Interview with Alun Anderson - Editor-in-Chief of New Scientist magazine

by Simon Kirk (student, Politics and North American Studies)

Simon met Sussex graduate Alun Anderson at the New Scientist head offices in London in May 2003.

Where did you grow up?
I grew up in North Wales, not far from Snowdonia, so my childhood was mainly about walking in mountains and sailing.

Is that where you got interested in nature?
Yes, I did to some degree, but actually I chose to go to Sussex because I drew on a map the universities that were furthest from where I lived and there was Sussex, Exeter, and Leeds, and I applied to those three. Sussex was the one I really wanted to go to. At that time it was really heavily into these inter-disciplinary courses. I was very lucky because I got into my first choice.

Why particularly did you want to go the university furthest away from your home?
I just wanted to get right away from home at the time. "How far can I go?". It's not that I didn't like Wales, it's just that if you're brought up in small time Wales, you dream of going somewhere really, really different. But actually I didn't really want to go to somewhere like London because that was a bit threatening to me at that time. At that time, Sussex was very trendy, so it was a fashionable place to go to.

I was there for the first year of the School of Biological Sciences and it was a complete shambles. It was run by John Maynard Smith. He was my personal tutor, which was one of the luckiest breaks I've had in my life because he is an absolute genius. I left Sussex in 1968, but I have never lost touch with him - a couple of years ago at the Edinburgh Science Festival, I hosted a talk that he gave, and that was so John Maynard Smith. He gave this great talk, then afterwards I went out for a few drinks with him - he's very happy after a few drinks - and then he couldn't remember where his hotel was because he's quite old! Even though this was a few years ago, he was still about eighty. So I was walking around with him, and he was saying [Anderson points vaguely in the air], "Yes, I think it looked more kind of like that kind of hotel". Eventually we found it. The mad absent-minded professor. So I was really lucky, this guy has been an inspiration to me all my life, and I know that only a few students are lucky enough to get a teacher who is also an inspiration - there aren't that many of them around.

So you arrived in Brighton, did you live on campus?
No, because in those days there were no halls of residence on campus. They were built while I was there. So I lived in a bed-and-breakfast in the heart of Brighton in the first year, and then I moved into a small house near the station.

How was the whole Bed-and-Breakfast shindig?
It was really weird because you shared a room, and there were a lot of you crammed in. Everyone was, of course, fresh from school. The people running the Bed-and-Breakfast were used to the kind of clientele that comes down to Brighton for a dirty weekend. The guy who ran it was always drunk and he had a woman who was sort of semi living-in. She would sort of stagger round our bedrooms late at night and make sure we were all tucked in to bed, reeking of gin. It was quite bizarre.

Coming from small time Wales that must have been an adjustment.
Yeah, it was really weird, really weird. But the other nice thing is that there tended to be lots of parties - because it was in the central area of Brighton, it was really easy to throw a party. I don't know what it like in halls of residence, but I've always felt like parties in a hall of residence can't really be quite the same. People had flats and rooms, so things would be fairly wild. And also, it was a fairly interesting time being the Sixties because it was just when marijuana appeared - everybody appeared smoking dope, so towards the close of my Sussex time, nobody drank anything, they were all just stoned out of their minds the whole time. Even quite a few of the lecturers and so on, because it was the sixties - they all got into it to. So it was fairly wild. It was when both the pill and dope appeared so it was a very big change in our lifestyles.

Did you spend a lot of time partying, or did you work hard?
Well it was a really strange thing, because the course was so disorganised that when it came to the examinations in the final year, they decided to write off all results from the first two years of our course because they accepted that much of it had been too disorganised to make any sense of what had happened. So, I worked very hard in my final year to get things together. Things that were really disorganised were things like lab-work because they were kind of building things as we went and they hadn't got a lot of stuff together. It was a great atmosphere and we learnt a lot, it was just that they were constructing the buildings as we were there, and making the courses. But we were the first ever students to do that course. I think that's possibly why we are quite remembered. If I go back there, even now, there are two or three people that remember me. I think that's because we were the first ones! The first hopeless lot.

