What's happened, of course, is that the age of enlightenment has been dimmed, shall we say, the age of reason and evidence which caused the flowering of science. When you have 40% of the American population believing in homeopathy or intelligent design, or anything, and thinking that anything goes, that any opinion has equal weight to any other…we had a profound change in attitudes in countries like the US and of course there's quite a lot of it here, and I'm sure there's plenty of it in Australia as well.
So the age of enlightenment, if not dead, is greatly dimmed. And if you have that, then you really are in trouble, and I remember when I was still the high steward of Cambridge sitting on a little committee with the then vice-chancellor Alison Richard, looking at the salaries of the non-clinical professors. That was the final port of call. They really re-did all the salaries there. And I noticed in the top category there were very few non-scientists, and so as a scientist I felt I should speak up on behalf of my non-scientist friends and I asked why there were so few. And Alison Richard said, 'Well, I'm afraid arts and humanities people have drunk too deeply of the well of this attitude and we have to wait for a generation to pass before we can get them up to speed again.'
— Bridget Ogilvie
