On Tuesday 28 January we hosted For Thought 2025 – our eighth annual event offering new and different perspectives on the relationship between science and innovation and society.

This year’s event was sponsored by MSD and held at the Royal Society in London.

Through a series of short talks, a panel discussion, and networking, our speakers and 200 guests explored what leaders in our boardrooms, higher education institutions, and in Government, are doing, or could be doing, to foster agile and responsible innovation that responds to peoples’ values and expectations.

This blog highlights some of the key themes of our first session’s speakers. A second blog will cover the event’s panel discussion.

Introducing the event was British Science Association (BSA) Chair Hilary Newiss. Hilary set the scene by noting that our first event in 2016 was held shortly after the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency. That event saw discussion on the subject of ‘trust’ and Hilary noted that nine years later, research suggests that public trust in institutions has continued to decline.

More positively, a recent paper published in Nature found moderately high trust in science and scientific methods across 68 countries surveyed: science plays, and will continue to play, a vital role in transforming the systems that underpin our lives – from energy, to healthcare and services.

Lord Patrick Vallance joined For Thought with a video presentation.

He described the role of the Government as ‘mission-led’ – putting citizens and their experiences at the centre of what they do. As Minister of State for Science, Research and Innovation in the UK, Lord Vallance described his mission as in line with the BSA’s:

“To ensure that science and innovation delivers benefits right the way across the population, putting people at the heart of what science really means, making it more relevant, representative and connected to society.”

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology aims to use science and technology to “improve the quality of lives, the outlook, the promise for all citizens. This means engaging to understand what people want from rapidly advancing technology," he said.

“Science has to deliver benefits that people can see, understand and feel – this will require efficient and effective investments in research and development across the board… from curiosity-driven research… to tackling immediate problems that we are facing, and to drive economic growth in the short term.”

Lightning talks

Our first invited speaker, Tera Allas CBE, is a senior advisor to McKinsey & Company and a leading expert on economic growth, productivity, and public policy. She emphasised the importance of events like For Thought which bring together people from across business, Government, education and other sectors.

“What’s 100% certain is that we cannot solve societies’ problems from silos, we need cross-sector collaboration. It’s hard work but absolutely necessary to deliver progress,” Tera said.  

“We also need to listen. As humans we have a bad tendency to extrapolate from ourselves and a tendency to think from an ivory tower to come up with solutions, rather than talking to people needing and already looking for solutions themselves.”  

Tera focused on the need for mindset shifts in technology and innovation if the UK is going to grow. This growth can’t just mean a growth in GDP or saving the planet, but has to mean people having healthier lives, she explained. While people are living longer, they’re doing so in ill health.  

“We’re obsessed with [technology being] ‘leading edge’ but what we actually need is for it to be effective, and it’s critical for people to adopt it,” she said. More thought needs to go into why technology isn’t being adopted, and that is likely because people’s hearts and minds need to be considered a lot more in technology’s development or roll-out. 

It is also vital that there is a shift in mindset to upskill and reskill the UK’s adult population, Tera said. Rather than the focus being entirely on young students entering the workforce, how do we change and improve the existing workforce? “We’re going to need local and hyperlocal solutions to problems,” she added. 

Professor Sarah Harper CBE, ​Clore Professor of Gerontology at the University of Oxford, a Fellow at University College, and Director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, presented on our ageing population.

A decline in fertility or childbearing means that we have not been replacing ourselves since the 1970s. The number of children women have in England and Wales is now 1.4, 1.3 in Scotland and 1.7 in Ireland: in line with other higher income countries. There has also been a fall in late-life mortality, meaning an increase in life expectancy for the over 85s.

Professor Harper explained that people are concerned at how we are losing young workers coming into the population, while there is also an increasing demand for health and social care.

She explored the big macro policies which could be introduced to increase childbearing, increase productivity – particularly productivity in the over 50s - and increase skilled, temporary, or short term, migration.

Increasing childbearing has proven difficult across countries “which have thrown everything at it,” Professor Harper said. There has been a huge mindset shift about reproduction, and a third of women aged 35 in the UK are yet to have their first child. “We have to accept that we’re never going to go above replacement, and if we accept that, and look at the changing structure of our population we can focus on the other two drivers that can be manipulated,” Professor Harper said.

She identified these drivers as: increasing productivity among the over-50s, and focusing on increasing short, circular, workplace migration.

We have to focus on healthy life expectancy, not just long life expectancy, Professor Harper said. Lifetime education is vital: if people are living to 90 years old, we have to look at increasing skills across lifetimes, and particularly for those who are over 50.

“We need to tackle some of the myths about productivity. At the moment, over 50s are more productive than under 25s, but mixed-age teams are the most productive teams to have.”

“We know our verbal skills improve with age, our communication skills, our problem solving, and reasoning. Technology that takes away physical labour tasks or assists with mental tasks can be a positive. If we can change and remove barriers from over 50s being mainstream, we can increase productivity.”

On short circular migration, Professor Harper explained that the EU is putting in place policies to encourage it. They are trying to attract younger workers who follow a skill or occupational need, and then the majority will later go home. “We know immigrants boost local services and products and don’t take occupations away from native born workers,” she said.

Our final lighting talk was by Madhumita Murgia, a writer who leads coverage of artificial intelligence for the FT. Joining us at For Thought by video she explored the subject of how innovation and technology impact on communities across the world.

Madhumita explained how AI has developed over the past decade as personal data across the internet has been harnessed, describing it as a “co-evolutionary process” – the technology is changed by its interaction with people, and we are shaped by it.

On her book, ‘Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI’, she said: “It isn’t about the technology, it’s about the people at the coalface. Ordinary people like you and me, our kids, parents, co-workers, and what it feels like to have your life changed by a technology like AI and other automated systems and algorithms, and what we learn from that shaping, that co-evolution. It looks at how we can apply those lessons as AI is supercharged by the Government, corporations, schools and hospitals.”

“How can the stories of ordinary people who have already been impacted, interacted with, who have already helped shape these technologies teach us how to live alongside AI systems and avoid some of the very real dangers?”

Reflections

Closing our first session was For Thought co-chair Lord David Willetts.

Lord Willetts looped back to the first For Thought in 2016, looking at what has changed in nine years. “Science and technology gets even more attention, an even higher profile, there are very few policy debates now where there’s not a significant science and tech angle,” he said.

At the beginning of Lord Willetts’ career in the civil service, he said that most Whitehall policy discussions assumed science and tech was fixed for the period coming, which might be three to five years. “That’s no longer the assumption,” he said. “People are actively looking for changes in science and tech for the foreseeable parliament’s future. That’s incredibly exciting.”

Lord Willetts also praised an increasing quality in science communication, noting the quality of science books for the wider public, and the existence of the Science Media Centre. “For the BSA, which was founded on the proposition that science is too important to be left just to scientists, this is good news!”.

Yet we still face huge challenges – such as the high percentage of people in the US who do not believe in climate change.

“With early signs [in the US] of things going backwards, it’s important that we don’t leave science to America and China,” Lord Willetts concluded, arguing for Britain to be proud of bringing together scientists from different countries.

The debate has focused too much on AI, Lord Willetts said. There are other technologies. He highlighted, for example, the potential for drones to deliver pharmaceuticals to remote areas, predictive technology for flood risks; and gene therapies for genetic diseases which work in a way that was unimaginable a decade ago.

He also noted progress in the willingness to accept that we need science and tech to help us answer big questions and find answers. With Governmental departments now putting questions on their websites that they want researchers to help find answers for: the belief that science and innovation can improve public services and life for us all in the UK continues to strengthen.