Public outreach starts with your friends

Some of the nicest visits are not organised outreach events, school placements or formal tours. They are simply friends coming to see you.

It was so great to be able to show my friends the impressive archives of Nature, Cell and Science (while aspiring to be featured in these archives, hopefully by the time the kids now enjoying their hot chocolates at 170 Queens Gate get to our stage in life).

There is something quite special about holding or looking through old scientific journals and realising that some of the work they contain changed how we understand the world.

Perhaps most importantly, we want the children to see that science is not simply something that “happens” in textbooks. It is something people do: they ask questions, get things wrong, try again, discover things nobody knew before and sometimes spend years trying to understand one small piece of the puzzle.

You never know what might spark someone's imagination. A visit like this may be nothing more than a fun afternoon, but perhaps it also plants a small seed in the minds of the little ones… a curiosity about how things work, a fascination with biology, an enthusiasm for learning, or simply the thought that one day they might want to study at a university and become part of this world themselves.

Imperial is a particularly wonderful environment for this, where visitors from almost any walk of life can find something interesting (and I am totally not biased). It is a place where a casual visit can quickly turn into a conversation about science and sharing a little of the excitement that made you want to do it in the first place.

That said, my friends were also lucky enough to bump into this gentleman near Buckingham Palace, who may have overshadowed the hype of the Nature archives just a tiny bit: