Cut and thrust of parliamentary life

A job in the higher reaches of academia is good training for parliamentary life, if Ian Gibson, Labour Member of Parliament (MP) for Norwich North, is to be believed. Now chair of the House of Commons select committee on science and technology, Gibson was Dean of biological sciences at the University of East Anglia until his election to parliament in 1997. Ambition, he says, and back-stabbing are common to both.Yet it is hard to escape the conviction that Gibson revels in political life. It is also more than likely that he was tailoring his words to raise an eyebrow or prompt a knowing smile among The Scientist's readership. Gibson is nothing if not media and audience conscious.Current and forthcoming inquiries of the select committee cover high-profile political issues like EU funding of UK science (which opened this month), biodefence and genetically modified foods. In the UK's parliamentary system, awareness of newsworthiness is crucial if a select committee's work is not to slip into obscurity. Charged with scrutinizing the executive — in the case of the select committee on science and technology, this means the Office of Science and Technology and the bodies it funds — the influence of a select committee on the political process compared with its US counterparts is indirect. It depends heavily on the personal influence of members of the committee, and on what publicity they can garner.This holds especially true for the select committee on science and technology, not one of the star committees of the House of Commons. Despite the high profile that Prime Minister Tony Blair attempted to give science during a speech last year to the Royal Society, and despite the clear link that Treasury reports accompanying the Comprehensive Spending Review of last summer made between science, technology, and the country's economic well being, one does not see top political reporters at the committee's hearings. Indeed, one rarely sees science reporters. Which is something of a shame because during the past year Gibson's robustly dialectical style (he says happily of himself that he used to view direct action as worth three committee meetings), and the committee's choice of inquiry topics, have injected some energy into proceedings.Certainly, last July's report on science education for 14–19-year-olds, with its comprehensive criticisms of a curriculum that discourages pupils from thinking for themselves, struck many chords among teachers. Equally sure is that Gibson's neighbouring MP and companion at soccer games, education secretary Charles Clarke (Labour, Norwich South), would have been well aware of the science and technology committee's work.Not that the two MPs necessarily see eye to eye on all topics. Gibson gives the recently published strategy review of higher education in the UK "one out of 10," the one mark being awarded because the government at least recognizes there is a problem. He is particularly scathing of proposals to grant university charters to institutions that do not do research. "People," he says, "need to be research-conscious, and all universities need to do research even if it is not the highest rated."That emphasis on research carried the committee last year deep into the heart of the UK's scientific establishment — and, co-incidentally, garnered more headlines — when it inquired into the UK's learned societies. Ostensibly, the inquiry was general, covering among others the Royal Academy of Engineers. But a reading of the subsequent report makes clear it was actually the Royal Society that was firmly in the committee's sights, and the subject of a parliamentary inquiry for the first time in the Society's 340-year history.The committee found — doubtless to the Society's relief — that the Royal Society is good value for money, but that it needs to guard against elitism. It also found that the low percentage of women among the Society's Fellows simply reflects the low percentage of women among senior British academics. Incidentally, the committee itself has only one female member; it ought to have two if it were to be strictly representative of the percentage of women in parliament.Though the learned societies inquiry is now in the past, it seems to have ruffled some important plumage in the upper echelons of the scientific establishment, and to have opened the committee to the "not for attribution" charge that it is taking on too many inquiries with too few staff.Such talk, though, shouldn't necessarily be taken at face value. Given the interlinked nature of politics and science — and politicians and scientists — at the more rarefied levels of national life, it is not entirely clear who is influencing whom and how. For example, Gibson sits on a Royal Society committee on science in society chaired by Paul Nurse FRS, who heads the influential charity Cancer Research UK, while John Enderby, a vice president of the Royal Society, is briefing the select committee for its EU science funding inquiry.What is clear is that there is life beyond the bench and a place in national life for scientists with a yen — and the constitution — for politics.

Cut and thrust of parliamentary life

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