Professor Fowler: Don’t forget the blue sky stuff

A highlight of last night’s Science Honours Dinner in Wellington was a speech by Professor Mary Fowler. the great grand daughter of our most famous scientist Ernest Rutherford.

While the scientific Pandora’s box of the last century was the atomic energy Rutherford had a hand in discovering, Fowler said the big scientific issues of this century would be climate change and modifying biology (ie: genetic modification). There’s also a great old recording of Rutherford’s mentor JJ Thomson.

Fowler’s message to the scientific community and the Government funders of science – don’t let funding of blue sky science projects slip in these harder economic times. It was that type of research after all that won Rutherford the Nobel and led to such important scientific discoveries.

Clcik below to listen.

[audio:https://www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz/wp-content/upload/2008/11/mary-fowler.mp3]