Science is an ecosystem that needs diversity and redundancy to thrive, says Dr Ruth Morgan
The 2024 World Science Forum in Budapest brought together leading scientists and policymakers to address pressing challenges in the relationship between science and society. Among the central themes of this year’s forum was the apparent erosion of trust in science and scientists, despite decades of science communication efforts. We sat down to talk with one of the invited speakers, Dr Ruth Morgan, Professor of Crime and Forensic Science at University College London and Co-Director of the UCL Arista Institute, who addressed this challenge by drawing parallels between forensic science communication and broader issues of public trust in scientific evidence.
Prof. Morgan’s background in forensic science provides an opportunity to examine how scientific evidence and uncertainty can be communicated effectively to different audiences. The success of forensic science in relaying complex probabilistic evidence in courtrooms offers valuable lessons for other fields, such as climate science, where similar challenges exist in conveying uncertainty to the public. Her dual role, leading both forensic science research and the interdisciplinary Arista Institute at UCL, also provides her with a unique perspective on these challenges from both specific and more holistic viewpoints.
“There is a mismatch between what the public often believe science can do and what, from a scientific perspective, we know that science can do,” Prof. Morgan explains. She illustrates this through examples from the legal system, where scientists often face questions that can’t be answered with absolute certainty. “‘From the sediments recovered from the shoes, can you tell us was this person at location X?’” would be a typical request to which scientists must respond with carefully qualified statements about probabilities and possibilities rather than absolute certainty.
“‘I can tell you that we can exclude these other locations, but I cannot exclude the possibility that they were at location X,’ or ‘I can confirm that their DNA is on the weapon.’ But in this context it is possible that their DNA got there through a direct transfer like handling the weapon, but it is also possible that it could have been transferred indirectly.”
The challenge and need of communicating uncertainty well has become particularly acute in recent years. As Prof. Morgan notes, “particularly in the last 20 years, when there is constant talking about lots of different types of crises, society really wants to have a clear understanding of what is going on and what to do [about it].” This desire for certainty came to the fore during the COVID-19 pandemic, where the simplistic mantra of “following the science” often proved problematic. As Prof. Morgan points out, “science cannot actually tell you always what to do. Science can give you insight, it can give you information, but we then need a person to bring all that information together and decide if in this context we are going to do X or Y.”
When it comes to helping people understand and accept probability and uncertainty, Prof. Morgan advocates for creative approaches rather than direct instructions. She points to the power of games and storytelling in making complex concepts accessible. “I think games are a very interesting way of enabling people to experience the theoretical concept, and that translates then into real life,” she says. She mentions the original design of the board game Monopoly, which included two different games to help players experience the difference between competitive and collaborative economic systems (though, notably enough, only the competitive version was eventually commercialised).
The impact of popular media on public understanding is another area Prof. Morgan highlights. She notes that “on the order of 80% of new commissions for TV and radio and film are in the crime genre,” which has helped create a more nuanced public understanding of forensic evidence and its capabilities and, also, its limitations.
The challenge of dealing with data and uncertainty has become even more complex in our current era of abundant information. Prof. Morgan describes how this has played out in forensic science, where technological advances have led to both opportunities and new challenges. “We have gone from a situation where you are trying to find the tiniest amount of material and get as much information out of it as possible ... to a paradigm where you can get a DNA profile from pretty much anything," she explains.
While this increased data availability has improved decision-making in certain contexts, it has also created new complications. For instance, “with current levels of [detection] sensitivity of DNA analysis, you very rarely get a single contributor profile; you often get multiple contributors and a mixed profile.” Both signal and noise have been amplified thanks to our new methodologies.
As Prof. Morgan notes, “extra data, on the one hand, has given us much better grounding to offer helpful insight, but it has also raised a whole lot of extra challenges that we now have to address.” This balance between signal and noise in data analysis points to a broader challenge in addressing complex problems. While automated machine learning approaches can handle more data than human brains, the challenge of discerning relevance remains crucial.
Morgan emphasises the importance of considering both technological and human aspects of challenges simultaneously. “I am always struck by the fact that in an awful lot of the challenges that we are looking at, there is a technological challenge and there is also a people challenge.” These are usually completely integrated and interlinked, and the traditional disciplinary focus of problem-solving would imply that we need to fix them one by one. “[First] the technology problem step by step, and then we look at the people problem. But actually looking at it as a whole at the same time is really important, but that is really challenging.”
She illustrates this through the example of sustainable fashion: “There is a technological problem in the sense that we need to have the capability to recycle fibres. But then you also have a cultural issue in that people are producing and interacting with fashion, particularly fast fashion, in particular ways.” The challenge involves not just technological solutions, but also addressing cultural and economic factors, and unless societal and market factors are addressed, even with the best technology, we will not be able to overcome the problem.
This holistic approach to problem-solving is central to the work of the Arista Institute at UCL, which Prof. Morgan co-directs with Prof. Maurice Biriotti. The institute works to bring together diverse disciplines so it can address complex challenges. It is also experimenting with innovative funding models that allow for more exploratory research.
“Instead of having a single very refined outcome in mind at the start and a clear method to follow, we start the other way and start with the topic and actually go broad to look for the synergies and tensions across a broad range of disciplines and identify the points of conjecture before we then come back to articulate new questions, test hypotheses and hopefully get to innovative and engaging solutions," she explains.
While being a “passionate advocate for problem-based research that has an impact in the real world,” Prof. Morgan is also deeply concerned about maintaining space for fundamental research alongside applied work. She points to a concerning trend identified in a 2023 Nature paper showing a decline in the amount of disruptive and transformative science.
She argues for viewing science as an ecosystem that needs diversity to thrive, using an evocative ecological metaphor: “What we [currently] often do is more akin to [planting] a field of corn or a field of wheat. Nice and neat straight lines. It’s dense, it’s flush, and we can get a combine harvester in and we can go through mulitple times a year and get the harvest and we can quantify it.” While this approach works well for certain challenges, she argues that science needs to also include approaches that are “more like a meadow with hundreds of different plants and flowers all coexisting.” This meadow might not produce such easily quantifiable results, but it provides crucial resilience.
As Prof. Morgan explains, “if and when a massive environmental disaster happens and that field of wheat is damaged ... a meadow, because it’s so diverse, has resilience and it will change, it will be different, but it will survive.” Crucially, the meadow also sustains the pollinator populations that are essential for many other commercial crop fields.
She also points to the example of Katalin Karikó, who won the Nobel Prize for her work on mRNA vaccines after decades of being underfunded and discouraged. “At the time no one would fund her. She lost her job. People kept saying stop going down this road because it is not the right way. Twenty-five years later we have got a new vaccine to a pandemic and it needed that basic research to have happened.”
These examples underscore Prof. Morgan’s argument for maintaining diversity in scientific approaches and funding models, while also finding better ways to communicate the value of this diversity to the public. The challenge of building and maintaining public trust in science requires not just better communication of scientific findings, but also better storytelling about how science works and why its different approaches – from applied research to basic exploration – all play crucial roles in addressing societal challenges. As she concludes, “We need redundancy in the system for it to thrive, [and for that] we need to create stuff that does not necessarily make sense on a spreadsheet.”