Jack Stilgoe
Senior Researcher
Jack Stilgoe works on science and technology projects and specialises in issues of science, society and public engagement.
"science"
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- The expert patience programme 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. from : jackstilgoe 12th December 2006
- Way upstream Next week, I will be a mentor at the EPSRC's 'Ideas Factory' on Software Control of Matter. This takes me way upstream and puts me among a diverse group of scientists, who are coming together to consider how to approach an esoteric problem with potentially massive implications - building stuff nano-bit by nano-bit. The EPSRC, who distribute the engineering and physics part of the UK's science budget, have set aside money to fund the proposals that are produced. For the last year, we at... from : jackstilgoe 3rd January 2007
- Where forwards please? The new ad from Honda stars a cross between Mr Soft and a stormtrooper with sciatica. The robot struts (limps) his stuff among his dusty predecessors in a museum, and that chap from Lake Wobegon tells us that Honda are about "Onwards, upwards - anyway but backwards. Tapping progress on the shoulder and saying 'More forwards please'."It's a nice turn of phrase, but it rings my alarm bells. It reminds us how easy it is to fall into the trap of seeing science-in-society in a linear way.... from : jackstilgoe 4th January 2007
- A new soft machine As we gear up to tomorrow's Atlas of Ideas launch, focussing on science in China, India and Korea, I've been thinking about some new bits of world-class British science. I spent last week in a Nano-sand-pit, working with 20 of the countries leading nano-scientists on new ways of turning information into stuff (towards a sort of mini 3D printer). The Ideas Factory blog, which over the course of the week climbed into Wordpress's top-ten, attracting over 100 comments, has just announced one of... from : jackstilgoe 16th January 2007
- Magic buttons Coverage today from the Guardian and the B B C of yesterday's launch of the Sciencehorizons project. 8 floors up at the Royal College of Art, overlooking the Albert Hall (officially the Albert Hall of Arts and Sciences), we had Science Minister Malcolm Wicks and a group of 12 RCA students using our discussion packs for the first time. The conversation was really rich. I tried to get as many quote as possible. They covered organ donation ("If we know we can grow spares, how does that... from : jackstilgoe 26th January 2007
- Another normal disaster I'm fascinated that we apparently already know what caused the derailment in Cumbria. Some bars separating the point blades broke and the inspection to check they were OK didn't happen. Job done. Blaim laid. Except that accidents are always, always more complicated and more interesting than that. I've just been having another look at Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow, emeritus Yale Sociology professor. It's a wonderful book, written in 1984, post-Three Mile Island but pre-Chernobyl and... from : jackstilgoe 26th February 2007
- Inconvenient uncertainties Finally caught the Channel 4 climate change debunking last night. Smelt bad from the start and the stink only got worse. But a fascinating deconstruction (someone French once called this "blowing up in slow motion"). It showed that the current winners ("swindlers") of the climate change debate have a fragile position. The evidence is massively in their favour, but they're just not as good at talking about uncertainty as their Exxon-funded chums, who argue through polished... from : jackstilgoe 13th March 2007
- The science we need, the science we want The Council for Science and Technology - Government's highest-level science advisory group - have this morning published their review of progress on nano policy. Broadly the message is... good work on the public engagement and standard setting but two thumbs down for funding far too few nanotoxicity studies. As is so often the case with science policy's unclear lines of responsibility, the buck has been passed along. The Science Minister was on the Today programme arguing that the money was... from : jackstilgoe 28th March 2007
- Nanodialogues Depending who you ask, nanotechnology might be the Next Big Thing, the Next Asbestos or the Next GM. But before its impacts have been felt, nanotechnology has become a test case for a new sort of governance. It is an opportunity to reimagine the relationship between science and democracy. from : markfuller 28th June 2007
- Making sense of hybrids Tomorrow is a big day for science governance anoraks. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority are deciding (in public) whether to allow research on hybrid embryos. The novelty is that their decision comes after months of deliberation - some public, some private, in newspapers and in staged engagement experiments - among experts, policymakers and the public. For the last couple of years, we at Demos have been speaking to all sorts of organisations, including the HFEA, about how they... from : jackstilgoe 4th September 2007