over the years of the first decade of the 20th century, German eugenics grew slowly but assuredly and he connected, Plutz connected very clearly and very well with the international eugenics movement. And the first eugenics conference was held not far from here down on the Strand in a hotel, the Cecil Hotel in 1912. Plutz was there, Goddard was there, it was chaired by Churchill, the keynote speech was by Arthur Balfour. So the popularity and the universality of this is also international by this point. Now eugenics in Germany I'll do this very briefly. Obviously many, many books have been written about the emergence of racial policies in Germany over the course of the 19th and 20th century. It was formulated very clearly with the idea of Nordic purity, Nordic which then becomes Aryan purity under the Third Reich. The idea, Leibnz und Werters Leibnz, lives unworthy of life, was introduced in 1920. And having read the passing of the Great Race and having been inspired by the antisemitism of Henry Ford whilst in prison in 1927, Hitler seizes power in 1933 and one of the first laws he introduces is the law for the prevention of hereditary diseased offspring, the first eugenics law in Nazi Germany. Let's just go quickly back to our three dead white Americans. The middle one, who I haven't mentioned yet, Harry Lachlan. He's Charles Davenport's deputy, sort of enforcer, another PhD in zoology but became absolutely fixated on eugenics over the course of the first two decades of the 20th century. In 1920, recognising that the states in America that were introducing eugenics law in a sort of ad hoc way where each legislation was different from the one that came before it, he wrote a book in which he had a eugenics legislation template, a sort of boilerplate form that states could adopt in order to speed up eugenics legislation being passed in various states. Now there was a strong connection between the American eugenicists from Cold Spring Harbour and the two eugenics foundations in Berlin in the 1930s. Partly it was academic, partly it was because Harry Lachlan, Charles Davenport were over there influencing their thoughts and their intellectual and scientific thoughts, partly because it was funded primarily by the Rockefeller Foundation in America but also because Harry Lachlan came across with his eugenics template, his legislative template and gave it to the Third Reich and that is what became the first eugenics law passed in Germany. It was a translation of American eugenics laws. So the links between American eugenics and Nazi Germany are intellectual, scientific, financial and legal. This is the thing that I found most surprising when I was writing this book. I had an idea about this but they are such strong ties that they're sort of undeniable. And what happened later is the implementation of what's known as Axion T4, which is effectively the pathway, the legal pathway to the Holocaust itself. Eugenics was a sort of backbone of the Holocaust. It wasn't, the Nazi's policies were deranged and drew from many different sources but without eugenics policy in them and they're what they call euthanasia policy, none of those things could have happened. Now, finally, the Nazis were excellent propagandists. They were extremely good at persuading the populists. Their people, their policies which we regard rightly as being extreme fascism today were popular. And they did this via posters, campaigns at health fairs, hygiene fairs, this is an example which effectively demonstrates the principle of replacement theory. I won't describe this. But they were very interested, as you may well know, in cinema as well and the effect of cinema, the power of cinema to persuade people of their political ideology. In 1935, a year when two new pieces of eugenics legislation were introduced in Nazi Germany, a short film called Das Erba was released, a 12-minute film in which a young female scientist is watching some stag beetles rut and she's confused by this behaviour. So she goes to her professor, the chap in the White Coast in the foreground top right and asks him what is happening and he begins to describe Darwinian natural selection, the struggle for existence. And he sits her down in a cinema and shows her a film. So we're watching a film of these three, watching a film about Darwinian natural selection. And in it he shows various things like a cat chasing a cock, a dog hunting a hare. And he describes the inheritance patterns of particular behavioural traits in pedigrees and pedigreed dogs in particular, a type of certificate that you get from the Kennel Club today. If, for example, you own a whip it, I own a whip it. And halfway through the film, as they're sitting down, they all burst into laughter because she, the naive young student says, oh, I get it, nature has its racist policies as well. And he'll fall about laughing. This is an attempt to justify the racialized policies of the Third Reich at this time. Here is a clip from this film, which I want you to watch. Georgier? Dear Gregor? So there he is describing the pedigree of the dogs? Right for us people. Then Decadvo might have been some other way. A famous example for the bad things and incitences is fab blas人. The