Angela Saini – Four Way Interview

Angela Saini is an award-winning independent journalist based in London, and the author of Geek Nation, a journey through India, to find out whether the country is set to become the world’s next scientific superpower. She has written for New Scientist, Science, Wired and The Economist, and she’s a regular reporter on BBC radio science shows, including Digital Planet. Her first book is Geek Nation.

Why Science?

I’ve always loved reading about big scientific ideas in fields like quantum physics and genetics, but when I think about it, I’m not so much a science-lover as an engineering-lover. I used to build model rockets when I was at school, I’ve always been a bit of a tinkerer (I do all the DIY at home!), and of course I studied Engineering at university. I like to see science applied in the real world, in architecture, electronics and other inventions, and observing the kind of repercussions these things have on our lives.

Why this book?

Since I’m a (British) Indian geek myself and I’ve lived in India twice, in hindsight it feels inevitable that I would end up writing something like Geek Nation. The book stemmed from a trip I made to Mumbai in 2009 while I was writing a piece about lie detectors for Wired UK magazine. It seemed to me as though the country had turned a scientific corner since the last time I was there, in 2004. There was so much exciting research happening, the government was making a huge commitment to ramp up science spending, and the tech boom was finally giving way to real innovations.

What’s next?

I’m going to the United States in March to give a talk at Google about Geek Nation, and then in April I’m doing a mega five-city book tour of India, courtesy of my Indian publishers, Hachette. I’m keen to find out what actual Indian geeks think about the book! But in the longer-term I’m looking forward to discovering whether India really does live up to its scientific promise.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

Just recently I was introduced to the wonderful sounds of the Intercontinental Music Lab, a collective of musicians based all over the world, who use science as their inspiration. To my delight they’ve kindly agreed to let me use their song, Dr Robotnik, as the soundtrack to Geek Nation. So readers in India will soon be seeing a trailer in bookshops with this awesome tune!

Photo by Blue Turtle Photography, reproduced with permission of copyright holder

Comments

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...

Beyond Belief - Helen Pearson *****

Apparently it comes as a surprise to many that medicine was not particularly scientific until the end of the twentieth century (to be honest, it's no surprise to me - we had a GP who used homeopathy in the 90s). Instead it was based on anecdotal guidance - the kind of thing that appeared to work. Evidence-based medicine has since improved the field, trying where possible to base decisions on evidence, ideally based on randomised controlled trials. The first part of Helen Pearson's book covers this well - though I think it's by far the least interesting part of what we discover. Instead what's truly fascinating is the rest of it, looking at a wide range of other fields where evidence was rarely properly used and that are only now starting to dip a toe in the water. These include social policy, policing, conservation, business and education. The main part of the book gives us examples of how bad these areas have been in terms of basing decisions on what's always been ...

In Seach of Sea Dragons - Matthew Myerscough ****

It's common advice to would-be authors of narrative non-fiction to open with something dramatic - Matthew Myerscough certainly does this with the story of his being trapped under an avalanche on Snowdon (while his girlfriend, also carried away remains on top of the snow unhurt). It certainly is dramatic, but seemed entirely disconnected from the reason I got the book, which was to read about fossil collecting. Luckily, though, in the second chapter we get into a more conventional 'how I got interested in fossils as a boy'. Having recently reviewed Patrick Moore's autobiography and noting that astronomy was one of the few sciences where amateurs can still make a contribution, it came to mind that palaeontology is another - Myerscough is a civil engineer by trade, but just as amateur astronomers can find new details in the skies, so amateur fossil hunters have been searching for these relics for centuries. When I give talks in junior schools, the two topics that guarant...

Search This Blog