1Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent has broad interests. In this article, I want to engage with two themes in her career: museums and the historical shift from “popular science” to the “popularisation of science”. Her work inspires us to advance, linking together understanding of public attitudes to science, museology, and broader talk about science in society. Recognising Bensaude-Vincent’s wide geographical interests, the emphasis of the case-studies will be British, but they will have messages with much broader implications.

2In the mid-1980s Bensaude-Vincent joined the teams planning galleries at the Cité des sciences et de l’industrie at La Villette. She was for instance deeply engaged with an exhibition on plastics, and was interested in comparable displays, for instance the new gallery at the Science Museum in London. Subsequently she published widely on popularisation, including the volume she edited with Anne Rasmussen, La science populaire dans la presse et l’édition xix^e et xx^e siècles and her own book L’opinion publique et la science: À chacun son ignorance.1 She reflected here on the twentieth-century shift from treating the public as adult, if deficient in specialist knowledge, to ignorant, and needing dilute knowledge. She has also sought to reverse such trends through other ways. From 2007 to 2013 she chaired the Vivagora organisation dedicated to active citizenship in emerging technologies.

3In her work dismantling the concept of “popularisation”, Bensaude-Vincent was at the leading edge of a distinguished tide. In England, Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumphrey examined the public appeal of phrenology and Jim Secord explored the public engagement with evolutionary thought before Darwin and the more general issues raised by the detailed examination of the publication processes of nineteenth-century science.2 It was a time, too, of changing methods of science governance. Early in the twenty-first century, ambitions for nanotechnology on behalf of scientists and politicians followed the public anxieties over genetically modified crops. Participation, citizen juries, consensus conferences, and new conceptions of the public as stakeholders replaced the image of laypeople as the passive and grateful objects of popularisation.

4In the 1980s the museum world was exciting. The “new museology” was more concerned than ever before with engaging visitors’ interests, concerns and needs.3 Much the attention was being paid to an emphasis on education and the social role of institutions, and rather less on the content of the stories they told. Yet those narratives did need detailed attention. At a time when multiple scientific issues were of urgent importance to laypeople, too often science museums appeared to be treating their topics as if they were the output of civilisations that while important were also exotic and remote. Science and technology were like medicine: of given and incomprehensible content that was probably horrible to taste but could be superficially sweetened. Visitors were urged, and helped, to press their heads against the display cases to learn but rarely to experience real empathy.

5That distance between the culture of the layperson and the content of the science was often unnecessary. While laypeople may be poorly equipped with knowledge of science, they are strongly armed with opinions about science. I emphasize “about”, for thinking “about” science is widely shared—even if engaging in science is generally professionalised, and for many seems not to be for them. By taking account of those thinking about science as well as those engaging in science, exhibitions can engage with their visitors through their stories. So, contrary to the conception of the public as “ignorant” and awaiting an easily digestible simple version of science, the museum presenter needs to engage with audiences already richly endowed with current news and ways of interpreting it, and with inherited assumptions about science and its producers. While visitors certainly bring curiosity, they bring much else and the ambition of “popularisation” seems curiously obsolete. As long ago as the 1940s, the American geographer John Kirtland Wright deployed the term “geosophy” to describe “the study of the world as people conceive of and imagine it.”4

6The implications of Wright’s thinking were brought to the British museum world by the geographer and museum-lover David Lowenthal.5 Shaped early in his career by engagement with French geographers such as Jean Gottmann and André Siegfried immediately after Liberation, he had later been profoundly affected by the experience of working with Wright at the American Geographical Society. He came to London as Professor at University College London, and even after retirement from there, he published his classic The Past is a Foreign Country and ran an influential and long-running seminar on “Uses of the Past.”6 In a 1989 article which grew out of the seminar, Lowenthal emphasised the role of memory as a means for many lay people to construct their models of the past. He wrote: “collective past is apprehended as a personal and deeply felt extension of the present, and the events and viewpoints of bygone times are seen and judged in today’s perspectives.”7 A sociable and amiable colleague, Lowenthal was to be seen at functions across the British museum world. With his encouragement, we may imagine an equivalent of Wright’s ambition, applied to science as a whole, not to celebrate such history, but to understand it.8

7It was therefore becoming clear that museum scholars, committed to an understanding of their fields but also to an engagement with audiences, needed to focus upon the knowledge, assumptions, concerns and culture of the visitors when framing their narratives. Audiences bring complex resources into the science museum. These can be classified, as firstly, rules of thumb about whom—institutions, information sources and individual people—they can trust. Secondly, visitors bring scepticism about the information which bombards them, wondering which of the facts, arguments, conclusions, and stories they hear should be believed. And thirdly, of course, many people experience the emotional responses of awe and fear at the power of science. Thus, the majority of respondents in the EU agree that “science makes our ways of life change too fast.”9 We can see such resources being mobilised most recently in such issues as the experience of climate change, and, recently, the benefits of Covid vaccines. In the case of climate change, a significant proportion of Europeans, about one quarter, believe it is “for the most part the result of natural cycles and not human activity.”10 As for the vaccines against Covid, ambivalence hit the headlines. When the polling company Kantar investigated European attitudes to Covid vaccination in November 2020 they found significant scepticism across the continent. At that time only 21% of French people said they would “definitely” take the vaccine, while 30% agreed to “probably”. In the US the figures were 30% (definitely) and 36% (probably) with 11% there declaring “definitely not”. Kantar found, they reported: “Trust in government also appears to be a factor in vaccine hesitancy. Germans trust their government the most—but even there, only one in three say they trust their government ‘a lot’ to ‘make the right decisions about making a vaccine available’. France again has the lowest trust level.”11

