Trust Me, I’m a Scientist

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Science is meant to be ruled by reason and evidence. But for centuries, only certain people were trusted to practise it. In this episode, Mary-Ann Ochota takes us to Cambridge in 1897, where crowds gathered on the streets to protest against women being allowed to earn degrees. Journalist and author Angela Saini explains how the Royal Society, founded in 1660 on the radical idea of testing claims rather than simply trusting the person making them, became a gentlemen's club that kept women and working class scientists locked out for centuries. It's a question that's shaped science ever since. If evidence is meant to speak for itself, why has reputation always mattered just as much, and what…