Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

National science weeks are much in vogue at the moment, but however
good the intentions, their execution still leaves very much to be desired.

William Waldegrave announced the British version a few weeks ago at
the British Association’s meeting in Keele, and apparently set the timing
– the end of March 1994 – with little else in mind but getting it within
the current financial year.

A similar degree of thought seems to have gone into the European Commission’s
grandly named European Week for Scientific Culture, the final details of
which were unveiled this week in Brussels.

The begetter of the European week is the European Commissioner for Research,
Antonio Ruberti, the able former science minister of Italy, who appears
in this case to have let his good sense desert him.

This is not his first science week. When he had Italy’s equivalent of
Waldegrave’s job, he set up the Settimana and it has turned into a jolly
event, with scientists throughout Italy spending a week explaining what
they do to the public. It would have been no bad thing to have a similar
set of events organised across Europe. Unfortunately, that is not what we
are going to get. Planning has been rushed.

As a result, Ruberti has ended up throwing money at a host of unrelated,
uncoordinated little projects, none of which will make much impact, collectively
or individually, on the average European’s perception of science.

So what are we left with? Open days at a collection of five plant biotechnology
institutes? They got the title right – it’s called The Power Behind the
Flower, a title New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ lent the organisers from one of its articles
– but that’s about all. Open days are what these institutes should be putting
on anyway. A film festival on science and science fiction before and after
DNA sounds more promising, but a seminar at Europe’s particle physics centre,
CERN, for scientific journalists on ‘The problems of scientific information
in Europe’? Don’t journalists know them already?

Good, bad, or indifferent, the events do not add up to a single, organised
effort to tell Europeans what their scientists are doing, nor to create
any great excitement about Europe’s incredible history of scientific achievement.

The Commission should really have given itself time to decide what it
wanted to do, and then allocated the money. Instead, it dangled the cash
in front of its ‘friends’, and asked for quick ideas.

You don’t get organised communication between 320 million people that
way. And there is now a danger that with a growing number of national science
weeks and a separate European science week, set for November, the public
will suffer science week overload. Next year, let’s hope for more discussion
and better organisation