Susan Greenfield Interview Transcript

It’s fair to say you’ve had a highly successful career – getting a professorship at Oxford, Director of the Royal Institute, life peerage, what would you say was the single pinnacle of your career if you had to choose one?

Oh that’s so hard, I think the peerage has to be something that you don’t expect necessarily that is very special and that’s not part of your life plan if you’re an academic, so I think that, certainly. At a much earlier stage in my life, getting into Oxford was very special for me. And becoming director here as well.

So how do you manage to combine running your businesses, being director of the Royal Institution and teaching at Oxford?

Ok, if you have companies – well it sounds very grand – but these companies are just shell companies. That’s to say they're a name, but they’re not exactly up there with Tesco! So what happens is you start these attempts built round some of your science to try and commercialise what you’re doing but if you do that you get someone else to be your CEO. So it’s not as if once you start a company based on your idea you then do the business side of things because if you’re a scientist, an academic, you don’t have the experience to know what that requires – it’s one thing to be an academic but another to commercialise the science. So that doesn’t take up a huge amount of time. With regards to teaching at Oxford, I used to teach but when I became Director of the Royal Institution I cut down on all teaching and administration and came up here [to London] so my research time is still the same but now instead of being 50% research and 50% teaching, I’m now 50% research and 50% the director of the Ri. So again, it’s not as if I’m trying to do everything – in life as you do different things, you let certain things go and move on to other things. You’ve only got a limited amount of time and it’s up to you how you assign your portfolio.

Can you ever see yourself returning to teaching?
No. It was interesting, I don’t regret it, I had great fun teaching medical students, at the time. You do something, you don’t regret it, you enjoyed it but then you move on – cycling you might enjoy, but then you buy a car so you know, you don’t necessarily go back to what you’ve done but that doesn’t mean you didn’t enjoy it, it means you’ve moved on and you have different things in life that interest you.

You’re the first female director of the Royal Institute. Are women still underrepresented in science?
Oh totally, yeah. This is something that concerns me a lot and I’ve been working with the company L’Oreal and Unesco on how to raise the awareness of the problems of women in science. It’s ok at school stage and even at university, especially for biomedical sciences because, as you may know, at your school about 50% of people doing biology might be girls but in chemistry and physics it’s probably less. The problem comes later on in life as you get more and more senior, suddenly the ratio changes and there’s fewer and fewer women and one of the reasons for that is when women decide to have children, usually in their late 20s, early 30s, that’s the time when in your career, you’d be applying for more senior jobs and it’s harder if you’ve had time out to have a child because you’re not as competitive because you haven’t been publishing and you haven’t been doing all the experiments that your male colleagues are doing.

Has attitudes towards women changed throughout your career?
Yes and no. in one sense yes in that people wouldn’t  be overtly sexist anymore, in the old days they would be a bit like racism, you know. I remember discriminatory notices of one sense or another. I remember men being paid more than women. Can you believe this For the same job! And everyone just accepting this was normal. So those things have changed hugely and everybody’s very politically correct now. That having been said, certainly my female colleagues feel that there’s discrimination there that’s institutionalised. Like you hear about institutionalised racism, there’s institutionalised sexism. That is to say no one is overtly prejudiced to your face but you just don’t know. If you don’t get a job, if you don’t get something happen, you just never know – there’s always that nagging worry was it because I’m a woman. So I think that’s still there.

I see you’re on the Royal Society’s council for the public understanding of science. Do you think we should be trying to make science more relevant for teenagers and what’s your advice for the young scientist?

