Philip Ball: belief

Transcript context

…What’s the harm to me, as a body? I don’t think we know yet, actually. I think that’s the problem, that it may be still too early to know to what extent that’s going to be a problem. I can’t help feeling that any substance that doesn’t break down, that simply accumulates in the body in this way — that doesn’t sound like something that you want to have happening in your bodies and in your tissues. It’s also sometimes suggested that some of the additives, the plasticizers that are added to plastics like this can function a little bit . . . They look chemically or a little bit like certain hormones, so they can mimic hormones and induce hormonal changes in the body. There’s a lot of research going to that at the moment that I’m absolutely not an expert in, but that’s one of the concerns that’s being raised about them. Michael Webb put forward the hypothesis that progress in science has declined radically in percentage terms. And he points out, in terms of the number of scientists, we have many, many, many more, not to mention more in China, more in India, more around the world. Yet overall rates of productivity growth — they’re not higher. They’re actually somewhat lower than, say, in the 1960s. We now have many more women in science. Has there been this radical slowdown in the pace of actual discovery per scientist? Not in absolute terms, but per worker. Are scientists today, per worker, just much worse?…

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