Physical anthropologist, author, broadcaster and professor of public engagement in science, Alice Roberts is a 21st-century Renaissance woman. Her face might be most familiar from Channel 4’s Time Team, or BBC2’s Coast, or one of several Horizon programmes she has presented; but she is also a qualified medical doctor, an anatomist and the author of seven popular science books, including the Wellcome prize-nominated The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being.
Like its author, her new book Tamed: 10 Species That Changed Our World weaves together many forms and disciplines: genetics, archaeology, anthropology and history combine with personal anecdote, travelogue and little pieces of fiction to create a book that is both chatty and academic, rigorously scientific and full of empathy. It describes how humans have domesticated nine species of animals and plants – from dogs, cattle and horses to rice, apples and wheat – changing the species and, in doing so, transforming our environment and ourselves. The 10th species she writes about is us. It brings evidence from ancient pottery sherds and new genetic techniques to explain, for example, how the Inca invented instant mash; how 70% of modern Europeans possess a Neanderthal gene associated with freckles; and to offer a conclusive answer to the chicken and egg debate. (Spoiler alert: the egg came first.) It spans the ancient – imagining how it felt to be the first human to ride a wild horse – and the modern, presenting the anthropology and science behind controversial topics such as climate change and GM foods. She wants to “arm people with information so that they can make their own decisions”. “I think that’s pretty crucial in public engagement generally.”
It was teaching that informed her presenting and writing, she explains. Having studied medicine at Cardiff University, she began teaching anatomy at Bristol and found it “so satisfying and fulfilling when you explain something to somebody and the penny drops”. But science and history were clearly in her bones. She has always felt at home in museums, particularly the department of Egyptology at the Bristol Museum near where she grew up, and as a little girl was delighted to discover that a pioneering Victorian Egyptologist, Amelia Edwards, was buried in her local churchyard in Henbury. She studied Latin and Greek at school, and talks excitedly now about “the poetry of technical terminology … you know, like levator labii superioris – a lovely, lovely phrase!” (It’s the name of the muscle that lifts the upper lip, of course.)
She admits that she struggled with Charles Darwin when she first tackled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, aged just 14: “It’s Victorian and it’s quite dense compared to what we would consider to be good writing, and he just goes on and on about pigeons. But there are aspects of his writing that I absolutely love, where you can see him working things out and playing with ideas.” But what’s really interesting about Darwin and science writing, she says, is how he used it to capture the public’s imagination. Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace presented their paper on the theory of evolution to the Linnean Society in 1858, but in the society’s annual summing-up, it announced that nothing very interesting had happened that year. It was only when the book was published a year later that the theory really caught on. “So it wasn’t the academic paper that made the big splash; it was the popular science book that he wrote to go with it. In terms of engaging with a wider audience, he was quite ahead of his time.”
Engaging a wider audience with scientific ideas is now part of Roberts’ raison d’être. Having worked at Bristol for 11 years – and in TV since 2001, when she made her debut as a human bone specialist on Time Team – she was made Birmingham University’s professor of public engagement in science in 2012. It seemed like a job that could “make a difference”, she thought, and nearly six years on it still gives her a glow. Part of her work is helping other academics to involve the public in their work, and she’s pleased that “we’re now getting to the point in universities where public engagement isn’t just seen as something that you do at the weekend or in the evenings, and isn’t a distraction, but is actually built in and is an expected part of your job.” Part of it is organising events, such as the Cheltenham science festival, to provide forums for interaction and dialogue between scientists and the public, and part of it is simply about being a visible science communicator in public. A real live female one, at that. To this end, she has also just embarked on a UK-wide, 23-date tour.
“Of course!” she yells when I ask if it is important to be visibly working in science as a woman. “And it’s not just women; we need diversity. Not just from a moral perspective; there’s an economic perspective as well. You’re not tapping into the widest possible pool of talent if you’re shutting some people out of particular careers.” That shutting out starts as early as school, she says. “We have plenty of young women coming into biology and medicine, but we don’t have enough coming into physics and engineering. It’s a really weird thing because, of course, all these subjects are completely neutral. So we’ve done it. It’s our culture or society which has somehow gone: ‘this is a boy’s subject’ or ‘that’s not really for me’. That’s just silly, if we put people off in that way.”
