When you have a hammer of a pamphlet, every story looks like a nail. On Friday, we launched The Received Wisdom - Opening up expert advice. In the papers, Richard Doll's (expert par excellence) reputation was taking a battering, vCJD was back in contaminated blood and the expert report of the TeGenero inquiry was described as a whitewash. At the same time, the mobile phones health scare was sinking its nails into Wi-Fi as it slowly died.

It was nice to be reminded of the relevance of a new part of Demos's work. At the launch, Sir John Krebs provided a fascinating insight into issues of expertise and evidence. (He has now stepped out of the FSA, which sat at the eye of the post-BSE storm). Unpicking the arguments, we were helped by Sue Mayer from Genewatch and Bill Stow from Defra. Friends old and new asked difficult questions, not least the timeless philosopher of science Jerry Ravetz, whose latest book we launched two weeks ago. Much of the conversation turned on a critique of the rhetoric of 'evidence-based policy,' which has in a motherhood-and-apple-pie-ish way become a mantra, without much consideration of its politics - or anti-politics.

It's a mark of how far we've come that the messages of the pamphlet, which ten years ago would have been considered radical, can be embraced by establishment experts and civil servants, while being politely criticised by NGOs as "too polite."

Our arguments are still new to many, however, as I was reminded by hecklers in the Today programme's audience. They were recording live at the Royal Society with the great and the good  - Krebs, Rees, Hawking, Greenfield, Wolpert. I was talking about the 'scientists of the future', contending both with Humphrys and a rather defensive early-morning crowd. Bracing.

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