Public understanding of science at the crossroads

With the publication of the House of Lords report Science and Society in the spring of 2000, public understanding of science in the United Kingdom is now at something of a crossroads. After well over a decade of efforts to improve what has come to be known as scientific literacy among the general population-led by such organizations as the Committee on Public Understanding of Science (CoPUS)-surveys suggest that little has been achieved. But how are we now to interpret this? Is it a failure by the scientific community to get their message across? Is the public just insufficiently interested in matters scientific? Or is it that the relationship between the public and scientists, and the dispersal and uptake of information, is more subtle than simple measurement models suppose? And how can the new age, as envisioned by their Lordships, be realized?.