I love this place. Alongside Jane Lubchenco, I ran a session on a new social contract for science, looking at the politics of science and the potential for a new breed of citizen scientists. Jane has written about this before, and had some fascinating thoughts on what such a contract might look like. I argued that, although the once solid social contract was now undeniably in flux, this might be no bad thing. Pitching into the discussion were Phil Campbell, Martin Rees, Paul Rabinow and Steve Schneider.

Sorry, let me pick those up. In fact, many of the most telling comments came from the younger scientists who are feeling the pressure of renegotiating their place in society. We argued about the necessity for scientists to collectively represent their consensus while individually engaging as citizens. We heard about the rise of military funding of American engineering research and the messy showdown at Berkeley over their deal with BP. And we whether public dialogue was in fact "all talk." My excitement and confusion has only been compounded by the discovery of free ice cream. If you asked a seven-year-old to design a conference, this is what they would come up with.

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