Question: The Government announced a 7% increase in the Science Budget in the last spending review. Surely that puts an end to claims that science is under-funded and scientists are underpaid?

Sir Robert May: I'll say two things about that. First of all, the reason why it is primarily the job of government to fund basic research is that it's a classic public good. It clearly is hard to estimate the actual returns from basic research, but they would probably be about 25% per annum, averaged over the long run. However, it is also a common good. The real reason we fund research is to create new knowledge, but even more importantly, to buy a ticket into the club of new knowledge creators among other countries. Most important of all, research produces cadres of trained people, some of whom circle back into the scientific enterprise, others of whom will go out into business, civil service, politics, and other walks of life, with that training behind them.

On the other hand, how much you should spend on research is something nobody knows. You can only draw comparisons. Until relatively recently, we were right in the bottom quartile of the OECD countries when comparing our spending on basic science as a percentage of GDP. The shortfall in expenditure on basic infrastructure was particularly worrying. The Labour Government, both in its initial comprehensive spending review three years ago, and in the more recent spending review that produced the 7% real annual rise for the next three years, gave basic science the biggest single proportional increase of any major budgetary unit. This was in recognition of our relatively low spending on research compared with the competition, and particularly that we needed to put more money into the infrastructure.

In terms of research expenditure as a proportion of GDP, we are in the bottom quartile of the top 20 OECD countries, in terms of GDP per head, and the US is only just above us. Ahead of us both are countries like Japan, Switzerland, Sweden, and the other Scandinavian nations. These countries know they must live by their wits, as we must. But the level of spending is not the only important factor. How about productivity in terms of new ideas, papers or references to the papers, either by other scientists or in patents? By most of those measures, despite our low level of spending on research, we are first or among the very top countries, in terms of what we get for every pound we spend. In terms of published papers in refereed journals, in relation to the money spent three years earlier, we've been number one among the countries of the OECD for the last ten years. That's partly because our output is as good as that of anyone else, and partly because the input has been weaker. So this much needed beefing up of expenditure will mean that Switzerland creeps back ahead of us because its output per capita is even better than ours. Output is very strong in the other Anglo and Scandinavian countries, where much of the work is done in ways that engage the young, and where the younger scientists are set free to express their creativity, rather than spending long periods of apprenticeship in deferential hierarchies.

Does that mean people will stop saying we ought to spend more? The Chancellor could tell you more movingly than I could that everyone thinks they should spend more on what they are doing. We should spend more on health, we should spend more on education, we should spend more on basic science, we should spend more on the police. You name it, we should spend more on it. I think you can always make a case, but ultimately you need to compare it with what other countries do. Not just how much you put into it, but the outputs of how you perform. You could look at many things. We probably have a wealthier soccer base than many of our competitors, but our performance is lamentable. By contrast, we are right at the top of the science league table, which is fortunate because ultimately it is more important to our quality of life and economic performance than soccer is.

Question: There are reports that schools find it difficult to find science teachers and people also argue that science subjects simply aren't popular with pupils. What can the Government do to raise the status of science in schools?

Sir Robert May: That is a problem. But it's not just a British problem, it's a general problem. You hear the same thing in Australia, in the United States, and elsewhere. There is a shortage of teachers, particularly in science and mathematics, and fewer people expressing an interest in it. Part of the problem is that with science playing a larger and larger part in the economic life of the country, a number of jobs are open to people with a science training. Whereas 50 years ago science teaching would have been one of the main job opportunities, now there are so many others. I had wonderful science teachers at school, but many of them wouldn't be science teachers today. In a sense it's a good thing as well as a bad thing. What can we do about it? We could put more money in. We could offer golden handshakes. We could offer more in the way of appraisals and rises for particularly meritorious people. We could put more money into refurbishing laboratories in secondary schools so that the conditions are better, and the Government has started to do this with the £60 million it announced last year.

