A programme about Richard Feynman was on Radio 4 last weekend, and in listening to it, one was amazed all over again at his genius and his incredible enthusiasm for science that came through in the excerpts from interviews and speeches .
His genius is clear, from his youth spent repairing radios to his involvement in The Manhattan Project at Los Alamos as a young physicist working on the development of the atomic bomb (and picking the locks of safes in his spare time). Later in his career, he made significant contributions to quantum mechanics, particle physics, won the Nobel Prize in Physics, wrote amazingly popular books about physics, and maintained a voracious appetite for learning. In addition to physics, he was very interested in the life sciences – biology, genetics, microbiology. His famous ‘There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom’ speech in 1959 paved the way for the fields of nano-science & nanotechnology.
While his intelligence is clear from his achievements, his insatiable curiosity and desire to learn about the world around him were also cultivated by his father. Feynman said that when he was a child, his father would read aloud to him from the Encyclopaedia – he would read something like (I’m paraphrasing here) “The Tyrannosaurus rex was 20 feet tall and its head was 6 feet wide.” And then, Feynman’s dad would stop reading and get out a tape measure and say, “Wait what does that mean? It means the T. Rex could reach up as high as your bedroom window, but it couldn’t get its head through the window because it would be a little bit too wide.” He put everything they read into real-world terms.
This is the type of curiosity and enthusiasm for scientific disciplines that many teachers, communities, universities, and national governments attempt to instil in students today. There is much concern over whether we are bringing up, educating and recruiting enough young people into the STEM disciplines, and outreach has become a big part of scientific endeavour. It is a built-in component of most government science grants in the US. An incredible variety of programmes exist to get kids interested in science. Science-related companies get involved too because a company is only as good as the skilled workforce available, from which they can hire their next generation of great scientists.
It’s an interesting area and no one has the magic key to what works best yet, but in March of this year the Higher Education Funding Council (for England) published a report with some positive news: 6.8% more students are studying subjects such as physics, chemistry and math than in 2005-06. Hopefully, we’ll see these trends continue. More on the report here. However, with the threat of significant cuts to science funding looming, one wonders (gloomily), if investing in training the next generation of scientists will simply result in their departure for greener scientific pastures…
In any case, here’s an example of the positive outreach efforts of one local company:
In addition to having several Modern Apprentices working in their labs, Ingenza gets out in the community to “raise science awareness amongst the local community.” Read more about it here.
For those of you who are thinking about a science career, or already in the sciences but looking to try out another aspect of the field, we have our Nexxus Career Paths in Life Science event coming up soon on 7 October.
What does your comapny do to reach out to prospective young scientists or the community at large? Why do you see this as valuable?
I had a couple of days in Manchester last week at the 7th annual BioprocessUK meeting. This is a meeting that I’ve enjoyed in previous years when I worked for a biotech bioprocess business, and which has always focused on what it’s title suggests. It has always been a really good meeting, and this year, after a 3 year gap, I noticed an increased sense of community among all attendees – it felt inclusive with real openness in presentations and networking between colleagues from different businesses. I know that that is testament to the work the Healthtech & Medicines KTN staff does outwith the meeting through Special Interest Groups, and with the Bioprocessing Research Industry Club, as well as directly with its community members. It’s a Nexxus ambition to help create that same feeling of open community between Nexxus network members, especially as you ought to be able to benefit from it.