Considering your accommodation was a bed and breakfast, your buildings weren't constructed, and your course not structured, did you ever regret going to Sussex?
No, I think it was really great. My brother went to Oxford one year ahead of me, and I think he had a shit time. Of course what you get exposed to there, especially in the Sixties, is a lot of old money - highly public school people. Whereas Sussex was totally…your background didn't matter. There were some famous people - the Jay twins were the famous ones - they were the ultra fashionable, mini-skirted, daughters of a politician, but there was no feeling of that public school divide, money and the rest of it. It really did live up to its dream of being a new university. I don't think that's true anymore, possibly, but at that time it certainly did.

Was that public school divide something that people were very conscious in those days?
Yes, very. I think people who went to Oxford - they became quite envious of people who went to Eton and who had this natural sense of... that's why I'm glad I didn't go to Oxbridge because I think Oxbridge can really fuck you up. It was only much later that I did go to Oxford and I went as a researcher and that was different.

What happened immediately after you left Sussex?
I went to Edinburgh and did a PhD, then went to Oxford and did a Post-Doc, and then went to Japan and did another Post-Doc - so in fact I was still an academic, sort of, in 1980 when I had reached the grand age of thirty-two. Until thirty-two I was considered a career scientist. At that age I completely switched to journalism. The reason I did that was because I had had a post-doctoral at the university of Kyoto in Japan, frankly because I'd always wanted to go to the Far East. When I came back there were no jobs, it was the Thatcher era, there were all sorts of cuts, and there was no money for anything in science and I couldn't immediately get a Post-Doctoral job, so I got a job at Nature, the science journal, running one section which was a hell of a lucky break to get as my first job. I found that I enjoyed science journalism much more than I did science.

So I worked at Nature for ten years, first in Britain then in Japan, I opened Nature's office in Japan and ran that for a few years. Then I ran the American operation in Washington. Then I moved to the competitor Science and then ten years ago I became Editor of New Scientist. The change [from scientist to science journalist] was because there were severe cuts under Thatcher, and no money. A few years ago I actually met Margaret Thatcher. I said to her that I had started off as a scientist and that I had changed jobs, and how I much more enjoyed being a journalist and that it had been a great break, and I told her, "I changed job because you cut all those university funds". She tapped me on the chest and said [speaking in posh accent], "dear boy, I never made any cuts, but I do know what's best for you". I said, "I get it, you're both right and right".

So Thatcher saved you!
Yeah, it was lucky because otherwise I'd be on a crap salary at some second rate university somewhere! But I was also lucky to be able to go into journalism because of something that goes back to Sussex. The whole spirit of Sussex was that the Arts had to do one Science project. So you had to do three months and do a dissertation that was wholly unconnected to the sciences. This was great! So I spent most of that time either living or commuting up to Sussex, and wrote a paper on Chinese painting during the Song Dynasty. I actually used to go to the British Museum every day. I'm sure it doesn't exist anymore, but you used to be able to go to the British Museum, knock on a door somewhere and they would give you a pass, and you were allowed into a room somewhere, and there I would make drawings, or copies of Chinese masterpieces that were not on display. I did this for my thesis at Sussex, which I've still got. It was absolutely fascinating to me.

I thank Sussex for introducing me to that because what happened later is that I actually continued that study and took three months off my PhD, and as a parallel consequence I got interested in photographing mountains. Then I took more time off and I worked for a photographer in the theatre. So I moved from doing photographs that looked like Chinese paintings in the highlands of Scotland, to doing photography in the theatre. That got me involved in the whole world of media and so on. It all kind of comes together working at New Scientist because her we do masses of design work, as well as writing about science. All these covers are created by me (when I was the Editor - now I'm the Editor in Chief), working with the Art Director, commissioning pieces and that kind of stuff. So bizarrely, the most interesting part of my job when I was editor was bringing together science and art and that all started back at Sussex, through these science and art courses. But of course I went to Sussex because they had ideas like that. I'm sorry that's all stopped.

So you were living at London whilst you were doing the drawing for your project?
Yeah, I used to hitchhike actually. Hitchhiking was actually the norm in those days, and loads and loads of people did it. There's a place just past the Oval on the way out south on the road - that's the point. Used to be a little queue. I wouldn't do it now, you'd be murdered by a maniac.

So after you left Sussex, you went onto these other institutions (Oxford and Edinburgh). What was your experience of them in comparison?
They were kind of stuffy, and not the same. Actually, living in Edinburgh was like flipping back five years in time, and it was a very strange experience because, as I said, at the end of my time at Sussex, all these hippies and dope arrived. And then I went to Edinburgh and about three years later, it all arrived there. So I saw it twice! I saw the hippy revolution twice! I used to joke that if I moved to Helsinki I could see it a third time. It's probably just arriving in Moscow now. Edinburgh had that great side to it, but as a university it was not nearly as forward thinking, and fairly old-fashioned.

