Angela Saini - Four Way Interview

Angela Saini presents science programmes on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service, and her writing has appeared all over the world, including New Scientist, the Guardian, Science, Wired and the Economist. Angela has a Masters in Engineering from Oxford University and has won a string of awards, including the ABSW Best News Story and the AAAS Gold Prize for radio. Her most recent book is Inferior: how science got women wrong, and the new research that's rewriting the story.

Why science?

I didn't think it would be necessary to write a book about how science can get things wrong but, surprisingly, it is. Social scientists have understood for ages that we need to be careful when we think about data and evidence to place it in context. It's strange that the public still so commonly believe that we should take published scientific papers as 'the truth' simply because scientists wrote them.

Why this book?

I only wanted to understand myself better. We get so much conflicting information in the press about the differences between women and men, and I wanted to sift the fact from the fiction, the hype from the more sober, reliable research. The truth is, the picture that science has painted of women is deeply flawed for many reasons - prejudice, bias, laziness, and a lack of humility on the part of some male scientists. My hope is that Inferior will help people think about science more critically and understand how the process works.

What’s next?

I'm making a few radio documentaries for the BBC World Service at the moment, and travelling the country giving talks about Inferior. I'd love to get started on another book, but I'm taking a break from heavy duty writing for now.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

I have a stack of books that I haven't had time to read, so I'm looking forward to diving into them this summer. They include Homo Deus, Why I No Longer Talk to White People About Race, and The Kingdom of Women. These are interesting political times, and although it's easy to be pessimistic about the state of the world, it's certainly fascinating to watch debates unfold about the kind of societies we want to live in.

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Four Way Interview - Tom Cabot

Tom Cabot is a London-based book editor and designer with a background in experimental psychology, natural science and graphic design. He founded the London-based packaging company, Ketchup, and has produced and illustrated many books for the British Film Institute, Penguin and the Royal Institute of British Architects. Tom has held a lifelong passion to explain science graphically and inclusively ... ever since being blown away by Ray and Charles Eames’ Powers of Ten at an early age. His first book is Eureka, an infographic guide to science.

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I ought to say straight away that A Tale of Seven Scientists sits somewhere on the cusp between popular science and a heavy duty academic title. For reasons that will become clear, I could only give it three stars if rating it as popular science, but it deserves more if we don't worry too much about it being widely accessible.

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