Matt Kaplan on Broken Beakers and Brilliant Minds: Fixing The Machinery of Science

From the energy crisis and feeding eight billion people to defeating cancer and coping with climate change, humanity faces some rather large challenges today. To tackle them, we need science running like a well-oiled machine. Unfortunately, it has more often resembled a clunky old engine: loud, temperamental and prone to breaking down at the worst possible moment.

It is tempting to blame recent funding cuts for science’s current woes, but focusing only on money rather misses the point. Many of science’s biggest problems have been around for years, sometimes centuries. Scientists have long been criticised, sidelined or attacked for having ideas that were too new, too inconvenient or simply too correct for the people in power at the time. Even truly unscientific behaviours, like character assassination and fraud, are not modern inventions… though they do seem to have enjoyed a recent renaissance.

The good news is that longstanding problems are not the same as unsolvable ones. Join Matt Kaplan, science correspondent at The Economist and author of I Told You So! Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled and Imprisoned… For Being Right, for a spirited and insightful talk on the history of these endemic issues and what we can do to finally consign them to the scientific scrap heap.

Matt Kaplan has been working for The Economist as a science correspondent for nearly two decades and contributed over half a million words to the newspaper during that time. Fascinated by the weird and often less well respected members of the animal kingdom, he has made a habit of writing about how these species make life better for humanity.

Copies of his new book will be available for purchase at the talk.