Mark Walport, until recently, was a consummate – if highly successful – academic. Over a well-charted career, he had earned a PhD from Cambridge, presided over Imperial College’s Division of Medicine, and served as Director of the Wellcome Trust, the UK-based cancer research organization. But seven months ago, Walport was tapped by Prime Minister David Cameron to serve as the country’s Chief Scientific Advisor, catapulting him from the realm of evidence-trumps-all pragmatism to the muddled, multi-dimensional world of politics.
“Governments care about two things: the health, well-being, and security of their populations, and they care about the economy,” Walport told me before his talk at the Falling Walls Conference last Saturday in Berlin. “And science has a lot to say about both of those.” While Walport offers the best-supported data to any issue the Cameron government requires, he’s particularly interested in tackling the challenge of global warming and promoting open access of scientific publications.
Walport – biased though he may be – believes the UK enjoys a particularly strong relationship between its scientific community and political leaders. He notes that each governmental department has a chief scientist, and that each one represents a different discipline. Walport is a medical doctor, but other scientific advisors are chemists, physicists, and engineers. This diversity, along with a well-established network of on-call experts, means that Walport is able to marshal targeted, context-specific advice at a moment’s notice.
When the Fukushima nuclear power plant spewed radiation after the nearby earthquake and resulting tsunami in March 2011, this set-up proved especially useful. UK-based Atmospheric and nuclear scientists quickly evaluated the situation, declaring that the radiation lead posed no significant risk to Britons living in Tokyo. And while the UK team was tasked explicitly with protecting its own nationals, the prognosis applied equally to the tens of millions of Japanese citizens living in the Tokyo megalopolis; Walport believes this expertise boosted the UK’s diplomatic relationship with Japan.
This is not to say that the dialogue between scientists and governing officials is always so streamlined. A sudden emergency is largely nonpartisan, but daily political squabbles are rife with posturing and conflicting priorities that aren’t necessarily beholden to logic. “Scientists think the wall is because politicians don’t understand the science and don’t listen,” said Walport. “Politicians think it’s that the scientists don’t understand the real issues of politics. The two parties think they’re having different conversations.” Indeed, realizing that there’s more to politics than scientific evidence – and that these other components are equally valid motivations – is a common shortcoming of scientists in the political arena.
On climate change, Walport is slightly less nuanced. The disintegration of sea ice, the rise of sea level, more evaporation – “all of these indicators are going in the direction of what you’d expect if the climate were to be warming.” As a consequence, there are three things we can do: work to mitigate the risk, adapt to changes, or suffer. “It’s up to us to optimize that ratio,” Walport explained. “And scientists don’t have a unique role in that discussion – it’s up to all of us."