Well there’s two parts to that question. I think science should be relevant to everyone, not just teenagers because everyone is a citizen of the 21st century and everyone has a right to help shape society as they want to do – whether they’re old or young, whether they’re poor or rich, whether they’re scientists or non-scientists, everyone is a part of society and we’re all part of Britain, in this case. So I think everyone should be empowered so they can evaluate what they do and don’t want because if they’re just at the mercy of the press, or people giving them sensationalist hype – like Frankenstein foods. Because if you don’t know what a gene is, or what genetic modification of food is, how can you evaluate whether you want it or not If you just call it Frankenstein food you don’t really understand these things. So, I don’t think it’s just teenagers, what we should be aiming for is a scientific literacy. Just as most people of heard of Shakespeare, it’d be nice if most people had heard of genes in the same way. So I think there’s two levels. As someone once said, it’s suicide to have society dependent on science and technology where virtually nobody knows anything about science and technology and we live in a science and technology era, therefore we should know about it if we’re not to be duped and not to have people tell us the wrong thing. So I think it’s really important, and I say this to the non-scientists, that they should have scientific literacy nonetheless, otherwise they’re going to miss out on things. The second part of your question is how to engage people, and how to get people interested and I think, I don’t know about your school but certainly when I learnt science at school I hated it because they didn’t relate it to life. You know, it was all about amoebas and distilling water and no one told me why that was interesting at all. So I think that people have to put it into a context. That’s not to say you spend the entire time talking about ethics, or you simplify it, but people have to relate it to everyday life. That’s why I think that things like the brain are very interesting to study, although it’s considered too hard to study at school level. My own view is that it’s not too hard because you can do it in such a way that anybody can latch on to and you can understand how people develop, what makes people different, how drugs work. And those kind of things people can understand and it’s important to them. Whereas a black hole, or an amoeba, or distilling water has no obvious relevance to the average kid. No one told me why distilling water was interesting. I think it needs to be more relevant. I also think what’s wrong with science, and why it’s not so popular is that the government threw the baby out of the bath water with all the exams you’ve got to pass and the curriculum. The most exciting thing about science is using your curiosity to test something out and be wrong – to have the freedom to be wrong. Of course, nowadays everything is so sanitised with health and safety, everybody’s in such a rush to dash and get all your qualifications, I think people forget the most exciting thing about science is to think well why does this do that, well lets test it out – what could it be If you’re not doing that then the rest is a bit boring. I feel that we ought to put back into science that curiosity, that time for you to make mistakes and to experiment and not know what the answer is – that’s really important.

How has the perception of science in society changed since the beginning of your career?

When I was your age, or a bit younger, on the telly there was “the scientist” – always a white man in a white coat, of course. For advertising, the scientist would endorse – scientifically proven… I always wondered what not scientifically proven would be! But anyway, science then had a kind of kudos of stature – “the scientist” was like god… this man, a bit like a doctor, in a white coat. I think now that science has taken quite a dip in its reputation. People are more wary of science – it’s more evil. Scientists are going to take over; they’re going to cheat you in way. I think that bit of science has gone down. I don’t think it’s seen as any more or any less elitist than it was, I think it’s always been a minority pursuit, people have always seen it like that. That still prevails and I think it’s still a problem for women – a woman doing science is even more freaky than a man doing science, and that’s bad enough! I think those images are still there. I think knowledge of science has come down a little bit but people are more aware of science even if they’re not necessarily prepared to embrace it. How could they not be Everything you hear about, whether it’s food, reproduction or communication or warfare is now touched by technology in a way it never was before. If you now look at the papers in your day compared to when I was young, when I was young there was no science related or science orientated but now about 90% of the stories would have some kind of science relevance.

You studied philosophy at university, alongside psychology, do you think your success is due partly to your different approach to science?

Well I’m glad you called it success, some might say I have an unorthodox way of working but I would regard that as the only way to be – unorthodox – there’s no point in doing what everyone else does. And even if you’re wrong as I am many times, the fun in life is to be different from other people. Certainly I would attribute my unorthodox approach to that, some people have said I would have been more successful if I’d towed the party line a bit more and behaved how I ought to behave, which I’ve never done. So in some sense that’s been a handicap to me, possibly. So doing classics and then philosophy certainly gives you an intellectual arrogance and it gives you confidence and a different way of looking at things. You actually are driven by a concept rather than by just experiments on their own – you want to fit it into some kind of scheme or picture or idea or some grand view of something. So that has certainly made a difference.

For someone so heavily involved in medical research, you obviously see the therapeutic side of medicine a lot. Do you ever wish you’d become a practising clinician?

That’s an interesting question. On the whole no but I think you sometimes you have more credibility with people if you’re clinically qualified and sometimes lay people say ‘oh so you’re not a real doctor’! And especially working as closely as you do on the medical problems. Sometimes you might think if you had a clinical qualification it might be a bit easier, doors might open, you might get more acceptance. That is why I would want a clinical qualification, not because I would want to work at the bedside. The reason for that is for me, personally, if you’re an out-of-the-box unorthodox person, that is the last thing you want a clinician to be. ‘actually, I’ll try something new, I haven’t tried this before, I hope you don’t mind!’ Clearly the point of medicine is that you are following precedent, that if one doctor is away the other doctor will treat you in the same way, not in a different way. What you want from your medics is a consistency of service, a consistency of approach and a way of doing things, founded on precedent. So I’ve never really regretted not doing medicine. That’s not to say I don’t respect medics it’s just that I personally don’t have the disposition or the ability or the right mindset to be a medic. Sometimes I think it would be beneficial to have a qualification like that because people are more comfortable with people they know are clinically qualified.

