The Café Scientifique

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Science discovers café society, once the domain of poets and writers. Credit: HULTON GETTY

The Café Scientifique started last May in Leeds. I happened to read the obituary of Marc Sautet, the founder of the French ‘Cafés Philosophiques ’, where people meet to discuss philosophy in cafés on Sunday mornings. It occurred to me that the British would never take this up, as they don't take philosophy seriously enough, but they might be prepared to discuss science — a subject they respect.

So in a local wine bar, I advertised an evening “where, for the price of a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, anyone can come to discuss the scientific ideas and developments which are changing our lives”. On the first evening, with a speaker on Darwinism, I had no idea whether the audience might consist only of myself and a few friends.

In the event, between 40 and 50 people turned up, virtually the capacity of the café, and this has been the average size of the audience since then. There are a few regulars, but many new faces appear each week. We meet fortnightly, and invite a speaker to talk for about half an hour. Then there is a break to replenish our glasses, followed by questions and answers for an hour. Interest has been such that another Café Scientifique has been set up in Nottingham, with a further one planned for Newcastle.

Nowadays it appears necessary to fund university chairs to study how to make the public understand science. So why has this format worked so well?

There is no agenda, hidden or overt, to defend or sell science. If people don't like what they hear, they object forcefully. The subjects, or speakers, are picked because they are what people want to hear and they are often controversial. The audience sets the agenda, not the scientists. Not surprisingly, the biosciences feature heavily, but the café has also tackled chemistry, physics, maths and IT. The venue, a café-bar, is where the audience feel comfortable. The atmosphere is friendly and convivial, rather than academic and competitive. This is not a ‘self-improving’ audience, in the way that Victorian scientific societies arose. People don't just want to listen. They want to participate and be heard on equal terms with the scientists.

It is also, as it turns out, an income-generating idea for the wine bar, so there are no start-up or organizational costs. Indeed, we pay the speakers' expenses by passing a hat, ‘le chapeau scientifique ’, round the audience. Since the Café Scientifique works in a suburb of Leeds (not even the university suburb), it could work anywhere.

Although I didn't know it, at around the same time in France, other Cafés Scientifiques were appearing, no doubt also inspired by the Cafés Philosophiques, so it looks as though it is an idea of its time, possibly even a movement.

There may well be something of interest happening here, something of real importance to science, and I use an analogy from medicine. In the late 1970s, medicine was a successful, authoritarian profession, rather like much science today. By and large, patients gratefully accepted any treatment from doctors. During the 1980s all of this changed —the fitness movement started, alternative medicine became established, funding crises proliferated, AIDS became a problem, self-help groups and ethics committees grew up, anxiolytic drugs were found to be addictive, and so on. Today, medicine is a battleground of politics, economics and philosophy. This has not stopped the progress of orthodox medicine, but doctors now work in a very different environment, subject to different constraints and conditions.

Since the end of the Cold War, science has come to the centre of the agenda in environmental politics (global warming), economics (BSE), consumer choice (GMOs) and medicine (genetics).

Under these circumstances science can no longer be taken on its own terms. Many new ways of addressing science will be invented, not all of them rational or favourable. The Café Scientifique is just a harmless straw in what might become a cold wind. What is critical is that scientists don't repeat the early mistakes made by doctors, who often buried their heads in the sand and hoped the new attitudes would go away. Scientists can no longer define the terms of the debates about science.