Science: Why it matters to everyone

You could say that science runs in my family. Later this year, after several years of studying the effects of influenza, my older brother will earn his Doctorate in virology. My younger sister studies food science and will soon be a registered dietitian. However, the subject was never my calling.

But as a member of the communications team at the British Embassy in Washington, my role is to promote UK government policies on a diverse range of topics, including science and innovation. Explaining UK excellence and why the public should care about government investments in this field can be a challenging task.

Last week, David Willetts, the UK Minister for Science and Universities, announced a new £300 million investment in global, cutting-edge science projects that will drive innovation. The UK is already a leader in global science and technology and the US is a major partner – so this is great news. The sheer scale of the investment will create £150 million each year, largely in terms of jobs and new technologies, from here on out.

I had the fortune of travelling to Chicago last month when Minister Willetts attended the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and visited local universities and research centers. He was promoting the value of UK/US scientific collaboration, and more specifically, his “Eight Great Technologies,” which will help solve global challenges and drive the UK economy.

While visiting Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, the Minister toured the supercomputing facility Mira, which as the fifth fastest facility in the world, is capable of carrying out 10 quadrillion calculations per second. But what does that really mean? Well, if you took the fastest laptops commercially available and stacked them on top of one another, for the same computing power in Mira you would need to stack these laptops 1.7 miles high. Another way of thinking about it is that one day of computing time on Mira would equal 300 years of computing time on the computer that I am using right now. With the power instilled in systems like Mira, scientists can tackle massive projects — like modeling climate on a global scale well into the future, or simulating airflow at the millisecond scale through a jet engine to discover how to reduce turbulence and increase fuel efficiency. The UK collaborates with places like Argonne to benefit from this type of power, but has itself become an expert in making these machines extremely energy efficient. This reduces the environmental impact of the mass amounts of energy required to power these great machines.

The UK’s R&D is contributing in ways that affect us everyday — smartphones for instance. 90 percent of smartphones use British technology in the form of chips that are designed in Cambridge. Thanks to a panel discussion the Minister took part in, I learned of another example of how government support for technology has benefited my life — this one slightly closer to home. All seven technologies that were needed to create the first iPhone came from state-funded universities. Steve Jobs was of course the mastermind that pulled it all together, but if this isn’t a perfect endorsement for state-funded research then I don’t know what is — although I might be slightly biased, coming from a state-funded university myself.

UK and US science collaboration is as impressive as it is important. Four Nobel prizes have been shared between the US and UK in scientific fields in the last 12 years.  As Minister Willetts said when addressing the newly elected AAAS fellows in Chicago, the special scientific relationship between the US and UK falls somewhere between competition and co-operation. Most importantly, it keeps both nations at the very forefront of world science.

This visit provided fascinating insight into the importance that the UK places on international science collaboration. It also inspired me to share all these great examples that motivate me in my job here at the Embassy and show just how crucial UK and US cooperation is to our daily lives.