Philip Ball: evaluation

Transcript context

…When it comes to policy, do you think current scientists are too safety conscious? I wouldn’t say they are, actually. Well, in policy, now, that really depends on what you mean. For example, we can raise this question during the pandemic: Was there too much caution with things like the testing of vaccines or the various measures that were introduced? Of course, that is a question that became hugely politicized. From what I saw, I think that it absolutely wasn’t the case with the vaccines. I think that the balance was exactly right there, that they were properly tested while still being accelerated to a degree that we absolutely needed. That was really a question of money more than anything else. There was so much money thrown at the problem that it was possible to do things all at once that normally would have been done in succession, that the drug companies could afford to take those risks because they had the financial backing. In terms of things like that, in terms of the safety of pharmaceuticals, I think that at the moment, I see no cause for concern. There have been worries about whether scientists have been too cautious in their views about climate change. Some people say, “Surely, we knew 20 or 30 years ago that this was already a huge problem. Why weren’t scientists making much more noise about it then, as they are now, when things are getting to a really desperate stage?” That was a process that I really saw unfold as an editor of Nature. We were handling a lot of the top climate papers at that time, when the worries of climate change were starting to be raised. I saw scientists going through an incredibly careful and cautious process of not wanting to be alarmist, not wanting to claim more than the data allowed them to say with confidence. It felt to me as though that was right. It felt to me as though that is why today we can say with such confidence that climate change is real, and that we know something about the causes, and that it seems clear that they’re primarily anthropogenic because there was that very cautious, very careful checking-out of the grounds for saying that during those years. It may well be the case that, because of that caution, the alarm wasn’t raised soon enough. It’s very hard to know how to manage that discrepancy, but I do feel that now we can be very confident in the conclusions that have been reached. It’s absolutely right that climate scientists, in particular, are really making strong statements and raising the alarm about what the future holds in this regard. I don’t think that there’s too much caution there. How far away are we from having artificial wombs that work?…

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