We do a pretty good job in Britain up to the age of nine. We do well in international comparisons. As science becomes more specialised, it's the nine to fourteen year-old age group that's probably the main problem. Beyond that we are okay. It's in that middle age range that we're also suffering lack of teachers. What we really need to be doing is not merely trying to attract more people into the profession, but providing life-long support, such as career development and dissemination of best practice, and putting a lot more emphasis on presenting science as a process for learning about the world that is applicable to all areas of life, and not as a tedious set of definitions and names for things.

Question: Do you think the teaching needs to change then, to broaden out?

Sir Robert May: The problem is that we teach science as things we thoroughly know. That's how you organise a curriculum, how you set an exam. The problems of science and society are often at, or beyond, the frontiers of science and they are about things we don't yet know. I think it's very difficult for people, when science in school, or even in university, is always presented as the things we clearly know. Science on University Challenge or Who Wants to be a Millionaire is represented through trivia questions. It's 'define this' or 'name that'. That doesn't tell you anything about science, but the questions have got a right or wrong answer so they suit quiz programmes. That's not what science is like. That's not what scientists are doing. Science stands for a way of enquiring beyond the frontier. The curriculum in school needs to be more about putting the investigation into the hands of the individual boys and girls and presenting to them science as a way of learning about things you don't understand, rather than as a tedious set of rote memorisation. Science is a creative force

Question: If you were to stop a person in the street and ask them to name famous footballers, actors and rock stars, they could probably reel off hundreds of names. Ask them to name a famous UK scientist, despite the fact we have many, they'd probably say Stephen Hawking and that's about it. What does that tell you about the status of science in our society, and what could the Government do to perhaps celebrate more the achievements of scientists and communicate those achievements to the public?

Sir Robert May: It's not an easy question to answer because the results of those polls reflect as much the nature of the entertainment industry. The names that come most readily will be celebrities, people who are entertainers, people who appear on the box when you want to sit down, relax in the evening. It's always been like that.

A big millennium poll about who was the most famous Frenchman, identified not Napoleon, but Pasteur. In our poll of who was the most famous Briton ever, they didn't say David Beckham, but Shakespeare. If I remember correctly, Darwin may have been fourth. So when you ask people the question the appropriate way, you won't get too bad an answer. But if you just look for brand recognition, then you're going to get the people who are in the daily news, and that's going to be sports stars. It would have been the same in Ancient Greece, I don't doubt.

Question: You're now the President of the Royal Society. What are your priorities?

Sir Robert May: Well, my priorities are to continue developing the things that are already underway, which are simplistically summarised as preserving the core values of the Royal Society as speaking for the best of what science is and can do, but to do so in a way which reaches more broadly, is more embracing, and is more relevant to the kinds of issues in which science is engaged in public life. So against that platitudinous sweep, more concretely, the Royal Society is some twelve hundred people, about nine hundred of them in Britain and others in Australia, Canada, India and New Zealand. But it speaks, and I think at the most authoritative level, broadly for science as a whole. And that means that we have to be all the time thinking of how we make sure that in all the things we do, we reach out to the larger constituency of science.

We have just established with money from the Kohn Foundation - a million pounds over five years - a new Science in Society programme that is headed by Paul Nurse, Director General of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund. The Royal Society has always been in the habit of preparing independent expert reports on matters of contemporary relevance. In recent years there have been reports on GM plants, and we are working at the moment on depleted uranium. We want to continue doing this, but we want to make sure we are even more consultative and open than in the past, while preserving our independence, unconnected to Government or anyone else. We consult very widely as we put our working groups together, so that all viewpoints, even those dissenting with the mainstream of science of the time, are heard. And then, of course, the products of these reports are always completely open, in contrast to some past practice in Government. That is one of the ways in which we wish to engage public issues more.

