When will we realise that science can be chic?

From a lecture by the University College London professor Lewis Wolpert at the Royal Geographical Society, as part of the Stargazers series

Whenever passions run high, it is a pretty sure bet that the underlying agenda is a battle for the moral high ground. Passion is currently high around science - its nature, its activities, its contribution to culture. There has been a spectacular rise in the success of popular books on science. Scientists have become much more visible in the media, and debates around science receive considerable public attention.

Whenever passions run high, it is a pretty sure bet that the underlying agenda is a battle for the moral high ground. Passion is currently high around science - its nature, its activities, its contribution to culture. There has been a spectacular rise in the success of popular books on science. Scientists have become much more visible in the media, and debates around science receive considerable public attention.

Literature has not been kind to science. You will hunt through countless novels and have the greatest difficulty finding a single worthwhile description of science or of a scientist.

There are virtually no books in the classical canon of English fiction that have illuminated the process of science in a way that scientists could identify or sympathise with, or that can compete with Jim Watson's The Double Helix. What great novel has a scientist as a believable central character? If literature is meant to reflect our culture, then as far as science is concerned, it is a miserable failure.

One of the very few exceptions is the surgeon Tertius Lydgate in George Eliot's Middlemarch, who does some basic biological research. The explicit hostility of imaginative writers to science has a venerable history, which is very well documented in Roslynn Haynes's From Faust to Strangelove - Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature (John Hopkins Univ). Examples from her chapter headings provide a good sense of her thesis: "Arrogant and Godless: Scientists in Eighteenth-century Satire"; "Inhuman Scientists: The Romantic Perception"; "Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know: Reality Overtakes Fiction"; "The Impersonal Scientist". Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels mocks the astronomers for their pretensions to secure knowledge and their preoccupation with the physical world.

We also find here a view of scientists that will be repeated again and again - scientists are obsessed with their own work and totally detached from the realities of everyday life. We can even find this view - that scientists are emotional cripples not really able to make satisfactory relationships - in the character of Arthur Miles in The Search by CP Snow. When attracted to a girl, he reflects: "The only thing outside myself has been my work. Is this girl going to upset that?" And Sherlock Holmes, known for his scientific knowledge, is portrayed as a coldly distant observer.

Aldous Huxley is thus very unusual, as his novels not only had science in them but they dealt with the scientific issues of the day. Moreover, he regarded as arrogant fools those literary men who ignored science and were ignorant of the work of Einstein or Heisenberg. He thought it the literary artist's responsibility to maintain a dialogue between literature and science. But Huxley was very influenced by the developments in physics in the Twenties and believed that relativity and quantum mechanics had completely undermined the concepts of reality and causality. A similar line is taken in the in Jeanette Winterson's Gut Symmetries, which gives it a spurious seriousness . The predictions of quantum mechanics are, in fact, astonishingly reliable and accurate.

The image of the scientist as detached, male, middle-aged, boring, bald and bespectacled is very much with us still, no matter that most scientists are young, and many are female. A woman scientist in a novel is even harder to find, though there is one in Antonia Byatt's Babel Tower.

But there is an outstanding literature of science written by the scientists themselves that goes back to Huxley, Darwin and Lyell. The modern representatives give the lie to the image of the illiterate scientist. Publishers are now only too well aware that popular science, written by practising scientists as well as science journalists, is a very hot area. Science is chic and exciting, and it is no longer fashionable to boast of one's ignorance or indifference.