Mars landings but no end to poverty
Updated on 11 September 2008
Sir David King, the government's former chief scientific advisor, speaks to Alex Thomson about his criticisms of CERN.
Watch David King speak to Alex Thomson
A transcript of King's interview
"My position is very simple: we, a modern civilisation, are faced with the biggest challenge we've ever had. And that challenge arises from global warming. We have a massive problem which is to decarbonise our economy in a very short space of time
"And what I think this requires is a rethink on the part of all of us. Now rethink means embedding in our thinking, whether it's in terms of the growth of the economy, controlling inflation, we also have to look at reducing carbon emissions.
"Now I made a speech on Monday night as president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science saying: this rethink needs to come into the thinking of the scientific and technological community as well.
"And I simply commented that it's interesting that we understand in such detail about fundamental particles, that we can look with confidence at the Higgs Boson and its structure and properties, and we can build a massive multi-billion pound machine in order to test the theory.
"I think it's amazing that we have the technological capability to land a craft on Mars so many miles away.
"While at the same time I'm dismayed that we haven't yet got highly efficient methods of producing energy from the sunlight landing on the planet so that we can simply leave fossil fuel where it is in the ground and use solar energy. And I'm dismayed by the fact that millions of people a year are still dying from malaria and HIV aids.
"So my plea really was for the brightest young people coming into science and technology, if they were heading towards, say, particle physics, just to give it a little thought, perhaps they could contribute to one of these very big problems which are central to the future of the whole of mankind."
