a glass of sherry in the direction of the BBC’s Mr. Quentin Cooper and his excellent programme Material World.
Today’s programme, available on iPLayer for the next sennight, is a splendid listen. It includes the following topical segment:
As leaders of the G20 leading industrial nations meet in London to discuss recovery packages for the world’s economies, we ask what science can do to help end the global recession. Historian Eric Rauchway has been looking back to the Great Depression of the 1930s, the attempts to use science to bolster the measures of Franklin Roosevelt’s reflationary New Deal, and how the New Deal laid the groundwork for post-war science policy. Sir Martin Taylor explains the thinking behind the Royal Society’s Fruits of Curiosity enquiry, announced this week to establish the role of science in the UK economy.
Men and women in labcoats leading the world out of its financial depression in ways other than prescribing is an image which gladdens my heart. Some Soviet-style posters and colossal statues of heroic scientists holding aloft items of lab equipment would make tremendously inspiring iconography for the population.
Someone should tell the National Lottery guys this. Harrumph.
Their staff are currently each being instructed to sell a kidney on eBay to help pay for the Londono Olympics, I understand.
I hope they are not fakes, then.
If so, they could be used to make a fake and kidney pie.