David Edge

Promoter of scientific understanding

David Owen Edge, physicist and science educator: born High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire 4 September 1932; Reader in Science Studies, Edinburgh University 1979-92; FRSE 1992; married Barbara Corsie (two sons, one daughter); died Edinburgh 28 January 2003.

The considerable advance in the cause of the public understanding of science in Britain in the last 30 years has not come about automatically; a relatively small group of scientists has devoted its energies to promoting scientific understanding, and among the most notable champions of the cause was David Edge, Reader in Science Studies at Edinburgh University from 1979 to 1992.

Edge was born in High Wycombe but his parents moved to Aberdeen and he went to the local grammar school, famous for its rigorous learning, and subsequently to the Leys School in Cambridge. After a degree in Physics at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he was tutored by David Shoenberg, later director of the Mond Low Temperature Laboratory, Edge was snapped up by the Perse School as an assistant physics master.

Proving a talented teacher, he was poached by the Science Unit of the Talks Department of BBC Radio in London, where he spent seven productive years, 1959-66, when the "wireless" was still in its infancy as an instrument of scientific education. Going to Cornell University in New York State introduced Edge to a whole new approach towards scientific education. Nothing gave him greater pleasure than in 1989 to be elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and three years later as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

It was that American experience that persuaded Edge that science research councils should ensure that comparability of standards between work carried out at facilities and work supported in other modes and true levels of demand for facilities are demonstrated. International referees should play a significant part in the appraisal of large facilities and their upgrades. Applicants should be made aware of the cost of the time allocated to them even if a system of allocation by price were not feasible.

Returning from the United States, Edge went to Edinburgh and was quickly promoted Reader in Science Studies. I had known him as an undergraduate at Caius and resumed the friendship after a gap of a quarter of a century, by which time he had become a formidable committee operator and a skilled editor of the magazine Social Studies of Science.

The distinguished zoologist Professor Aubrey Manning says:

David Edge came to be a very big influence on us all in Edinburgh. He initiated the idea that science was a human activity which could not be divorced from the culture in which it existed. He expanded on Dr Jacob Bronowski's paradox that those who claim that science is objective confuse the findings of science, which certainly are objective, and the practice of scientific work, which is certainly not objective. I found teaching with him on a joint course linking zoology with general science studies most stimulating. I learnt a great deal from David Edge, as did many of my colleagues.

Edge was co-author with Michael J. Mulkay of Astronomy Transformed (1976) and, Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Dean of the Faculty of Science at Bath University and President of the Royal Astronomical Society, says,

he was lead author on the Third Cambridge Catalogue of Radio Sources, for many years the definitive catalogue of radio-astronomical sources (quasars, galaxies etc) in the sky. The author order was normally alphabetic – that Edge led the list of authors on the catalogue shows his high standing in the radio-astronomy community.

One of Edge's most important contributions was his very influential and active membership in 1990-91 of the Advisory Board for the Research Councils Working Party on Peer Review, for which he was handpicked by Professor Sir David Phillips (later Lord Phillips of Ellesmere). Under the chairmanship of the working party of Professor Margaret Boden, Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at Sussex University, Edge contributed to many of the main recommendations.

He believed that excellence within one's specialism had to be the pre-eminent criterion for the membership of any research council committee. Research councils should seek those appropriately qualified for committee membership from sectors or groups that were sparsely covered in the 1990s. Edge would constantly complain that far too many of the key places in science were given to those in the golden triangle of London, Oxford and Cambridge. Trawls for potential members should be widened and the academic community informed of the methods used. Councils and boards should continue to make final decisions, but from a wider pool, with appropriate bodies or offices continuing to take regard of "balances".

Edge had a lot to say on the issue of referees, particularly that they should be allowed to ask for their reviews to be held back from the applicant but that councils should strongly discourage them from doing so. One of his contributions to the committee was the suggestion that, as an experiment, the councils should ask reviewers the hypothetical question, whether they would agree to their name's being included on their reference when it was returned to the applicant.

Shortly before his retirement, Edge was awarded the John Desmond Bernal Prize for his contribution to scientific education.

Tam Dalyell