Tony Blair gets science

Just in case you missed it, the Prime Minister of the UK has gone all science on us. The evidence is in the speech Our Nation's Future - Science he delivered last week to "the Royal Society in Oxford".

There was even a sideswipe at the media in there. (Now there's a surprise.) But it wasn't at the science media so much as the rest of the pack who "may demand certainty" that "any new technology is 'absolutely safe'" as the PM put it, before adding that "science cannot provide" that guarantee and "we should not pretend it can".

He even plugged a couple of science books. "We have seen recently some excellent popular books - Steve Jones, Richard Dawkins, Steven Hawking, Bill Bryson, whose A Short History Of Nearly Everything sold over two million copies and which was sent to every secondary school. The BBC and the Open University have some excellent science services." Wonder why he didn't mention any science writers.