Tim Boon: A scientific approach to public health

From a speech at the MMR conference held at London's Science Museum, given by the head of collections

Arguments about immunisation go back a long way. An 1853 statute made vaccination against smallpox compulsory. Compulsion effectively ended 40 years later when opposition became so intense that conscience clauses were added. But opponents of immunisation dogged its advocates for several decades more. Today there is no Anti-Vaccination League with activists ready to dispatch teams of protesting sandwich-board men whenever new vaccines are introduced. But many of the issues remain.

In those pre-NHS days, policy was also affected by the accepted governmental principle that health services should be demanded by the public and not imposed. It may seem strange that an age ostensibly more paternalistic than ours should take such a liberal view.

We live in a much less deferential age, yet sometimes it seems that official public health pronouncements betray the paternalism of an older age. Better results might be achieved by adopting a more nuanced model of how the public responds to information. Work done at the Science Museum and elsewhere might be worth consideration. The museum's Naked Science events are designed to provide a forum for dialogue that enables good mutual engagement between the public and science.

We have long given up on the so-called "deficit model" of science communication, in which people are seen as empty vessels requiring only to be filled with science to become obedient citizens. We work with realistic models of how people absorb information. This recognises that assimilating knowledge means appropriating it.

In other words, scientific information that conforms with pre-existing patterns of knowledge gets absorbed.