descendants of North Man, O'r hefyd am ychynig, Martin Callicac yn y ddechrau, ychynig o'r dechrau ein mergyn, a'r hefyd yn y ddull yng Ngharraedd gyfnodydd yn y cwylig. Callicac yw'r hefyd yn yr unrhyw o'r hefyd a'r hefyd yn y cwylig, a o'r hefyd yn y ddechrau, 534 erd, cranky, ondlych i'r arbôr. Ydi'is nurhae yn beistio i'r ffyrdd yn tausendyn. OK, nid ydych chi'n gweithio. Mae ydych chi'n gweithio i'r ffyrdd yn sanatoriwn, i'r ffyrdd ffyrdd ffysigol, ac mae'n gweithio i'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. I ydych chi'n gweithio i'r gwneud allanodol o'r cwrlin gyrych. Nid ydych chi'n gweithio i'r gweithio i'r ffyrdd yn bwysigol hir yma, ar y bryd i'r gweithio a'r ddysgu amser aorod agor gyda myneddol i ffyrdd gweithio newyddol ym 1900 o'i meddwl a chioedwg yng Nghaerdydd mewn iaith ddisgyn almightym. Ym ffordd holl honno ar hyn, gwmhaithol i ddych chi'n meddwl i'r gwneud i'r mewn iaith ddych, Mae'r prifoedd yma yn ymgyrchio ar gwybod yn bwysig o'i ddweud y bydd ymgyrchio'r ffordd. Mae'n ei ddweud, mae'n bwysig, mae'n bwysig, bydd angen i'r bydd, mae'n bwysig o'r bwysig. Ac yn ymddug, mae'n ddweud ymgyrchio'r bwysig o'r ysgolwch yn y rechydigu ymarfer, rydyn ni'n bwysig i'r bwysig ar gyfer y rechydigau gyda'r cyfleoedd fawr oed. Many of you will know the quote from the former editor of New Scientist, Alan Anderson, who once brilliantly, memorably said that science is interesting, and if you don't agree, you can fuck off. Can someone screen grab that for me? I'm in the Royal Society, everyone. But you know what, I don't think that's necessarily true. It's an excellent line, but science is in the service of knowledge, but it is also in the service of people. Knowledge doesn't exist independently of people. I want you to consider the work, recent work of two of my colleagues, so Kate Jones, who's not here tonight, but she's a scientist. Kate Jones is at the back tonight, she came in late, who's fundamentally interested in bats, but most of her work over the last few years, or much of her work over the last few years, has been modelling disease outbreaks in Africa and around the rest of the world. Is that a pure science? Is that an applied science? Has that been relevant to society at all in the last two or three years? I think it has. Is that politics attached to science? Is that science independent of politics? I do not think so. Or maybe last week, the work published, led by my colleague Mark Thomas there in the second row, in which he used ancient DNA to determine that the bodies of 17 people that were discovered in a well in Norwich were of Jewish origin, and had probably been murdered as part of what was emerging as the first wave of antisemitism in Europe, which resulted in the expulsion of the Jews a few decades later. That's top quality, pure research science. Is it relevant to politics today? Yes, of course it is. Is it independent of our understanding of antisemitism? Of course it is. So what we do is we do science within the context of society. By the way, I don't think Kate Jones nor Mark Thomas are FRS. Yet, we're working on those campaigns. So I just want to conclude by saying there is, I think, arguably, a moral obligation within the study of humans that knowledge accrued should improve the quality of our lives as societies, as individuals, and where possible it should reduce suffering and increase social cohesion and fairness. I believe this is the duty of scientists and this, by the way, is a view expressed very clearly by one of the greatest of the old dead white men in our field. Here is a quote. As man advances in civilisation and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he or she ought to extend their social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to them. This point once being reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the people of all nations and races. If that isn't a political statement, then I don't know what is. That was said by Charles Darwin, FRS. Thank you very much. On behalf of everybody here, thank you for such a fascinating talk. I think we can forgive you for going over because it really was fascinating. I think we've gone over a bit but I do want to give you, the audience, a chance to ask a question or two if that's okay with you. So I think we have some roving microphones. So if you do have questions, I see a couple of them. We'll only take one or two, I'm afraid, just because of this time. But again, at the Gentleman in Yellow, I think there's a microphone making its way to you. Sorry about the timing. I studied a little bit about eugenics by reading Philippa Levine's very short introduction to eugenics. One of the things that came up is the history of the defeat because it was a global phenomenon. How did the defeats in the Zulu anglo-war, the Boer war, and also the First World War shape attitudes towards eugenics? You spoke about Mary Stelps and also another one that you probably didn't mention, Margaret Sanner. How did eugenics around the world affect the positions of women in colonised in the colonies in the various different empires? Yeah, sure. That's two questions in the area of one. So the answer to your first question is massively. So the influence of what happened