We also have meetings here at the Royal Society, about 20 a year. Many people will be most familiar with the recent one on 'The origins of HIV and the AIDS epidemic', which took up a controversial view that HIV came as a by-product of sloppy practice in developing polio vaccines. This theory was produced by a journalist in the first instance, and indignantly denied by the people involved in the polio vaccines. It was a very passionate, polemical and partisan meeting, not at all what you normally associate with the dignified discourse that people think science involves. We put together a meeting around that theme that heard all the passionate, partisan people, but which also had a solid core of people with no axe to grind on this. They had been looking at the molecular history of the different strains of HIV virus and trying to construct the history of the epidemic as written in the different strains that have diverged from some common origin or origins. I think that very colourful meeting, with lots of television cameras at the back of the hall, was hugely useful in shedding a lot of light on the science and essentially ending the thought that HIV came from a polio vaccine, while at the same time showing that the Royal Society is willing to take on a brawl in pursuit of trying to produce scientific illumination. We want to do more of that.

It would have been very good if we'd been able to act unusually fast for a scientific process to put together a debate on stem cells and cloning. In particular, whether adult cells may soon be able to match the versatility of embryonic stem cells. The balance of opinion is that we are not yet that close with adult stem cells. It would have been great to put on a debate based on the science, but inviting different viewpoints and touching on the ethical issues as a background to the really excellent standard of debate that took place in Parliament. The debate was indeed helped by letters that my predecessor, Aaron Klug, wrote to each MP and peer. That kind of engagement through discussion meetings, through working party reports and simply through letters from the President, is more the idiom in which we want to act in future. These go back to the origins of the Royal Society really.

Question: The Archbishop of Westminster recently said he would like to see a summit about stem cell research in which scientific leaders, religious leaders and political leaders all meet to discuss this issue. Do you think that would be a good idea?

Sir Robert May: I think it is a good idea. I think basically the more these issues are widely aired and the more there is an opportunity for people to discuss them, the better.

Question: But surely these issues won't be resolved by leaders in ethics and science?

Sir Robert May: These issues, like many others, really have two parts, only one of which science contributes to. There are many important debates that are about values. Whether we are talking about biological diversity in the countryside or whether we are talking about the trade-off between long-held religious beliefs and medical benefits that could be developed if one didn't hold those beliefs. They are debates about the kind of world you want to live in.

The task of a democracy is to try and air those debates and come to a consensus, which will never be unanimous, as to what this particular society wishes the world to be like. Where does science come into that? In two ways. Science, by telling you how the world actually is, can constrain the possible choices you can make about the way the world might be. For example, you might wish to have a world in which you had a particular kind of agriculture and at the same time everybody in a still growing population could sustainably be fed forever. Science might tell you 'you can't do that - it's just not possible'. More importantly, and more commonly, the role of science is to illuminate the facts that are going to be relevant in delivering the world you want. So suppose you wanted a world that combined efficient agriculture with an environmentally-friendly approach that absolutely minimised the impact on other plants and animals. There are going to be important trade-offs there. And the world is such a complicated and non-linear place that intuition is often a hugely unreliable guide to the actions you need to take once you've agreed what you want. The purpose of science is to tell you what the world is like and having come to some consensus, through an essentially political and social process, about what kind of world we want, tell you, yes you can have it, but this way won't get you there.

So then, why have a summit about stem cells? It would at least help the broad political, social process of people deciding the world they want. In this case, it is essentially a choice of 'even though I'm not sick today, do I wish to take advantage of medical advances that are going to make a hell of a lot of people's lives vastly better?'. That may mean somewhat modifying religious or other views, or else cleaving to dogma even at the expense of human health. There may seem a way out of using embryonic cells through using adult stem cells instead. Science will illuminate for us how soon that might happen, and indeed whether it would ever happen if we don't carry out research on embryonic stem cells. And that is the kind of debate that could have ethical and value elements entwined with scientific elements. Science is not going to solve the problem, but it's going to make clearer to society what we can have and what we can't have.

Question: Let's look at some recent cases. You head the Royal Society at a difficult time for science. Cases such as BSE, GM crops and now depleted uranium. They've led to a public cynicism over scientific advice. How do you think the reputation of scientific advice has suffered from these cases?