8Certainly, questions of trust, belief and the power of science are associated with climate change and Covid vaccines, but they are not unique to these issues. Bensaude-Vincent herself described worries around nanotechnologies in Grenoble in 2006, “risk and toxicity, social responsibility in case of disaster, issues of liberty and privacy”, and finally anxieties about “nanotechnology for what and for whom?”12 She summarised the arguments of the activists who saw their city as test-bed for what they called necrotechnologies, “including all homicide (civilian and military) technologies which for a century have burgeoned in the Grenoble area: electrochemistry for combat gas, nuclear technology and now nanobiotechnology.”13 Such scepticism about the trustworthiness of the promoters of science and technology is not the reserve of a tiny number of pessimists. A Eurobarometer poll conducted in mid-2021 found that one quarter of respondents believed that “The cure for cancer exists but is hidden from the public by commercial interests.”14 In half the member states of the European Union a majority of respondents did not believe it is false to say, “Viruses have been produced in government laboratories to control our freedom.” Kearnes and Wynne have noted how “public ambivalence” has now become “the problem.” They suggest, however, that such ambivalence can be seen as “an engaged—rather than passive—mode of relating to technological determinism.”15 This approach, taking ambivalence as a real phenomenon, is important to museums if such institutions are to engage with public opinions about science. They need to start with the nature of popular culture as it is. Beyond purveying the facts of the natural world to a wider hitherto uninformed audience, the Museum needs to think of itself engaging with trust, beliefs, and responses to the power of science, to help the visitor to think and to enjoy.

9A focus upon trust, belief and power raises a host of issues rather different from those traditional in the history of science. For the museum, it also highlights different objects. So, for instance, the issue of pregnancy testing, the topic of just twelve articles in the ISIS cumulative bibliography, is an everyday issue of high importance both to individuals and to the observer interested in perception of science. For thousands of years, people relied on culturally-mediated and trusted traditional methods of confirming pregnancy. In the 1930s scientists offered the evidence of animals such as immature rats and mice, rabbits, bitterling fish and xenopus toads. They may have been monitoring the physiological changes caused by gonadotrophins, however the user was taking on trust information whose implications would change their lives. There was nothing commonsense about the relationship between the length of the ovipositor on a bitterling, or the ovulation of a clawed toad, and a woman’s pregnancy.16 The link, of course, is trust in the guidance of science. The visitor looking at preserved bitterlings may reflect on the transitory nature of what evidence we are asked to trust, but also continuities in that trust.

Specimen jar containing three female Japanese Bitterlings, 1930–1980

10There have also been apparent discontinuities in what we are asked to believe, whether it is eugenics, evolution, Newtonian physics or the efficacy of covid vaccines. How the public came, in the past, to share certain beliefs supported by science, but not others, is an important issue. The British doctor Cecil Helman has written brilliantly about popular concepts of illnesses and how to treat them which he encountered as a general practitioner.17 The widespread belief in creationism in the United States is another obvious issue. For a wonderful satire of beliefs about science, there is little to outdo the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles with its treatment of Noah’s Ark.

11There are naturally many points of departure. Some are the issues in the news, which we all share, such as Covid, climate change and artificial intelligence. In this article, however, I want to suggest an alternative to the quick-changing news agenda and to understand citizens’ thinking about science itself. The common use of such terms as “innovation”, “technology”, “technique”, “techno-science”, “applied science”, and “pure science” reminds the observer of the importance of the categories by which science is talked about. Such categories are themselves neither scientific nor neutral. They are concepts forged in the public sphere, with connotations that have accumulated over two centuries and vary from country to country and between national discourses. Of course, scholarly studies have reviewed their nature and optimisation. Reports on the promotion of innovation are a literary genre in themselves but they do not exist in political or cultural isolation. Moreover, as Bensaude-Vincent has pointed out, the co-construction of individual policies on particular technologies is an ambitious challenge in a democracy. Government policies on the role and budget of science, the economic potential of innovation and the diverse resources needed to exploit science are matters of national politics. They are the products of distinctively local cultures. While the European Union has moved into supporting basic science through the European Research Council only in recent years, earlier it showed with the series of Framework programs that it felt, on the contrary, technology was its responsibility in what was felt to be a new age. The Euratom program which preceded them was itself a response to talk of a Second Industrial Revolution. At the Messina conference of 1955, foreign ministers commissioning Paul Henri Spaak to make a plan resolved: “Le développement de l’énergie atomique à des fins pacifiques ouvrira à brève échéance la perspective d’une nouvelle révolution industrielle sans commune mesure avec celle des cent dernières années.”18 It might indeed be worthwhile researching further the conception of science and technology expressed by the Framework programs and the EU today.