What attracted you to neuroscience and how can you see it developing in the future?

I kind of drifted into it, like all things – one doesn’t wake up one morning and say ‘I’m going to be a neuroscientist’. In the 70s, when I started off they talked about brain research or neurophysiology but they didn’t really talk about neuroscience – that’s a relatively new discipline. I think it was all started when I did Latin and Greek and I was interested in Greek philosophy and what makes a person a person and how much you’re responsible for you actions, what is free will, why do wars start, how do people fall in love, what’s an emotion and on and on and on. The Greeks ask some really really big questions and that I think is heady stuff when you’re a school kid. And when you get into that you get very excited and very demanding, intellectually, with the kind of things you want to do, rather than go back to pedestrian stuff. So because of that, I wanted to do philosophy and at oxford to do philosophy you have to do it politics and economics which I certainly didn’t want to do or you can do it with physiology – I didn’t know what that was – or with psychology. I vaguely knew what psychology was so I did it with that. Then I got very disillusioned with philosophy because the way that’s taught at oxford is not about all this intoxicating stuff – it’s about the definite article and is very language based and I found that a bit dry. Whereas this new subject, psychology was fascinating and because I hadn’t done sciences it was new stuff. So I got into psychology and then I got more interested in brain-type things. My tutor said “I’ll laugh if you’re a scientist, hahaha”. So after my first degree, I did a doctorate in pharmacology so I got into it through a series of steps that I wasn’t aware I was taking at the time but just intellectually, the path I chose as opposed to another path was one that led actually going full circle and ended up asking, in brain terms, all those questions I’d asked as a school girl. And to a degree those are the kind of issues one can address now by looking at the brain.

Changing the subject a little, I read somewhere that you’re pro GM food… [laughs] I was wondering what your reasons are for that?

It’s not that I’m pro-GM food, it’s just I’m not anti it. There’s a difference. All my life I’ve fought against prejudices and to be against “Frankenstein foods” is a prejudice just like all prejudices. So I keep an open mind. What I don’t like are strong words like ‘contamination’ – as soon as you say that people feel there’s something sinister going on. And frankly, all other things being equal, if GM foods mean, as they will, that you don’t have to use pesticides and insecticides and you can feed the world’s population… what would you rather have, people starving or eating GM foods and staying alive, given that the GM foods are not toxic. So in my mind this is an option that we can’t dismiss from the luxury of the western world where we have food. These are possibilities that have to be exhausted and explored. And it has to be proved that they are bad, proved that there is something wrong, rather than this media sensation. It’s too valuable a technology to dismiss in this sentimental, old fashioned, misty-eyed rather complacent attitude.

Do you think we’re becoming too dependent on technology?

Yes and no, in that technology’s always been neutral, so it’s always bought good and bad things. So if by too dependent you mean that our life-expectancy’s doubled since the beginning of the 20th century, or something like that, don’t quote me precisely! If far fewer women are dying in childbirth, if far fewer people, even during their life, are in less pain then lets not forget that’s a huge bonus. As someone once said, everyone probably would’ve had toothache in the old days; you would’ve had bad teeth. So either no teeth or bad teeth so imagine how that would change your life. It’s not going to kill you but imagine what life would be like. Little things like that which we tend to forget about. Take penicillin, you would’ve had running infections – imagine what that would’ve been like. Also think how domestic appliances have improved quality of life, reading at night time whereas you would’ve had a flickering of a candle, women not having to spend all day cooking and cleaning. Now you could say there are downsides, someone might say we’ve lost certain aspects of our humanity so it’s a very interesting and in depth discussion, which I explore in my book, tomorrow’s people – how much technology is influencing. I don’t think there’s too much or too little but you always suck with the devil if you’re taking on these things there will be a downside and you need to decide whether you want that or not. But I for one do think that the quality of life that technology’s given us is a lot better than say in Victorian times, you know we have much more freedom, much more potential and much longer lives. What we do with it is the issue and we can’t expect technology to make us happy but we do have the opportunities now that we didn’t have otherwise.

What are you working on at the moment, any particular research projects And what do you hope to achieve before you retire?

