Channel 4, Director of Television and Content, Kevin Lygo, takes a moment to reflect on the channel’s guiding principles in the light of its forthcoming 25th anniversary in November this year. "The channel aims to stand squarely in the centre of national debate, challenging orthodoxies and presenting alternative perspectives to encourage our audience to think again."
Here we explore what challenging orthodoxies and presenting alternative perspectives means in relation to science, media and public.
Controversial thinkers who have the guts to challenge the accepted order of things are the very powerhouse of scientific discovery and invention. Indeed, if it weren’t for a spirit of rebellion, then science might still be languishing in the dark ages today. Even so, those who flout convention with revolutionary ideas are very often forced to pay for their boldness.
Famously, Galileo was put before the Spanish Inquisition in 1633 for publishing his support of the, then scandalous, notion that the earth moved around the sun (as opposed to the other way round). He was sentenced to life imprisonment, but in the event, passed the remainder of his life under house arrest. Charles Darwin kept his own heretical theory, of natural selection, under wraps for many years before he had the courage to publish in 1859. After publication, and unable to bear the infamy, Darwin retired to his country retreat and was rarely seen in public again. In time - a long time, it has to be said - both visionaries were vindicated by later generations of scientists.
Clearly not all scientists can hope to be Galileos or Darwins, but the point is that even relatively small scientific discoveries are bound to challenge something in the status quo. Modern science provides a method by which new observations and ideas can be tested against current knowledge, and checked and re-tested by scientists other than the originators. The process is prescribed and it is what has made science such a successful tool for understanding and shaping the world we live in today.
Breakthroughs in science, whether they are top-drawer or not, eventually must face appraisal at a public level, as well as at a specialist level. Day by day scientists make in-roads into the unknown, most of which pass the public by entirely, but when science hits the headlines the fallout can impact hugely on the lives of everyone involved. This was just as much the case in the days of Galileo and Darwin as it is today. Both men had ideas that challenged religious dogma and were attacked on these grounds as much as on scientific ones.
Science must cut the mustard on more territory than its own. It must measure up on ethical and emotional grounds as well as scientific, and this tends to be where the non-specialist public and press have the most to say, and quite rightly so.