12The most recent of these categories is “techno-science”, a term coined by the Belgian philosopher Gilbert Hottois late in the 1970s and popularised by Bruno Latour.19 This term came to be used to describe kinds of knowledge, practitioners and indeed entire societies. The rich literature on the German language term “Technik” is still distinctive in its meaning with no exact English language translation. I leave it to the French reader to decide whether “Technique” has exactly the same connotation.

13The English term “applied science” also has got its own culturally specific trajectory. Bensaude-Vincent has shown that there is no stable French equivalent.20 I would suggest that is because in Britain applied science has acquired its significance from the popularity of a distinctive political economy. More than the administrations of many European countries, British governments for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries resisted direct intervention in the market. They did however seek to support national industries. The solution, time and time again, was to support a certain kind of science seen to be useful enough to be a national asset but not so close to market, as to constitute meddling. In the nineteenth century that support was through the support of education. The method was to reward teachers whose students did well in examinations established by the Department of Science and Art. Those examinations would be in subjects which did not constitute trades or arts in themselves. In terms of proprietary knowledge, what we would today call “Intellectual Property Rights”, applied science was safe. Over time the Department became more daring. It started with such topics as “chemistry” and by the end of the century was examining, and rewarding teachers for teaching such topics as metallurgy. There was a separate category of “technology”, closer to the market and to such practical activities as paper-making. These sensitivities were carried over into the support for research emerging early in the twentieth century. It proved much easier politically for British governments to support the practice of scientific research, even applied research, than for administrations to intervene in the working of the market-place.

14Innumerable small decisions added up to a macro-development. An event during World War One provided a dramatic demonstration of the role of such politics in action. At the beginning of the conflict, a government department designed and built many of Britain’s aircraft at the Royal Aircraft Factory. However, when German planes proved superior as fighters and British pilots were shot down, there was a press outcry. Incompetent civil servants had stood in the way of private industry was the newspapers’ claim. The Royal Aircraft Factory stopped manufacturing warplanes but was reserved for applied research, under the new name of Royal Aircraft Establishment. The relationship between research and manufacturing was therefore defined, as the relationship between government and industry was being negotiated.

15In the 1960s, under the rule of a socialist government, the support of scientific research was seen to be too restrictive a prescription for prosperity, and the role of government was now to intervene in the market. At a time being described as a second industrial revolution, Britain’s experience of the first Industrial Revolution provided a warning. Wealth had been made but at a terrible price. This time, things had to be done better. The category of “Technology” with its broader connotation and interventionist implication, rather than applied science, would be the horse to back. A powerful “Ministry of Technology” was therefore founded, and scientific research bodies were warned that the era of high exponential growth was coming to an end. However, that movement too passed. At the beginning of the 2020s when manufacturing industry across Europe had become an ever-smaller part of GNP, and intervention was again out of favour, in Britain, the Conservative government announced its aspirations to make the country a “science super-power”, with the belief of assuring “prosperity and competitiveness in the digital age.”21

16There is of course no “right and wrong” evaluation of such categories. It is however reasonably debatable among all citizens which is the most appropriate for the conditions they are experiencing in the present day. Museums can use their resources of real things, their historic objects, to show visitors that these categories are not given but are constantly being reconstructed by people like themselves, by politicians, journalists and scientists. Of course, these categories might vary not just between nations but also between industries. What works best for the pharmaceutical industry may not be the same as the most appropriate category for car manufacture. In an era of service industries, it may be worth exploring too what the most appropriate categories for them are. In the 1930s, there was talk of adding social sciences to the subjects suitable for application as “applied science”. The idea never really caught on in English, and for instance “eugenics”, though widely discussed, was not amalgamated, in Britain at least, with talk of applied science.

17The particular topics of public concern seem ephemeral. Nanotechnology was a major concern of the early twenty-first century but faded from view early in the second decade. The issues of trust, belief and power are, however, enduring. Belief in the reality of such categories as applied science is widely shared. Scholars and specialists in museums need to address these issues for the sake of communicating with their visitors. Historically, scholarly museum curators felt that the communication of contemporary academic scholarship to a wide audience was their responsibility. Designers and educationalists were expected to make the objects and knowledge attractive. This article and Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent’s recent volume Les Sciences dans la mêlée have, however, suggested that it is not sufficient for the scholar to present scientific and historical facts, however appealingly.22 The study of popular thinking about science informs not just museums and thus has an indirect benefit for public discourse. It helps, too, such engaged intellectuals as Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent to play their part in developing the public discourse.