When Charlotte Sleigh’s itinerary for India was decided, the first thing she did was to read about science in India. “I learnt a lot of things,” she points out in a serious tone. “I learnt that science in India faces many challenges; it has a lower level of investment/ funding as compared to many other countries; it has a lower number of researchers particularly women. Also, there is brain drain as most students go off from here,” she explains.
The lecturer in the School of History at the University of Kent, Canterbury, is in CCMB, Tarnaka as part of the British Council’s ‘Science and Beyond’ series. While Charlotte elaborates on ‘some of the difficult things,’ her tone changes when she speaks of the ‘enormous excitement about science and technology in India. Science is a great possibility. It is a genuine social wide phenomenon. I should also say that all those scientists in India, their work is of exceptional quality. They work under a lot of limitation and challenges. So, it is a kind of mixed picture.”
Science communication Charlotte’s Hyderabad session was unique and her talk was on ‘Science communication and why does it matter.’ Interspersed with a story on ‘Electric monks and Pathology biscuits,’ the lecture was quite insightful. A few hours before the lecture, she reveals the story behind electric monks. “Science communication as a field of expertise is quite new. It has been developing in the UK for 20 years or so. I am trying to show how science communication is something that actually has a long history.
The electric monks are from a story from the 18th century when electricity was the most exciting science,” she smiles. The electric monks are a famous demonstration by a French scientist, who was also a priest. “He got 200 monks to stay in a circle because he knew that when he touched a laden jar which came with primitive batteries it felt strange and quick. ‘But how quick is that?’ He got a super long chain of monks and there was an audience too. The point I am making in that illustration is that people who were watching were participating and inquisitive. There was a communication. We sort of lost that sense of communication and need to go back to it,” she explains.
The ‘pathology biscuits’ are by a graduate of the science communication programme run at the University of Kent. “She organised and judged a competition in which people had to bake biscuits and decorate them with something that illustrates a cellular pathological process. That’s an example from the present-day I have tried to draw the public into a conversation about science,” she observes.
Charlotte has been known as ‘the ant woman’ on account of her research into the history of myrmecology, the science of ants. “They (ants) teach you patience, to work hard and in harmony,” she smiles and adds, “I see them as mini computer systems because of the way they share information with one another.”
Of family and values She reminisces that her younger days when as a student of biological sciences at Cambridge University helped her seek answers. “I was frustrated and wanted to ask more philosophical questions and at Cambridge there is this whole programme of history and philosophy in science and discovered all the questions that I wanted to ask,’ she recalls. How did she develop interest in two contrasting subjects such as philosophy and science? “Historically, philosophy and science are not two different subjects. What we call science today was called natural philosophy. It was a broader subject in many ways. We sort of lost that today I think. One way you could understand the communication is by opening up the small human dimensions again and those questions about family and values.”
Charlotte exhorts scientists to bring in a new approach in their field of work. “Scientists for the past 70 years were like, ‘We don’t do values. We just do science. Values are for other people.’ I think that’s a wrong attitude. Science and values have to go hand in hand. It is a human identity and we have to decide what are we going to add in science,” she says and adds, “It is also practical; we have to know where we are going to put that money - whether it is public or private with the things that we choose to buy. We have to say what we value.”
