What do you do if, like Wellcome Trust medical workers in Africa, you suddenly discover that your cultural baggage is proving hard to bear for the people you are trying to help? That, in local custom, your logo of two entwined snakes foretells death? That the recipients of your therapeutic skills suspect you of giving their blood to evil spirits?

These were some of the unpleasant findings of research carried out by the Wellcome Trust in Kenya. Trying to get to grips with malaria and its transmission, the medical workers were unaware of the way the local people regarded them and their efforts.

In response, they developed and implemented a new approach to community engagement, which has evolved into a programme of partnership and consultation between them and the local communities. The two-way dialogue that has resulted benefits not only the local people, but also the science being carried out amongst them.

In Kenya, such engagement is encouraging. But it does not always work. This issue of SPA also hears about the difficulties of bringing people round a table to exchange views. Laura Potts tried to gather together people with different opinions on the role of exposure to environmental hazards in the incidence of breast cancer. The petulance she encountered – with one person even refusing to sit next to another – gives some insight into the practical problems engagement can face.

No wonder that Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientists have stressed the need for future models to incorporate predictions of human behaviour, if efforts to mitigate global warming are to be effective (Shorts).

The need for engagement between designers of software and computer users is spelled out in the Opinion columns. Martyn Thomas pleads for an independent review of the NHS IT programme, Connecting for Health, while Adam Laurie extols Open Source software because its community of experts examines it for bugs and security problems before it is launched.

Keith Davies wants to bring back the Haldane model of research, which would separate it as far as possible from political and administrative pressures. In his opinion, our current business model of research undermines public trust. Alan Malcolm offers a specific example: public mistrust of GM food. Will it, he wonders, scupper a new additive for ice cream?

The SPATalk deals with carbon rationing. Is it a valuable way of cutting carbon emissions? Yes, believes Mayer Hillman, who argues that the only realistic and fair way ahead is by adopting an international framework based on equal per capita shares of carbon emissions across the world’s population. No, retorts Claire Fox, who accuses Hillman of a ‘paralysing obsession with reducing carbon emissions’, and says his prescription will ‘deny the gains of modernity to the under-developed world.’

Meanwhile, some good news stories. Sandra Knapp and Steve Cafferty celebrate the 300th anniversary of Linnaeus’s birth by describing how his collections are about to be available online, to the particular benefit of Third-World scientists whose countries often supplied the specimens in the first place. And Jason Hall-Spencer relates how the publicity his research received at the 2005 Festival of Science has led to conservation of precious coral reefs off the UK.

Finally, Gordon Duff pays tribute to Gareth Roberts.

Wendy Barnaby, Editor

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