Lisa Jardine gave this year's C.P. Snow Lecture, 50 years after Snow's influential 1959 lecture entitled  The Two Cultures.

"Fifty years on, Snow’s ominous prophecy of a governing class lacking the competence to make informed policy choices where science and technology are concerned continue to reverberate. In recent debates about GM crops, nuclear energy and climate change, politicians and the public have shown themselves liable to be swayed by the most persuasive of advisers or interest groups, unable to judge for themselves either the soundness of the scientific data or the scientific arguments."

An abridged version of Professor Jardine's lecture.