Geographer contributes to debate on the new Longitude Prize
Published on Wed 21 May 2014
.png "political-science_(2).png")
Longitude prize 2014: a poor replacement for political action
Geography's Jon Mendel in the Guardian 21 May:
When it comes to dealing with global challenges, we should be holding our government to account, not seduced by hopes that science will solve our problems.
The UK government’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has proudly announced the new Longitude prize and minister David Willetts states that “this prize will challenge scientists to tackle one of today’s greatest scientific problems”.
Longitude 2014 “is a challenge with a £10m prize fund to help solve one of the greatest issues of our time”, and follows from David Cameron’s 2013 announcement of a “grand innovation challenge”. Longitude’s six challenges are certainly important and the prize committee includes lots of people who’ve done excellent work. However, it’s wrong to present these challenges as scientific or technical issues – most need social and political change if they’re ever going to be resolved. I’ll go through the food, water, dementia and paralysis challenges, explain why Longitude 2014 is a bad way to address them, and end by posing a political challenge of my own.