in the Boer wars in Southern Africa was hugely influential in persuading or offering a solidification, cementing of the nascent ideas of eugenics amongst the political classes, primarily through Churchill. Many people, including Carl Pearson, said it very specifically. He believed that we'd been beaten by an inferior race. Churchill adopted exactly the same view. This acted as a philip for the pro eugenicists to say, well, we have to have eugenics policies because we are too weak as a nation at the moment for various reasons, through breeding, through public health, to reform our societies so that we don't get our asses handed to us by inferior races. So it was enormously important. The second part was, well, I don't know the answer to the question of how did first wave feminism or how did the movements of Sanger and Stopes influence women in the colonies. But in terms of, again, justifying the principles of eugenics through basically racist tropes. We've got to remember that race as we see it today is not quite the same as how we saw it in those days. So Stopes was anti-Irish primarily, but also anti-Jew and anti-Slavic. Whereas now today these are all white European people. So she was extremely racist and extremely influential in imposing effectively racist policies or suggesting racist policies, supporting racist policies in order to prevent the reproduction in those groups of people. She lost interest in it in the 1940s because she recognised that it becomes such a toxic idea that she never mentioned it ever again. Thanks very much. We'll take one more question and a lady over here in blue. Hi Adam, thanks for your talk. It was enjoyable. I think my question is more generally based on science communication. In a society where we are surrounded by people who have the same sort of pattern and ideals as us and there's a selective bias between people you surround yourself with combined with the general distrust of the media that is present in these days. How would you go about building a more evidence-based society and policy in a country? Have you just asked me to fix society? I mean we're 20 minutes over already. Well I think in a way I think this is the point that I made at the beginning when I was joking about our ideas of normalising science in society that if we have a more scientifically literate population that if we teach aspects of science which are generally ignored until later in our education process things like risk, probability, which we don't really teach at school at all but are so fundamental to understanding the complexities of science and how the world actually works those are things that should be embedded much earlier in the educational process. Now that's really easy for me to say I'm not a teacher, I'm not an educationist I don't know how to structure a curriculum aimed at 7 or 8 year olds I have co-written a book aimed at 10 to 14 year olds but I literally found it the hardest thing I've ever had to do because I don't know how to do that but normalising those sorts of ideas early on in our scientific education I think is part of that process to defer to teachers to help with that process and help that process become more normalised in society these are strange days we've just come out of a pandemic in which science I think in a weird way had a good pandemic if that's a okay thing to say. I mean Hannah made a programme three years ago which predicted that it would happen and modelled it almost perfectly for the BBC and then it happened we all knew that this was coming it was just a case of when it was going to come but we also you should celebrate the triumphs of science in the pandemic in that we sequenced the genomes of the virus almost instantaneously and generated a vaccine almost instantaneously but well you know there's a quote in the book about the presence of scientists in parliament and it comes from an editorial in nature from 1869 in which the editorials of nature have always been anonymous and it describes parliament in 1869 as being that they couldn't imagine a place less devoid a more devoid of scientific knowledge or expertise in the whole of society I kind of wonder whether that's changed I don't know we got a new prime minister about six hours ago should we wait and see well thank you very much I'm so sorry we couldn't take more of your questions this evening and again apologies to our viewers online for not being able to pick yours up so it's sadly all we have time for but we do have one last thing to do before we end our evening and that is with great honour on behalf of the Royal Society we are now able to present Dr Adam Rutherford with the 2021 David Attenborough Award for outstanding public engagement with science many congratulations welcome congratulations speak on behalf of everyone from that applause and those watching online when I say thank you to Adam again for that talk tonight and a phenomenally thought provoking talk thank you to you for joining us this evening again for this special lecture congratulations again to Adam for the award and I'd now like to invite our VIP guest to join us for some celebratory drinks thank you very much for joining us this evening well done, well done fascinating topic