Would you describe yourself as quite liberal?
Yes, I would really. Yes, definitely then, compared to Edinburgh. But after that I went to Oxford which was very striking again because I was in the same lab as Richard Dawkins - he wrote a book called The Selfish Gene - he wrote it whilst I was there. I still know Richard as well. Just before that, a man called Desmond Morris had written The Naked Ape. I was exposed at Oxford to the notion that you could do very powerful, popular science writing. It was probably more The Naked Ape, then The Selfish Gene. The Selfish Gene was just coming out at the time that I was leaving Oxford, whereas The Naked Ape had been out for years before I arrived.

Were they inspirational to you?
Yeah definitely. Seeing how it could be done certainly put me in mind that popular science can be very well done.

So in 1990 you moved to New Scientist. Why did you make that change?
At my previous job, Science, I was so-called International Editor and here I was 'The Editor'.

They offered it to you directly?
Yes, they headhunted me. I was again very lucky. They were looking for an editor, they didn't have any great applicants around, and the headhunter produced a short-list including me.

Did you think twice about it?
Yes, I did think twice about it actually. The reason being, at that time there was a bit of turmoil at New Scientist. That was entirely to do with internal company politics and I did check out very carefully that I wasn't walking into a job where I would suddenly be required to sack everybody. Sometimes they do that. Corporate life is full of strange goings on that are not very savoury. But it turned out to be a great job - the magazine has been fantastic.

So if you arrived into a magazine rife with problems, what was the first thing you did to try and fix them?
The first thing I did was I interviewed every single member of staff separately and asked them how they got there, what they thought about the magazine, what they thought the problems are, where the difficulties had been. I ended up with a file of how every individual saw their job and the magazine. That gave me the insight to say, "this is what we need to have as our strategy, and this is what we need to eliminate as our problems". And it worked pretty damn well. I also had a very lucky break because I had been working in America. America is ahead of Britain in lots of ways - that is to say, a lot of the latest trends begin in America and come here. Coming from America, I was really well aware how science writing could be pushed further, how illustration could be pushed further, how treatment of science could be done differently. I didn't need to think too much about it, I had already learnt it. That was very jammy that I'd done that. Things that were obvious now, people would think, "God, you mean we didn't use to do it that way?." Just the whole way you set up a story, and write the introduction to a story, and how you bring personality into the story.

Science writing used to be slightly apologetic: [puts on whiny voice] "this is all going to be terribly difficult, but I'll try and make it easy for you". Like they've sugar coated something you don't really want to take. Our goal was to really change that - change the people and the ideas - to be self-confident. Science often suffers from this sort of cringe factor - "I'm a boring scientist, you probably don't want to talk to me". My policy was if you're talking to someone else the approach is: "what's happening in science is the most interesting thing in the world, and if you don't agree with me just fuck off, because I'm not interested in talking to you". You had to have that kind of attitude. That tended to be the kind of attitude of people in the arts: [in snooty voice - think Brian Sewell] "Of course I am doing something interesting", so I took the same attitude. If you're not interested, I don't want to explain to you - you're just a fucking idiot, so get out of my way! And it worked, because if you write like, "I'm really interested in this, it's not only interesting its really important. If you can't see this, you're probably a moron!" It works. It has to be true to a degree. Otherwise it's just piped bullshit, or triumphalism or something. The thing is, it is really interesting and important. People from the sciences do often have massive inferiority complexes.

Why is there that inferiority complex?
It's the type who is attracted to it for a start. It's no doubt that it's the nerd and geeks who are more inclined to go into science. Also it's future prospects - the aspiration of someone doing bio-chemistry, it's not going to be... well, some of them might think they are going to win the Nobel Prize, but it's not the same thing. When I was a student, the most fashionable thing to do was sociology. Sociology was absolutely cool. I'm sure there really is still a hierarchy of topics; I don't know what it is now though.

Did you get this sense of inferiority as a science undergraduate?
Yes, definitely. Definitely.