Sir Robert May: I think it's more complicated than that. The feeling that says people are more distrustful of science than they've ever been doesn't stand up to close examination. If you go back five or six hundred years, people expressed their dislike of the new by burning Bruno and making Gallileo recant because they didn't like his views. If you go back two hundred years to the advent of the smallpox vaccination, there were riots in the streets. There were some wonderful cartoons caricaturing it as little cows popping out of people's arms. When the railways first appeared there were lots of serious worries that if you travelled that fast you wouldn't be able to breathe. And there were also worries about the consequent pollution and smog which were real. What's new is the pace rather than the character. I'd say today people are more tolerant of the new.

Consider the stem cell debate. Exactly the same questions of values existed 150 years ago about the dissection of dead bodies. The path to learning basic anatomy was blocked by value-laden religious views of the time against dissection. We can't even imagine that now. We can't imagine people feeling that creating an effective medicine by understanding what was going on inside our bodies was stopped by the views of the time. But this was a view where breaking it wouldn't simply damage a scientific career, it would have you hanging by a noose. So it's a mistake to think the past was different. On the other hand, the general public, if you poll them, say science has made our lives better and the intent of science is to do good, by margins of at least two to one. But the majority also say the pace at the moment is too fast to keep up with, and too fast for effective regulation. So that's the problem. The problem is to do things in such a way that it is clear you are pausing to examine credible worries. You're listening to reservations and you're trying to engage people in a completely open way.

I think BSE is a particular unhappy example. We still are not certain where BSE came from. But once it appeared, the question immediately was 'will it affect humans'. And the answer to that was, at the time, nobody knew. However, by comparison with scrapie, a similar disease in sheep, which had been present for at least three centuries, and which as far as we know has no effect on humans, the best guess was that BSE wouldn't. Now in retrospect, it seems it would have been wise to insist 'we don't know, but our best guess is it won't infect humans and here's the basis for the guess'. But you can see the downside. If you had said it in that way, it would have done unnecessary damage to farmers if it hadn't infected humans. But we should have told it like it was. Instead, 'we don't know but by analogy with scrapie the best guess it's OK', very quickly became 'it's OK and here's my daughter eating a hamburger to prove it'. That particular example overshadows all else.

We also live in a time when an increasing number of lobby groups and so called non-governmental organisations provide a livelihood and a way of expressing passionate convictions held by many people, and many of which I share. That is a feature of today's world. Many of these lobby groups are entirely worthy and express causes I often agree with. Some of the environmental groups, like the RSPB, are just that. They care about the environment. Some of them, on the other hand, are not beyond using whatever tactic will advance the cause they espouse. Some environmental groups have the view that we would all be better off with less globalisation, less entrepreneurship and capitalism. Who knows, they might be right. But an organisation like Greenpeace, which frankly and honestly says it's not primarily interested in science, sees some of these issues as a metaphor for delivering a wider agenda. And that's a further complication in much of the debate.

Question: How concerned were you by the possible closure of Huntingdon Life Sciences? Do you share Lord Sainsbury's concerns over the pressures that they've come under?

Sir Robert May: I don't know enough about that particular laboratory, but more generally the use of animals must always be carefully overseen, and you must always ask if you really need to do it. The use of mice and rats, and even very rarely dogs, cats and primates, in pursuit of an understanding that will alleviate human and non-human animal suffering, is a Faustian bargain that the great majority of people wish to make, I think. It is the same sort of trade off between ethical values of respect for all life and the practicalities of curing disease both in our own species and in others. In that sense, it has analogies with the stem cell debate. In Britain, we should realise how well we handle these things compared to other countries like, for example, the United States, where, until very recently, birds, mice and rats didn't count as animals in law. There was no oversight and no rules governing their use. And I don't think that's how it should be.

Take the stem cell debate. Ten years ago we dealt with the essential issues of principle at stake. We dealt with them upfront and then we went ahead. Whether you agree with that decision or not, at least we now have a consistent position compared with some other European countries who forbid the research but embrace warmly the results, to the greater happiness of many of their citizens. Where does that stand ethically? You forbid the research and embrace the results? Or look at the situation in the United States where you're not allowed to do any of this kind of work with public money, but you can do anything, even if you wanted to clone a human being, with private money.

