I’m not a great enthusiast for displaying initials after my name (in part because I haven’t got anything very impressive to display, and in part because my academic qualifications label me MAMA), but one I’m rather proud of are the initials FRSA, labelling me a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (or more properly, if long windedly, the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce). This is not to be confused with the more distinguished FRS, but the RSA in a valuable organization which sees as one of its roles the forcing of debate on issues that need exposing.

Although the Society’s title says nothing about science, much of its concern these days is about scientific matters one way or another, and I wanted to give a little exposure to a particularly interesting item from the viewpoint of this blog.

A little while ago the controversial genomicist Craig Venter gave a lecture at the RSA. On the RSA’s website there’s both an article about his talk, but particularly of interest is a series of Q&As on science and the media that took place after the lecture.

Go to the web page and you should hear the Q&A after a few seconds (if you don’t, scroll down to the bottom). It’s a little slow getting going, but there’s a valuable discussion here about this topic at the heart of popularization of science.

(Interestingly, Venter is rather hard on bloggers. He says he’s sure there are useful online science comment columns out there in blogs, they’re just hard to find. He clearly hasn’t visited Nature Network.)