If Science is to Save Us: Q&A with Astronomer Royal Lord Martin Rees

Astronomer Royal and Chair of the Longitude Prize Committee, Lord Martin Rees explores the power of prizes to unlock innovation to solve great challenges in his new book, If Science is to Save Us.

We met with Martin to discuss science’s ability to help and inspire us, while at the same time having the ability to destroy us. In the book, he explores the great challenges that science can help solve, from biopower to cyber-attacks, and the existential threat of climate change.

Thanks for speaking with us Martin. What role do you see astronomy and astronomers playing in the 21^st century considering the challenges we face on Earth.

I am an astronomer. What’s special about astronomers is that, more than other scientists, we tend to think in very long timescales. This perhaps makes us that bit more conscious of the long-term past of science – what we owe to our heritage, and this has led me, in the last 20 years, to think more about the long-range future.

Although the Earth has been around for 45 million centuries, this century is special. The human species is so numerous and so empowered that it can – as never before – determine the future of the planet.

Science can either help us, and empower us, or destroy us because humanity has become so powerful.

Your new book, If Science is to Save Us, was published in September. What is the premise of the book?

The first part is a survey of the global mega-challenges that confront us.

To begin with, I look at the challenge of biotech. We have lived through a pandemic that has touched every corner of the globe. Collectively, it has forced us to acknowledge the truth that disasters can truly be global in nature.

Thanks to the interconnected world we live in, not least because of air-travel, and the internet, a catastrophe is no longer restricted to one specific region. It can spread around the world at lightning speed.

I also discuss the implications of technologies like Artificial Intelligence. There is a real worry among many people that machines will take over and what this could mean for the way we live. I worry less about this that about the nearer-term risk that we become over-dependent on them, and they fail.

Take for example surgery. Should the decision to refer a patient to surgery be made by a doctor or a medical AI?

On the whole, we feel reassured that there has been human input and consideration, we worry about the undiscovered bugs and malfunctions of a machine. While AI technologies can be useful tools to inform human decision making, we maybe don’t want to delegate too much to machines.

You don’t only explore challenges in science, but also opportunities for science to play a greater role in public discourse and for the public to engage more broadly with science.

That’s right. The rest of the book talks about the role of the scientific community and the purpose of science in public life.

I think science can offer great hope, but I look at how things can be improved, for example in universities, looking at how one can organise science education in a more strategic and useful way.

Education has changed very little in my lifetime, but the pandemic and the rapid roll-out of distanced learning has shown there are opportunities to do things differently. I would like to see more flexibility in education with greater focus on lifelong learning.

Universities shouldn’t always be for 18 to 21-year-olds; there should be more opportunity to sign up for one- or two-year courses part-time as well as full-time, and take more modules later and throughout your life.

In education, we need to place more emphasis on bringing the public into decision making and there are some deficiencies in how the scientific community is organised. There are some lessons for academics.

In the book, I criticise the culture of universities, focused on writing papers and passing exams; I think that’s very constricting. It limits who engages with science and limits science’s ability to broaden its reach.

We need to have a public which has enough understanding to engage in scientific debate. That requires a change to the way we learn throughout life. Science, and the scientific community cannot sit isolated in a citadel. It must become a broad church that encourages participation.

Are we closer to experiencing for ourselves the depictions of catastrophes we’re more used to seeing in science-fiction?

Yes – we are. To use Nate Silver’s quote, “the unfamiliar is not the same as improbable”. In the case of some of these things, the probability is getting higher and higher by the year.

But “probable” does not mean inevitable. Science and innovation can provide the solutions we need to global mega-challenges, but it can be a matter of timing.

Innovation may come in response to a catastrophe – like the rapid role out of novel mRNA vaccines in response to the Covid 19 pandemic.

Or we can work to avoid catastrophes and incentivise solutions now, putting them in place to ward off the worst impacts of, for example, climate change. This seems a more sensible approach in my mind – pre-empting catastrophes and preventing them. The stakes have never been higher.

In your book you spend time discussing the merits of challenge prizes over more traditional science awards for incentivising solutions to great challenges. Why do challenge prizes stand out for you?

There is a difference between “prizes” and “challenge prizes”. Apart from some high-profile exceptions, few in scientific academia find themselves gaining riches from their discoveries, and from my experience, few are motivated by money. The prime driver of the community is discovery, deepening human knowledge, and securing the esteem of one’s peers.

“Prizes” – as opposed to “challenge prizes” – by which I mean high profile awards like the Nobel prizes are flawed. Not least because so many discoveries are built on the backs of multiple others.

No scientist’s achievement is a lone endeavour, they are one player on a much wider field, and yet prizes tend to ignore this community. I use the example of the 2017 Nobel prize for physics – LIGO’s detection of gravitational waves. That was a discovery reported in a 1,000-author paper, and yet only three of the authors were rewarded.

Nobel prizes exclude huge tracts of science too. Mathematics is not recognised, neither is environmental science, computing, robotics and AI. This distorts public perception of what science is important, and does not adequately reflect the collaborative nature of science.

Challenge prizes are different. Instead of awarding past achievements, they do the opposite. They incentivise future efforts to crack an important problem. This opens the field to mavericks and disruptors to approach solving a problem from multiple disciplines and viewpoints.

A special advantage of the system is that the aggregate funding expended by all the challengers for each prize far exceeds the prize money on offer. For example, the teams competing for the $10 million Ansari X-Prize collectively invested $100 million into private space-flight R&D in pursuit of the prize.

Each competition therefore offers a cost-effective incentive towards a goal that is socially worthwhile or of genuine public interest.

It was for that reason that in 2014, I championed the revival of the Longitude Prize. The public were asked to vote on a global challenge it should tackle, and they chose antibiotic resistant infections. It is a silent pandemic on course to kill 10 million people a year by 2050. More than 200 teams have engaged with the Longitude Prize on AMR and we’re about to enter the final phase of judging to determine a winner.

As the Longitude Prize on AMR comes to a close, I am pleased that the new Longitude Prize on Dementia has launched to incentivise new technologies to be used by people living with dementia so they can keep doing the things that bring them fulfilment for as long as possible.

You are chair of the Longitude Prize committee. As you mentioned, the Longitude Prize on Dementia is seeking technological solutions that adapt to the changing condition of someone living with dementia. Why is this important?

The science community has made great strides towards a cure for dementia in recent decades, but it is still many years away. People are living longer, not only in high-income countries, but in low- and middle-income countries too. With that comes greater numbers of people living with age-related conditions like dementia. It’s expected that 153 million people will live with the disease by 2050.

Technology has become very important to maintaining the safety and well-being of people living with dementia, but the focus up until now has very much been on devices that monitor a person, often to provide peace of mind to family members or carers. There is an opportunity to unlock technologies that are designed for the person living with dementia to use themselves to help them continue to live independently as their condition progresses.

The Longitude Prize on Dementia is awarding more than £4 million to incentivise this new class of technologies. Importantly, the prize will connect innovators with people living with dementia to ensure they are at the heart of the technologies that are developed.

If Science is to Save Us by Lord Martin Rees is published by Polity Press and on sale now at all good bookshops.