As the parent of a girl and a boy, and a scrupulous practitioner of the scientific method, Roberts is well placed to observe stereotypes in childhood and their effects. One of the Horizon programmes she presented, with Dr Michael Mosley in 2014, was called Is Your Brain Male or Female? To which the answer, she laughs, “is obviously no!” In it, she replicated larger scale experiments, some of which showed that “parents are pushing boys more, or encouraging them to take more risks, while saying to girls, ‘No, you might not be able to do this’”. She remembers, on another occasion, being “angry on Twitter”, alongside the physicist Helen Czerski, about “some weird article where somebody had suggested that girls might be more interested in maths if you used more examples of shopping and cooking. She was frustrated when some comments she made about the segregation along gender lines of children’s toys were misrepresented as her blaming Lego for the lack of women in science. As a scientist she would never state a position with such a lack of nuance, and she often stops and asks herself if what she’s just said is scientifically accurate. But yes, she says, she does find it “frustrating” when toys and clothes aimed at children are limiting their ambitions.
In person and in her writing, Roberts does not shy away from tackling controversial topics. Her Twitter profile says: “All views my own & I assert my right to share them”, but in her book she tries hard to stick to evidence, not views. She investigates GM food, intensive farming and climate change, for instance, explaining the history of the scientific techniques involved and investigating the public’s suspicion of them. Difficult decisions have to be made, she writes – not by scientists in labs and politicians in chambers, but in conjunction with farmers and consumers all over the world. “What I’ve tried to say in the book is: ‘I don’t think I’ve got all the answers to this and I think it’s something that needs to be worked out in dialogue.’ It can’t be one person saying: ‘I know the way to do this.’ It’s about communication and people understanding enough so they can be involved in that decision-making process. So, what I’ve tried to do is present the evidence.”
If that makes the book sound dry or didactic, it is not. Each chapter explains the evolution of a particular species, using evidence from the fossil record and neat summaries of mind-boggling cutting-edge technology. Roberts is clearly thrilled by the revelations that new techniques can offer. (At one point in our interview, she switches mid-sentence from talking about mitochondrial DNA in apples to telling me how early humans “interbred with all these other species in a completely randy way – wherever we’ve gone we’ve just basically shagged everything that was shaggable, it’s amazing”.) But she also thinks empathetically as well. Humans ate rice because it was high in energy and drought-resistant, the evidence shows. But people ate rice because they were cold, it was tasty and they’d had a long, hard day chasing wild boar around ancient China. Scientists believe that wolves were domesticated to help with the hunt and protect the camp, but Roberts suspects that the age-old love affair between children and puppies had something to do with it, too. She scoffs at the idea that humans set out to forge our own destiny as part of some grand strategy, and speculates that thrill-seeking teenagers were the first to dare each other to jump on a wild horse and ride it. “Not the head of the tribe going: ‘Right everybody, what I’ve decided to do is, those big creatures over there, we’re going to get them.’”
Roberts has just finished filming another series of Digging for Britain (which will be broadcast by BBC4 in December), and credits archaeology – “being able to actually touch objects that people interacted with hundreds of thousands of years ago” – with helping her to imagine what those other lives were like. She also thinks that her medical training enabled her to eliminate the imaginary disconnect between science and emotion. Anatomy training has to teach doctors to objectify the human body to the point where they can stick a knife in it, she points out. “But then you have to come full circle, so that you’re not thinking you’re interacting with a gall bladder. You’re not, you’re interacting with an entire person, with all their emotions and concerns and worries.”
Her books seem to achieve a similar process. “I don’t know if in science we try to avoid that: we think if we get emotive, we become less objective. But I think you can strip the emotion and the subjectivity away while you focus on doing the science – and that’s really important. The scientific method is about trying to remove our own bias and subjectivity, and be as objective as possible. But then you can put it back into context and you’re allowed to be emotional and human about the way you engage with it.” The result is a book that is passionate about the subject while being critically dispassionate about the research.
In global politics recently, the losers have begun to realise that while they may have had the facts, the winning side was the one that told the most convincing stories. Perhaps scientists ought to do the same if the public is to understand complicated subjects such as GM crops, vaccination and climate change. The role of the talented science communicator is more important than ever, and Professor Roberts seems just the woman for the job.