Did you get over it?
Yes, I definitely got over it. But there is no doubt that if you are a young student in the age range of 18 to the early 20's, you're in these social situations - girls and all the rest of it - where your status is very very important to you, and you're not so relaxed about yourself. There is a significant hierarchy that really matters to people, and engineers are at the absolute bottom.

Do you think the attitude change that you have brought into New Scientist, this banishing of the inferiority complex, needs to go down to that age range?
Yes, I think it does. Although you get lots of kids who are interested in science, and I think the image of science has improved enormously. One of the reasons is because of magazines like New Scientist, but also, there's been a huge number of best-selling science books, from The Selfish Gene, onwards, which has made it clear that understanding science is a key part of understanding culture, and the insights of science are genuinely vital. So what I always say is that before the Second World War, there was a lot of insight into ourselves, our lives, our world, often by artists or philosophers, thinkers. What I always try to say to people to boost the profile of science is that there have been no interesting ideas from artists since 1940. I think its true, because they've produced no insight into the human condition in the sense that the neurosciences and evolutionary theory have. All those insights are actually feeding back into the arts and filmmaking and everything else. So the tables have turned to a degree, as to why science is a hell-of-a-lot more interesting then it used to be. Before the war, a lot of science was about building atomic bombs or something. The growth of the biological sciences and parts of the view of the universe - you could say cosmology, astrophysics and that kind of thing - they have really changed how we see ourselves. That's what's really important, how we see ourselves. We are not the same anymore, and that's due to science.

Your views on art are quite controversial, do you think that art is really nothing if it doesn't provide you with an insight into yourself?
Well, its very difficult isn't it? I would say yes, but that doesn't mean in any way that you could limit art with any written statement. If you could take a picture and say, "this gives you the following insight" it would be a crap picture. In some way it does, but its often very hard to say what that [insight] is. You see there's no problem with that in science, because the more we know about the origins of feelings and emotions... science is not just some cognitive fact based logic. The more we know about those other kinds of things, the more we can incorporate what art does to us into a quite reasonable account. In fact, just this moment, I'm doing an issue on why music affects us quite the way it does. We can get into quite reasonable accounts of how these things work. So there isn't a divide, there isn't a mystery, but it doesn't mean that everything science studies is expressed in some set of logical statements either.

You are essentially a scientist or journalist, but running a magazine involves a fair amount of management. How interested are you in that side of your work.
I would say quite interested. My view about the magazine is that the magazine absolutely thrives on diversity. So what you want is a load of people, all stroppy as hell with different opinions on things, because it's from them that you get the creativity. What you don't want is a monoculture. A magazine has to be a very creative environment. So I have to manage diversity. That means in any office there will be a large number of rows, arguments, disagreements and fallings-out. So it's like one big slightly argumentative family. Sometimes those arguments are really severe, but that's what makes it vital. Managing that.

Do you referee it from above?
I wouldn't say referee it. Sometimes people get really carried away. I remember once there was someone whose work I was criticising too fiercely, this very large woman. She grabbed me by the head and banged it against the wall! Sometimes we can get quite out of control here! We settled amicably, later.

Its coming up to fifty years of New Scientist - it was founded in 1956. Why has it been able to stay around so long, when so many other magazines have come and gone?
I think its through continuous innovation. If you look back, there are certain fundamental principles that have always been observed. There was a mission statement in the first editorial of the first edition, which broadly explained what New Scientist was going to be, which was for all those people interested in science and the impact of science on society. We've stuck to that, but we've innovated in the writing, the layout, and the design. Constantly tried to modernise it. When I first joined, there was a lot of modernising to do because we'd fallen behind. I got a lot of letters from readers saying, "oh that's dreadful what you're doing, and I'm cancelling my subscription immediately, blah blah blah". They always used to say, "You changed the magazine terribly". I wrote back and said, "I haven't changed the magazine at all. What's happened is that you've changed. This magazine is aimed at what it should be aimed at, people in their twenties to early thirties. What's actually happening is that I'm keeping the magazine the same age, and you're getting older". I also said, "if you are really interested in science, you will understand that I need to keep those people interested in science". A hundred people wrote back apologising and telling me I was right and they would subscribe again. That's all we're doing all the time. Whatever a young person would see as a well put together magazine is what we want.

How important is style in comparison to substance or content?
Style is extremely important. How you present it all. We've got an audience that goes right through from Nobel Prize winners to school kids. So we are accessible but we have to be authoritative. The staff are great. A lot of people here had PhD's; they work on the highest level.

