Science Week has ambitions to entertain as well as educate

Science as entertainment will be on display as Science Week 2014 gets underway this Saturday, November 8th. While, children and adults alike will enjoy the various fun events and amazing science shows, there is a deeper purpose behind the week.

Prof Mark Ferguson, director general of research funding agency Science Foundation Ireland, says that the week is about introducing new discoveries as well as showing parents and students that studies in science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) can lead to rewarding careers.

The week also lets taxpayers know how their hard-earned euros are being spent.

Now in its 19th year, it’s a much-changed event compared to its early days. “The whole thing has grown,” he says. “It started out as a publicly funded activity, but very rapidly excellent volunteer groups came forward from industry, the universities, professional bodies, museums, libraries and research charities and got involved.”

It was previously run by the Government’s Discovery Science and Engineering public outreach programme but this was subsumed into the Foundation and is now known as Science Foundation Ireland Discovery.

“In the early days DSE would have done most of the work in organising projects and events and so they would have been limited in number and geographic spread,” says Ferguson.

“Now with the excellent work of so many people and groups, the number of events has grown, the quality of events has grown and the spread of events has grown. What SFI has done is to move away from being the hands on organiser of a limited number of events to being a part funder and coordinator of the event.”

This year the programme (scienceweek.ie) has 800 events listed across the length and breadth of Ireland and the Foundation is expecting at least 250,000 visitors to take part.

“That is staggering when you consider what it evolved from. That tells you it is hitting buttons, that people appreciate Science Week and it is reaching out and engaging people with science.”

Of course it all costs money and takes an amount of effort to deliver such a busy programme, so there must be reasons why volunteers and funders are willing to commit to it, and Ferguson readily lists them off.

“For young people and parents, it is important they understand why the study of Stem subjects can open up a wide range of careers,” he says.

Ireland has a high-tech economy with all of the top 10 companies in information technology, nine of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies and 11 of the top 13 medical device companies all have operations here. “They employ hundreds of thousands of people, good jobs and well paid jobs,” he says.

It is important for the country to educate a steady stream of graduates able to fill these roles, but it is also beneficial for the graduate who, unlike so many generations before, can find sound jobs with tempting salaries at home. “Ireland continues to need a pipeline of accomplished individuals,” he says.

Nor are these graduates restricted to the sciences and engineering. There are opportunities for science graduates in the agriculture and food industries. “Even betting shops are hiring maths and IT graduates,” says Ferguson.

“It is part of their training for science students to assemble evidence, analyse the evidence and assess conclusions that can be drawn from it. That training equips you for any job for life. It gives you lots of flexibility.”

Ferguson urges the public to make an effort to inform themselves about developments in science in order to understand the changes wrought by a rapid increase in scientific development.

“The pace of scientific discovery and its application is ever accelerating. It is not slowing down and society needs to keep pace given that a legislative framework for new technologies may be needed,” he says.

“For example look at big data. Useful information may come from data but it can be personally invasive and raises questions about who owns the data. We need to have a rational debate with government on how to protect the citizen but also allow the harvesting of societal benefits from the technology.”

“People shouldn’t be fearful of science because they don’t understand it. It is important that people are informed,” he said. And an event such as Science Week is a move in that direction.

The theme of the 2014 week is the “Power of Science” and the thinking behind this choice is to remind people about how pervasive science is in our lives. “Try to think of one thing that has not got some connection to science,” he challenges.

It is also about the power of science to do good. "There is a common feature of modern society to focus on the negative things, but there are positive things too. People live longer, healthier lives, they are better educated and have more leisure time." Left behind are the days when half of all children died soon after birth, that many diseases curable today were intractable a century ago. "We have come an awful long way but still have a long way to go."

The crisis of Ebola in west Africa is another example of the power of science. “It is an excellent example of the mobilisation of science. It was not being widely researched but within a few months this mobilisation started to deliver new vaccines and improved treatments. That is an unprecedented international response.”

Science is able to respond to crises and help bring change. “The power of science reminds people that there has been a remarkable amount of good coming from scientific advances. And there is lots more to come,” he says.