Some guy named Gordon

Just about a week ago I got three copies of the following email about something called the Romanes Lecture.

ROMANES LECTURE

A senior member of the cabinet will be coming to Oxford on Friday 27 February to deliver the Romanes Lecture, which will take place in the Sheldonian Theatre at 1pm. The subject of the lecture will be science.

The prestigious Romanes Lecture continues to attract distinguished public figures and world leaders to speak on topics relating to Science, Art or Literature. Romanes Lecturers in recent years have included the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, Rt Hon Tony Blair and Nobel Laureate, Muhammad Yunus.

Entry is by ticket only. Early booking is recommended.

Apparently other people realized this was code for "The Prime Minister is coming." I was a little less perceptive and just thought, "oh cool, a science lecture in the Sheldonian (a beautiful old Christopher Wren building)." So I went to the talk today and it was indeed the Right Honourable Gordon Brown talking about science. Brown basically discussed how science has driven technological innovation and hence the economy and how Britain (as the leader in science - ha) needs to elevate science's importance and push it in the schools. I can't say I was really impressed by the talk so much as impressed by the fact that he chose science as the topic.

The only concrete thing from the talk that impressed me was a discussion of how they want to offer science teaching jobs to people in high tech fields suffering from redundancies (British for layoffs). It's an appealing idea that you could use the economic slump to entice good scientists and technologists into the classroom, but there are a few problems. First, the current people in those classrooms won't be very happy about the implication that they can't do their jobs well enough. Perhaps more importantly, with the huge surge of funding Obama and Brown are throwing at science, there may actually be plenty of science jobs for the next few years. It will be after the funding surge that we really have the surplus of scientists looking for work.