Newcastle upon Tyne

Sweet talk: Tom Shakespeare, a prime mover at Café Scientifique, engages an audience in Bologna, Italy.

The Vitenskapskafeen in Oslo is so popular that people happily sit on the floor once the seats are taken. The same kind of event, when held in a forest in Poland, attracts everyone from villagers to the local priest. In Denver, Colorado, such meetings draw enough singles to create match-making occasions.

The focus of each of these popular gatherings, called Cafés Scientifique, is informal scientific debate. The idea was started by French physicists in 1997, but when Café Scientifique organizers met to share ideas in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, on 21 and 22 May they welcomed colleagues from 11 different countries, from Argentina to Japan.

The meeting revealed a movement that has expanded rapidly, but remains close to its grass roots. Suggestions that international cafés could develop a more unified structure and organize larger sources of funding attracted limited interest. Instead members were keen to learn small tricks of the trade from each other.

The events are all based in informal settings, such as bars and cafés. Expert speakers, such as scientists from local universities or businesses, start the meeting with a short talk before joining an audience-led debate. Organizers deliberately keep audiences small, aiming for around 50 participants.

In Britain and France in particular, the proliferation of Cafés Scientifique has been dramatic — the two countries now host around 70 regular events a year between them.

Many of the organizers are eager to see what else they can do with the format; they could, for example, use video conferencing for debates between disparate groups of people. Michael Puncheon, who runs café events as part of his work at the British Council, describes one successful event that linked scientists and lay people in London, Istanbul and Ramallah, on the West Bank near Jerusalem. They were given the chance to hear Mike Parker, an expert in the ethics of genetics at the University of Oxford, discuss issues such as genetic testing. “They were young audiences and they really got stuck in,” says Puncheon.

The idea of cafés for young people also attracted interest at the meeting. Since the first such event was run in 1999 in Lyon, France, junior debates have spread to schools in seven French cities. UK organizers say that in the autumn they will apply for funding for a similar programme to the Wellcome Trust, a research charity that encourages public engagement with science. “It's a chance for pupils to meet scientists and businessmen — the people who shape the world,” says organizer Pablo Jensen, a physicist at Claude Bernard University in Lyon.

Tom Shakespeare, a sociologist at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne who helped organize the meeting, acknowledges that the cafés appeal mainly to the middle class. But Shakespeare and others point out that the events still reach a wide audience, particularly as they can be held in small towns that do not have science museums or universities to host larger events. The cafés also serve an educational function: in France, events have been run in teacher training colleges to make new teachers more confident about discussing science.

The Denver café, organized by University of Colorado immunologist John Cohen, performs another social function: “I know that people have got together after meetings,” he says. “So when people come in alone, we carefully direct them to potential partners.”

See Editorial, page 327

→ http://www.cafescientifique.org