Is it true the biggest selling edition had a marijuana leaf on the front?
The two biggest selling editions were on marijuana and alcohol. You don't often get scientific insights into those delivered by a magazine like New Scientist. We had got hold of some information about how the possible fears of marijuana were being exaggerated.

Do you feel that you have a responsibility to educate people about science?
I wouldn't say educate, but inform. Yes, definitely inform. Educate makes it sound like going on a course. 'Empower' is the word we use.

Last year you had a competition in which you offered the winner the opportunity to have their body frozen after death, known as Cryonics. How did that come about?
We knew there was an organisation in America freezing peoples' bodies or heads. You could just have your head done, on the grounds that if they could ever figure out how to unfreeze you, by then they would have the technology to provide a new body. The idea was that if you were frozen, they would one day be able to wake you up, cure whatever was wrong with you, your neurones would still be there, and so would your consciousness. Whether that's true is extremely dubious, but we thought it was a great competition prize, 'life after death' was what we called it.

Would you do it?
No, I would not. We did give people the choice. You could either have a holiday in Hawaii or be frozen. The winner wanted the holiday, which I think was good because it's pretty ghoulish.

How do you feel about Genetically Modified food?
GM has been unsuccessful so far and we [the magazine] are very disappointed by that. We advised repeatedly these companies, we told them that if you want to win the public round to GM or any new technology you have to provide some obvious benefit. There is no obvious benefit from GM at all. We told them that they should start by engineering out something, so for example, engineer out an allergen from peanuts. Then you have actually removed something, and make it a healthy, great product, shows the power of molecular biology. What do they do? They made this piece of stuff which needs gallons of herbicide, makes the company rich, ruins the country side, doesn't help the farmer, doesn't help the consumer - own goal!

A lot of people are worried its dangerous. Do you personally worry about the dangers?
No, I don't worry in general. You could create GM food that was very dangerous to eat. That hasn't happened. The real worry about GM is whether it harms the environment - that is all about specific uses of GM not GM in general. A possible good one is for example, if you put a food supplement into rice, and the poor people eating rice is South East Asia have a good life as a result, that's pretty hard to argue against, compared to how GM is being used for in Britain.

Why do you think there is such an anti-GM feeling in Britain?
Because in this country and in Europe in general there is a strong concept of nature and the natural. It's actually a bogus concept but it's very deeply implanted in our psyches. Interfering with nature, removing the natural, is always seen as bad. But when you explain to people that the original potatoes were poisonous, they had to be bred for hundreds of years before they came this staple - people don't get the idea that nature is not always friendly and a nice place to have a picnic. That's the way our romantic tradition has evolved. They're such powerful notions about interfering with nature, that it's hard to get people to think about GM. But I wouldn't want to accept GM, I'd want them to say, GM may be useful if we know what we're doing with it.

Do we know what we're doing with it?
Ah, well... no, we don't. Not with all uses of GM. But the way its being used in Britain is not sensible, we don't know enough about the environmental impact. We don't know enough about ecology in general.

The government has an important decision to make at some point [its just been delayed]. What do you think they will have to decide?
The government has a very difficult problem. The Blair government has wanted to give it a lot of approval and back GM. But I think it's going to have to give very limited approval under strict circumstances, which I think is probably the correct decision because you've got use GM if its safe and has a benefit.

Do you definitely believe in Global Warming?
Yeah I do. I think there is enough evidence about it.

What would you do?
I think unfortunately we've got to get behind all these things that are in the Kyoto Protocol. They're either not being honoured by nations like America which hasn't signed onto the Kyoto Protocol, or we're not making the progress as fast as we can. I don't believe in big technological fixes for global warming. I believe we've just got to be more energy efficient. I don't really like some of the green power - I don't like giant windmills all over the countryside, they just look ugly to me, although on the other hand I accept that its probably necessary. Some people really like them, but I don't.

But do they work?
They work, yes.

So what would you do instead?
Oh, I'd like to just have the wind farms offshore, which is what they are moving to now. They're putting the wind farms out at sea, where the wind is actually more constant and I have made myself quite unpopular because New Scientist does support those kind of projects, but I've often protested against just plonking giant wind farms all over the place. The places with the best wind are often the most beautiful. That's what's happened in Wales. They've built these bloody things in Wales. Take them to England, in my view!

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