Sir David King Interview: Conversations with History: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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In your present role you have entered into government service. You're not in politics per se, but you are at the interface of government and science. Talk a little about these two very different worlds, because they are different. You've already suggested some of the ways in which they might gain from each other.
You're quite right. My position as chief scientific advisor is as independent scientist. The post was invented by Churchill during the Second World War. He wanted a scientist who could give him objective hard facts and challenge him, and the post still exists in that form. The post has, of course, developed, so I have a big office and a large budget, which the first holder of the post, F. H. Lindeman, who was head of physics in Oxford, didn't have. Nevertheless, the basic tenet of the post is still the same.
I had no idea before moving into this post exactly how to cope with the problem that you've raised. But dealing with science and presenting it to politicians, what is critically important is being able to do it in simple words. You can deal with sophisticated phenomena but deal with it in simple phraseology.
And so, what is that problem? That's critical because it also relates to the public debate on issues. Is it finding the simple language? Is it presenting that simple language to the media and the public generally, and then obviously to the leaders of government? Are you running tutorials both for large and small audiences?
Absolutely. So, on the one hand, talking directly to the prime minister, one on one -- and by the way, the prime minister is a barrister, he has the mind where he wants to take ownership of what you're telling him. So, I might talk to him for forty minutes. At the end of it he stops me and then he goes back over what I have told him to see that he's taken ownership of it.
In the bigger world, I will go on the national media in the UK when we're faced with major situations and attempt to explain it. As a matter of fact, when there was a tsunami in Indonesia, I went on the media to explain the origins and how we in Britain might better manage the risk in future to our populations and to other populations through better understanding of the science. That is my basic message, that using an evidence-based approach, scientists now can tackle enormously complex things. My job is to bring that understanding to politicians so that they can make better judgments.
Does the arrow go the other way also, in the sense that there's a societal problem that the government is worried about and that you have to essentially go to the scientific community and suggest, cajole, seek to persuade people to make these problems the focus of their curiosity?
Absolutely. And so, for example, post-9/11would be exactly that situation where we have set up a research capacity that didn't really exist before, looking into the potential threats to our society from 9/11-type activities. So, I will be proactive in going out to the research community exactly along the lines that you say.
In terms of giving advice to government, I wonder if I could just explain to you how I first got involved in that in a very real sense.
Please.
The foot-and-mouth disease epidemic that broke out in the UK in 2001 came just a few months into my appointment. I sat, like everybody else, watching this epidemic develop, and about two weeks in I gathered data from the Ministry of Agriculture that was handling the epidemic and called in a group of epidemiological modelers, and together we modeled the epidemic. Four different groups of scientists ended up modeling the epidemic. Based on the models, I could see that with the control procedures we had in place then, the epidemic was actually out of control. So, I had to go to the prime minister and express that view, and then also say what should be done to get it under control.
We ran these programs in real time, so we're talking about working around the clock, twenty-four hours a day. In real time we managed to model the epidemic and then show with various control procedures how best to bring it under control. So, I went to the prime minister and explained it to him. I had to explain, for example, that we had an exponential growth in the epidemic. I said, "Today, Prime Minister, we have forty-five new infected farms in the country, and in nine days' time," (because it was a nine-day doubling period) "we'll have ninety." And I could say that with some certainty.
"But," I said, "If you follow this procedure we can turn this into exponential decay within two days." Now of course, the prime minister was quite taken with that idea. He called together a meeting of the appropriate government members and effectively re-changed the policy, and the epidemic followed our prediction. That was science being used in real time for government to see how well it could operate.
In this and other cases, what is the problem that you observe, or are a party to, where private interests want to oppose what science is telling you and what you are telling the prime minister? Is that a process that you can contribute to, or is that the prime minister and his government's problem?
My own view is that I have to work with the prime minister or other cabinet members on the science advice, because if I give advice that's inappropriate because the private sector, for whatever reason, won't cooperate, I have to go away and come back with advice which takes that into account. On the other hand, for example, coming back to the foot-and-mouth disease epidemic, our model showed that if we could quickly take out all of the animals on a farm where the epidemic was already being shown, and then follow that up with taking out all the animals on all the neighboring farms where there was a common fence, we could bring the epidemic under control quickly. Now, the private owner of those farms was saying, "But my animals are perfectly healthy." And my model was saying, "They may be healthy today but if they go down tomorrow, your animals will become a virus factory and the epidemic just continues." So, the model was saying do that, but many of the farmers were objecting. That's the point where I found myself going on television to explain to the public the basis of the model, that at the end of the day the number of animals we'd have to cull would be considerably reduced by switching off the epidemic rapidly at the expense of taking out the animals on these farms.
The model you're describing, do you think it potentially can work well in all democracies?
I think that, to be honest, it's the kind of model that all democracies need to have. If I could make a statement there, I think that today the scientific community is considerably more capable than it has been in the past to assist governments to avoid or to reduce risk to their own population. I would therefore say prime ministers and presidents would ignore the advice from the science community at the peril of their own populations.
Again, let me give you an example from the tsunami in Indonesia. The scientific community, the geological community, now understands plate tectonics, the movement of these great plates around the earth, with quite considerable detail. Seismologists based here in California and in Britain had predicted that the next big disaster was going to be on that region along Indonesia, where these plates were meeting. And yet no governments took action, no governments in the region were prepared to pay the $30 million that was estimated to set up an early warning system. The disaster has cost in excess of 200,000 lives. My view is that with an early warning system that could have been reduced to less than 100,000. Now there's an example where the science was available, and I'm working internationally to see if we can improve the system whereby the current state of knowledge of the scientists is brought to the attention of the political communities.
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