Question: Looking at all these issues of BSE, GM crops and stem cell research, do you think one thing that could help would be greater transparency, greater openness of scientific advice and diagnosis?

Sir Robert May: I put in place guidelines on science advice and policy making under the Major Government, which have been re-reviewed as part of last year's White Paper. They are now codified and underpinned by a Ministerial Committee and regular review. I think that is the way to go, inside and outside government. Their central principles are always to look ahead and do it all openly. That has a cost, particularly in government, where there is the old tradition of getting together a group of experts, who report to a minister in confidence. The minister then stands up and says 'this is what I've been told'. It's tidier. People can uninhibitedly say what they think without getting caught in ugly arguments. It may be tidier, but it doesn't work in today's world, and I am delighted to see its passing. That messy cacophony of voices in the marketplace, while it may make for more difficult political handling, that's the way science itself works, and it's a good path to the truth. And ultimately it's the way to re-engender confidence. Surprisingly, you get more confidence when you deal with an issue by saying 'I don't know the answer, here's the best guess, here's what the arguments are on one side, and the other, and this is why we're doing that'. That is better than simply standing up and saying 'the experts agree this, and that's the answer'.

Question: So do you think the Government in future issues should be more open and, just as you say, only refer to the differing advice?

Sir Robert May: When I arrived at the Office of Science and Technology, the Council of Science and Technology produced reports that were only published from time to time. Now they even put the minutes of its meetings on the Web the next day. And I think that's the way to go. It's certainly what the Royal Society has always stood for. Our independence, coupled with our authority. Engaging people in an open way outside the Society so that we get the proper mix of people looking at issues. This is the way the Society has been operating for some time, and it's the way it will continue to operate.

Question: Liam Fox, the Shadow Health Secretary, recently said we're in danger of becoming a neurotic society. We take safety as a given, but we're hyped up by health scares every day - mobile phones, long-distance flying, cling-film, salmon. Have we, as a nation, lost our perspective on risk and depend too heavily on scientific advice reassuring us that we will not be in danger?

Sir Robert May: In a sense, this problem stems from the advances in science that mean we not only live longer but we expect three score years and ten of healthy active life, and we look for someone to blame if we don't get it. If you went back a hundred years to the Victorians, the world was a more dangerous and risky place. Parents lost children and children lost parents, and death was a more commonplace experience. It was a world of larger risks in which today's obsession with the marginal risks weighed against the huge benefits of science to our lives did not exist. If you put a Victorian in our society now, he or she would think that we are absolutely bonkers.

We have used the fruits of science to advance good health and nourishment that most of us enjoy today, although there's still a shameful gap in the third world. In the developed world, we have in-built evolutionary mechanisms for worrying about risk. But the usual risks that were there to worry about in our evolutionary past are now largely banished, so it's small wonder that people now fasten on to other things. So I think yes, we are in danger of losing perspective on many of these things. I think many people, but not everybody, appreciate that absolute safety is an illusion. A ranking of things that are dangerous begins with accidents in the home, but people don't get out of bed each day fearful of them.

Question: Let's look at a specific issue: global warming. How does the Royal Society contribute to this debate?

Sir Robert May: On this issue, scientific assessment uniquely and pioneeringly is something that transcends all national academies and national boundaries, in the form of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. A Fellow of the Royal Society, John Houghton, has had the honour and distinction of chairing the IPCC's working group on scientific aspects of the climate system and climate change. The IPCC has brought together all the relevant scientists so that they can paint the landscape of scientific opinion. The things we agree on, the things we disagree on. Where we disagree, we get some sense of the consensus of opinion, what are the outlying dissents, and what are the crackpot dissents. You can place things in a landscape. Too often on these issues we lapse into saying there are only two opposing views.

