The British Parliament is set to put the Royal Society—one of the world's oldest and most distinguished scientific bodies—under the microscope. The focuses of attention will be on efforts by the society to promote public understanding of science, an examination of why there are so few women and minority groups among the organization's members, and what the society does with the £26 million a year that it receives from the public purse.

The House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology will hold public hearings into the activities of the society, which may yield a head-on confrontation between Britain's scientific establishment and left-wing members of the government, who claim that the Royal Society is an elitist organization in need of radical reform.

Ian Gibson chairs the Select Committee and in addition to being a former professor of biology at the University of East Anglia, he was also a trade union activist. He says that it is time to broaden the criteria by which fellows of the Royal Society—one of the highest honors a British scientist can receive—are elected. “Perhaps more weight should be given to the role that an individual has played in promoting the public understanding of science and the social use of scientific knowledge, not just to scientific achievements,” Gibson says.

The Royal Society strongly defends its record. Presently, the Royal Society has 1200 Fellows, of which 44 (3.7%) are women. Of 366 Fellows who are under 65 and living in the UK, 17 (4.6%) are women. It says that this reflects the proportion of professors in scientific and engineering disciplines who are female. It adds, “statistically, a woman stands a slightly higher chance than a man of being elected once nominated.”

Lord Bob May, the society's president and a former chief adviser to the government, points to several ways it is helping to increase the number of women in senior scientific positions. He also feels that the organization has little to fear from parliamentary scrutiny of the way that it conducts its affairs.