What have the noughties done for science?

Watch Susan Watts' Noughties and science film in full

By Susan Watts
BBC Newsnight Science Editor

The deputy head was still trying to shout to me about his school's values as the band struck up with a shrill whistle.

Local dignitaries and former staff started jiggling to the music. But most surprising perhaps was that all this razzmatazz was to celebrate the opening of a new science wing.

People who offer to scan your genome and offer to tell you what your medical condition is likely to be - this is almost entirely rubbish at the moment Nobel prize laureate Sir John Sulston

What an eye opener to see the whole of the Sawston Village College near Cambridge so excited about science.

Their guest of honour, the Nobel prize-winning scientist Sir John Sulston, sent his own children here, and we were there to ask him what he thinks the past decade has done for science.

And here was one answer right in front of our eyes. An impressive new building, sparkling equipment, and children involved, excitedly, in science experiments.

For the time being there is more money for science at the end of this first decade of the 21st Century, and a feeling of cautious confidence too.

The children were surrounded by old science lab favourites - the small "pop" of an explosion as they slid a burning splint into a test tube of hydrogen, and more modern additions too - jelly babies on cocktail sticks, wedged across tubes of liquorice - a visual aid for students learning about the double-helix structure of the DNA molecule.

'Astonishing scientific endeavour'

It was Sir John who led the UK's contribution to the Human Genome project, which produced a read out of the DNA code that makes a human a human.

The Hubble Space Telescope has revolutionised astronomy

The international project opened a decade some thought might not get started at all.

The Millennium Bug was set to strike at the heart of our electronic-dependent world. It did not, the machines were okay.

What began instead was a decade of astonishing scientific endeavour. Stem cells held out the promise of rejuvenation, fertility techniques allowed us to screen out disease and think about shaping our own evolution.

The Hubble Space Telescope looked out to the edge of the Universe and far back in time, and we wondered about intelligent life elsewhere as we found more and more planets around other stars.

The Large Hadron Collider tried to tell us more about how it all began, until it broke.

Revolutionising medicine?

I asked Sir John how significant a moment it was when the working draft of the Human Genome was announced at the start of the decade.

President Clinton announced the first draft of the human genome in 2000

"I think philosophically very significant because the idea of a species evolving from a 4.5 billion year process now being able to read its own DNA… I don't believe that's happened before. It epitomises our strength as an intelligent, thinking and transcendently thinking organism."

But a lot of promises were made back then, about revolutionising medicine.

"Inevitably in the excitement, all sorts of examples were given - that this would be important in medicine, and so on. But I always contended the most important part was the foundational aspect, knowing our genome, and knowing lots of other genomes… and comparisons between all those is the most powerful tool."

Sir John warned though about taking short cuts.

"The whole thing is being oversold by some. For example people who offer to scan your genome and offer to tell you what your medical condition is likely to be - this is almost entirely rubbish at the moment. Understanding which genes are involved in which processes, to build up the entire network of genetic pathways that make a human being is a multi-decade long job".

He worries that the decade has seen what he calls a "channelling" effect - with researchers asked to focus on work with an obvious ability to create immediate profit.

"Now there's no harm in that in a sense it's a win-win situation: do good science, get lots of profit. But if you neglect all sorts of other areas, and particularly neglect the future then we're in trouble. It's very important... to fund research which doesn't have any immediate utility necessarily, but looks as though it may be important in the future."

The importance of education

Sir John told me about what he had said to the children of Sawston College earlier that day.

"I was saying that I personally had found tremendous excitement and joy in science. I recalled how excited I was learning about things at school. And then I talked about how some of them would make basic discoveries which would change our understanding of everything, how some of them would make things which would make society better."

I am sure that hearing from a Nobel prize winner would help to drive the students to great heights of ambition. But I suspect their enthusiasm can be traced just as firmly to the energy of the team of science teachers at their school.

Given the problems their generation will face - such as finding enough food and clean energy for a growing population - science education will need to be perceived as being not just for scientists, but for everybody.

That way more people will understand something of the nature of relative risks, and about the power and limitations of science in future decades.