The Royal Society cannot do a great deal more than contribute to that. But there are particular questions of policy for the Society to think about. Particular details like the question of carbon sinks, for example, and the implications that has for the accords post-Kyoto, or the role of nuclear power and the development of renewable energy sources, as the Society's recent reports have considered. But in a sense, global warming is an odd example because given that you've got an international body, you don't really want individual academies second guessing its decisions. That is an important point to make. I think one of the items on the agenda of the Royal Society is to try and develop an effective independent source of the best quality, wide ranging, openly given, scientific advice in Europe, rather than relying on coteries of bureaucrats in Brussels. The world academies are also trying to put together an Inter-Academy Council to provide advice to world Governments and international bodies. They had the first meetings of this in the days before Davos. The IAC would take the model of the IPCC, and follow it for other burning issues. The Royal Society has already collaborated with some of the other academies in the United States, Brazil, India, China, Mexico, and the Third World Academy of Sciences, to produce a report on transgenic plants in world agriculture. There are very different sets of viewpoints and priorities in the different countries. We brought together scientists from all those countries to find out their worries about food safety, environmental issues, and biological diversity. We asked larger questions, like 'how do these worries differ between the developed and developing world?'

Question: With an issue like this, how would you like the science community to engage the public in this debate?

Sir Robert May: I come back to the Royal Society's activities as an example. The Society is a founder member of COPUS, which deals with issues about portraying science accurately as a way of knowing rather than as a set of answers to trivia questions. COPUS will shortly be announcing its new objectives to provide a national focus for science communication activities. In addition, our Science in Society programme is looking at the Society's role, through our discussion meetings, working groups, and all the other things that we do to try to engage the public in the issues of the time. It aims to make sure we aren't seen as handing down knowledge from Mount Sinai, but instead viewed as listening to concerns as well as illuminating the facts that constrain the discussion.

Question: Do you think there's a comprehensive enough debate for the public to understand in these issues?

Sir Robert May: I think there are a lot of misapprehensions, but we have to be very wary of any particular interested elite making statements about the public. There are many, many publics. The best way of getting a sense of what the public thinks is to ask them in representative samples. And I come back to the fact that when you do that, about 80% say that science has made our life better, and they say that scientists are trying to achieve just that. They do not, in general, say scientists are a bunch of weirdos who want to play God. But they do say they worry that the pace of science is such that effective regulatory supervision is difficult and they distrust the politicians' ability to do it. That puts the real onus on us to make sure that these issues are widely and openly discussed, so that we are both hearing the credible worries, and are being seen to listen to these worries.

Question: Do you think science should be a major issue in the next general election?

Sir Robert May: Well, we are already seeing some differences in the way that the major parties are going to tackle scientific issues, for instance with the climate change levy and the permission to build mobile phone masts. But we must have some consensus about what we need to do on the really big international issues, like climate change. This will be even more important with a new President in the White House and uncertainty about what he intends to do.

We have the same challenge with politicians as we have with the rest of society. We need to listen to their worries and concerns, which usually reflect what their constituents think. We need to engage them in the debate and make them more accustomed to dealing with the uncertainties at the frontiers of science, where policy-making is required. All of these recent events where the public has lost faith in the ability of politicians to offer proper guidance on scientific issues, like BSE, depleted uranium and the MMR jab, shows the need for this. And of course scientists need to become more streetwise about the political process.

The money allocated to science through the last two spending reviews have been pleasing exceptions, but on the whole, science rarely seems to attract the attention from politicians that it deserves. I suppose that is partly because although the present Parliament contains an unusually high number of MPs who have a background in science and engineering, they are still a very small minority. But science and engineering are now more important to the quality of life and economic performance of our country than ever before. Science may not be a central issue in the next election, but it is an inescapable aspect of many of the key issues, such as healthcare and our ability to compete economically with other countries. However, that doesn't mean that we want to see science used as a political football. It wouldn't help to make BSE a party political issue, and we don't want to see party political divisions over how to tackle climate change, or whether depleted uranium poses a health risk. That is why the learned societies joined forces on 14 February to highlight the importance of science and engineering in the run-up to the election and to offer MPs the chance to consider properly how science and engineering should contribute to our lives in the future.