In the lab I continue to work on Alzheimer’s disease, and before you ask, no we haven’t solved it but you’ll be the first to know! We’re also working on how the brain generates consciousness. We’re also working on how science and technology impacts on learning and how kids are thinking and how education should be changed. Other initiatives I’m trying to set up which might affect you when you’re older is Science Corps which will be a mixture of Medicins San Frontiers and Peace Corps which is to get western scientists to go out into developing countries and to help them develop and have a better quality of life using innovative science in a way that is not obviously apparent. We’re trying to set up a Royal Institution in Australia which looks like it’s coming off which is very exciting so therefore different countries will have a way of talking and learning about science in a way that’s not on a government agenda or a company agenda and in a way that’s free. And here we’re refurbishing and will open in about a years time. It’ll be this fabulous new area where people can come and talk – there’ll be a bar and a restaurant.

Is the Royal Institution government funded?

No, we’re entirely independent. You can join or your school can join but anyone can come without joining.

What is your vision for the Royal Institution?

I want it to be a place where anyone, independent of their background – because we’re here in Mayfair, again there’s an elitist image which I’ve been trying to reverse and again an upper class male image which again I’m trying to reverse – anyone from any background especially a non-scientific background should feel comfortable here. They should be able to drop in, and have a cup of tea or a glass of wine or listen to a lecture and just meet up with people and on neutral territory talk about how science is changing their lives and what the implications are. My dream is you’d be able to say to your family and friends shall we go to the cinema tonight or should we go to the Royal Institution And it should be the same. It should be as exciting, as fun, as relevant and just like you might go and see a film together and come out arguing about the meaning of the film so you should be able to come and see something here and leave and discuss. Above all I want people to argue because if you argue with each other you have a healthy society. If you’re discussing and debating, you’re at the cutting edge where nothing is concrete, that’s much more interesting. You come here, you get the facts and then you start to discuss and debate them together. So that’s my vision, it’s that people should be empowered and you feel when you leave that you’re stimulated and worried and excited and inspired and above all you’re going to do something about it – you’re not passive. You are an active citizen who’s going to do something. You’re not just feeling that you’ve been taken over or fleeced or confused, you’re someone who’s going to help and contribute to make society a better place.

Can you see yourself staying at The Royal Institution in the long-term?
Well, I retire when I’m 65 and I’m 56 now. In theory, I have got about ten more years here. Once you have done what you want to do, and you have had your vision and your legacy, you hand over to the next person to do their thing. So I certainly want to stay here for as long as, until the building is up and running, the place has proved itself, and we are back on course lots of exciting events and the vision is realised. I am not sure what that will be, how long that will take, but once that’s done, then I’ve got to do other things, but until then, I absolutely want to see this through until it’s open.

On the whole, do you have an optimistic or pessimistic view about the future of humanity?
I think all scientists are optimists, because you are always dealing with something that you don’t know. You have always got a problem or a question that hasn’t been answered before. You are always dealing with something which, by definition, no one has been able to answer up till now. So, most scientists are optimists because they are trying to change something. So, on the whole I am optimistic. What saddens me is when I see the situation with these hoodies, these kids, who grew up in inner city estates where no-one has really helped them, and they have such low expectations of themselves. That saddens me hugely. But on the whole, when I do look at other young people, these are very exciting times. For example, I was in Ireland recently, in Derry, at a Catholic girls’ secondary school in an inner city area, and they had just got specialist science status, and they were so excited, so up to it. That really does give you hope. So, on the whole I am optimistic.

What developments in neuroscience can we expect?
I think there’s going to be something that’s referred to as convergent technologies. That is where you have the physical sciences and the biological science coming together. A good example of that is nanotechnology - the science of the very small, a millionth of a metre - where for devices that might be ingrained in the body, which are very tiny, you would need a knowledge of biomedical issues and you would need physics, chemistry and material sciences, so I think, in the future, we are not going to have neuroscience segregated from physics. They will come much closer, and anyone who does science will have to do all sciences, or have a literacy in all sciences. It’ll be a handicap if you don’t have a working knowledge of all branches of science. So, I think there will be convergent technology. The other area of neuroscience that I see coming to the fore is the middle layer. On the one hand, you have cells and genes and molecules. People on that layer work bottom-up, they work on that level and then, they work up. Or people can work in terms of behaviour, in terms of brain scans and brain regions having functions; that’s called top-down. And until now, those two levels haven’t really been reconciled. People lave either worked top-down or bottom-up, but the middle layer, which is very large groups of cells and transient formations of these large groups of cells, how they are then related to function, is an exciting area That’s what we do at The Oxford Centre for the Science of the Mind.

Do you think we’ll ever be able to understand the mind and how it works?
My father says that you can’t use a knife of butter to cut butter. It depends on what you mean by understand, and what you mean by work. I think the question itself is such a broad question that you need to boil it down to more specific ones. Let’s take the biggest question of all, and one which fascinates me How does the brain generate consciousness, that inner state If you think about it, it drives you mad actually, the question, because consciousness is highly subjective; you don’t have the same consciousness as somebody else. You have a different consciousness to me; whether someone is poetical or musical or articulate, you just wouldn’t know what the other person is thinking. So, that can really be the most tantalising thing. Now, if you said to me that you had solved how the brain generated consciousness, I wouldn’t even know what kind of answer to expect. Would you be showing me a robot Would you be showing me a brain scan What kind of explanation would satisfy someone; as to how you, as it were, turn the water into wine, how you turn the physical brain into an inner state that you can feel, and who is doing the feeling, and where is the person doing the feeling Your mind just reels. Conceptually, it’s just impossible to understand. So, that kind of thing, I think we are going to have problems with, simply because we haven’t yet formulated how we are even going to approach the question. Other things like Are we going to get a better treatment for depression Yes. Will we get a better treatment for Alzheimer’s Yes. So, it depends on what kinds of questions you are asking.

So, what are we doing right in science education at the moment?
I think kids are becoming alert to science more. That’s very good. I think, certainly, we are becoming much better with the screen and with IT skills. That’s good. It’s the question of harnessing technology that still needs work.  

Tony Blair is having a massive drive on making science more popular, and getting more children to do science A-levels and take science subjects at university. How important do you think this is?
Well, when you compare with new economies in China and India, there, I think there is something like 25 times more children who are doing science. A ludicrous discrepancy between here and there, so if this country is going to compete in the world economy, it has to be set to get into science and technology, or else we won’t have the skills base that India and China have. But telling people they have to do it, forcing people, is not an option. I think what you have to do is paint a vision to people as to what will happen, how exciting it will be if they do these things. Let them decide. But I think just trying to say to kids You should do this. You surely do what you enjoy, what you find exciting. So the issue is how you get kids to realise that this is exciting, not just telling them that they should do science. You should teach it in such a way that people just can’t imagine doing anything else; like they do in India and China, where they are really turned onto it.

Do you think that as a woman working at a very high level, not having had children makes it a lot easier?     
Yes I do, and that’s another thing that I come right out and say. Now, that’s not to say, as I am often misquoted as saying, that women who want to have a career should not have children or can’t have children. What I am saying is that the government should be doing things to help women who wish to have a career and to have children to help them do this, because as I say, if you don’t have kids, it’s much easier, because you are working consistently, you don’t have a break in your career structure, but if you do have a break in a career structure, in science, it’s not like medicine or law where you can go back an pick up where you left off, you can’t do that. So, it’s very important. So, in my case, not having children, I’m sure, has helped me not be as distracted as I would be had I had kids.

You hope to bring science to the public and to make it popular. Do you think there’s a risk that this might dumb down science to the extent that it’s no longer intellectual enough?
I think people accuse you of that; certainly my colleagues would say that. But there’s a difference between dumbing down and making something clear. Quite often, people who are in specialist subjects - I am sure you have found this with teachers - they can’t see the wood for the trees and they are so keen to show you how much they know. You get a lot of detail that you don’t necessarily need. Now, I’m not an economist, but say I wanted to know about the economics of South America. I wouldn’t need to know all the details; I just need to know the bottom line. Now, does that mean it’s been dumbed down for me No, it just means that they’re simplifying it for a non-specialist. So, I think that phrase ‘dumbing down’ is a rather complacent one that people use that makes them feel very intellectual and clever and lofty. But actually isn’t really the case. All you are doing is extracting the salient features and not giving people the unnecessary detail. I think there’s nothing wrong with that, and that’s what we do in academia all the time. You are constantly sifting through all the facts and finding out what is important, what is not important, what is relevant to put down. When you take notes, you don’t write down every sentence of what you read. Already, you are taking out the salient things. Now, are you dumbing down No, you are not. You are just clarifying in your mind. You are just getting the clear picture. It’s just the same.

So, what advice would you give to the budding young scientist?
Two things. To never take anything for granted; always question everything. Always question dogma. Look at the evidence and if you are not satisfied with it, you can see an alternative, you have to challenge the dogma. And the other is you have to not mind being wrong.

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