Welcoming visitors to this year's Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition, Neil Parkinson, Esat's chief executive, had "no doubt that these young people are the natural entrepreneurs of the future". Now in its 37th year, the gig, formerly sponsored by Aer Lingus, has, since 1998, been run by Esat. It used to be about . . . well, science: physics, chemistry, biology, that sort of stuff. Strange then that the ambition of its current sponsor appears to be to spur young people to engage in commerce.
Few previous winners have become entrepreneurs. Most work in academia, medicine or technology. It is alarming then that even some of the country's brightest and most dedicated kids should be automatically considered "natural entrepreneurs of the future". There they sit at their little stands in the RDS supposedly dreaming of following in the traditions of Louis Pasteur, Marie Curie and Albert Einstein. Meanwhile, the boss of the company sponsoring the competition sees them as the natural successors of Louis Walsh, Margaret Heffernan and Albert Gubay.
That is telling. Clearly, science, like everything else in contemporary culture, is being put in its place by business. The kids couldn't be the inventors, discoverers and researchers of the future. No, they would be entrepreneurs. Presumably, Neil Parkinson intends this as a compliment. It's true, of course, many of today's biggest technology companies, such as Vodafone, Microsoft and Nokia, are primarily marketing companies, oriented to business and fashion more than to scientific research. Little wonder the public is less excited by science than it was one and two generations ago.
Back then, following the rise of "big science" during the second World War and its continuation during the Cold War, science was both scary and exciting. It seemed awesome, capable of great benevolence (vaccines, TV, jets) or devastating destruction (Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Bikini atoll). Sure, such "big science" could be hard on the nerves but there was something more exhilarating about feeling suspended between Eden and Armageddon than about wondering what colour casing to fit to your mobile phone today.
It's not as if the power of science to enhance or destroy life has diminished. It's just that the propaganda surrounding it has changed enormously. We live in a time when, ironically, although we're more dependent on technology than ever, much of it has been appropriated simply to make money rather than to make life better. In fairness, economically profitable research can often be socially useful. But the two are not synonymous - think of computer features which only a few anoraks want or use and which are principally included to prevent prices from collapsing.
Perhaps we ought not be surprised that so much "science" is, in fact, marketing. We are bombarded by advertising which mentions unheard of and probably spurious chemical or biological compounds and processes for everything from cleaning clothes to removing wrinkles and boosting our immune systems. Such "snakeoil" pitching aims at human naivety, wishful thinking or even desperation. It's science of a sort, I suppose. But that science is psychology, in which even bespectacled, white-coated, test tube-handling scientists are used as props for the propaganda of flogging products.
In the last century, western European science emigrated to the US and, albeit to a lesser degree, the Soviet Union. Between 1900 and 1933, for instance, the US won seven science Nobel prizes; between 1933 and 1970, it won 77. It is no surprise then that so much science (understandably fleeing fascism for the dollar) has instead been hijacked by and put in the service of what is disingenuously called the "free market". Indeed, with genetics having replaced physics as the "hottest" science, sensible people are right to worry more than ever about the relationship between private capital and scientific research.
So, rather than produce entrepreneurs, it might be a good idea if science produced scientists. That is not to say that governments, which, after all, made post-second World War physics focus excessively on research with military applications, are necessarily less sinister than private enterprise at managing science. All controllers have agendas. But it's a sad day when to be a mere entrepreneur - though a reasonable ambition in itself - should be glibly considered as the logical, inevitable and perhaps most worthy end for youngsters who might hope to discover cures for cancers, AIDS or heart diseases.
Still, eternal teenage health concerns, focusing on hair, teeth, acne, blackheads and fingernails, did feature prominently at this year's exhibition. So they should, because it helps greatly to be genuinely interested in your project. Almost equally prominent, however, were studies concerned with society's images of science and scientists. These suggest not just a concern for PR but a recognition that science - whatever about technology - needs more than an image makeover. Already, only one in 10 Leaving Cert students opts to study chemistry and only one in eight to study physics.
One project, by Michelle O'Dwyer and Kim Doherty of Hartstown Community School, Dublin, was titled "Teenagers' Perceptions of Scientists". The pair reported that, on the positive side, scientists were regularly seen as "intelligent, well-paid, well-organised and doing interesting work". That wasn't the full story, however. Many other teenagers saw scientists as "unexciting, humourless, middleaged/old and doing difficult work." Furthermore, most students "believe scientists are male and wear glasses and white coats". Glamorous, sexy, rock 'n' roll, it isn't.
Other entries included "Taking the Myth Out of Science for Children", by Rachel Fahy, Laura Murphy and Karen Smith of Loreto College, St Stephen's Green, Dublin, and "Students' Attitudes Towards Science Subjects", by Jenny Judge of Glanmire Community College. It's unlikely that a generation ago, science would have felt so insecure about its place that it would generate similar projects. Indeed, were studies undertaken then about the images and self-images of science, they would surely have exuded a bullish confidence in the future.
Mind you, it's telling too that all the "image" studies mentioned above were by girls. For the first 15 years of the Young Scientist competition, which began in 1965, boys won it 12 times - 80 per cent of the time. They still have a lead but their share of the total number of wins is now less than 60 per cent. (OK, this is a nerdy, albeit, in context, appropriate way to make the point. But it does reflect that science used to be almost exclusively a male area of study and that girls, presumably liberated by feminism, are now winning in this area too. In fact, twice as many girls as boys exhibit projects at the competition nowadays.)
More sceptical analysts, of course, might argue that such a feminising of science indicates a lessening of its rank in the overall hierarchy of power. Certainly, if scientists are yesterday's heroes and entrepreneurs are the current flavour of the month, then males retain a grip on the really lucrative action. There are more ways to power than brains. Indeed, as Todd Gitlin pointed out about the typical defence of George Dubya - "he doesn't have to be smart, he can hire smart people" - intelligence can thus be certified as something for underlings. Politicians, like entrepreneurs, can have it every way, I suppose.
Anyway, science faces more than the image problems propagated by media which cast scientists as nerdy, bespectacled, white-coated geeks and entrepreneurs as Armani-clad, dynamos with model good looks. Genuinely considered difficult, staid and frankly, hardly worth the effort, it is essential that "studying science be made attractive", says Dr Helena Sheehan of DCU. "Science degrees must be made more interesting and be taught within a broader context, which includes modules that address, for instance, the historical and ethical dimensions of science."
Clearly, such a move could help to rescue science from its dowdy image.
But it's not just in education and media image that science has difficulties. Perhaps, in a clarion irony, the greatest threat of all to science comes from technology. This might sound bizarre because technology is really applied science. But the forms of technology most favoured by the market and its heroic entrepreneurs are quick applications which can be successfully marketed to haul in big profits.
It's not just incidental that the title of the former Young Scientist Exhibition is now the clunky and inelegant Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition. This year, a "technology" category was introduced "on a pilot basis". Fair enough, this addition reflects the world around us but it also shows that marketing and marketplace economics have done to science what they inevitably do to everything: seek the most profitable lowest common denominators.
"Few people realise it but fundamentalist religions are still stronger than science in the world," says Helena Sheehan. Of course, when you think about it, it's true that ancient faiths, visceral beliefs and tenacious superstitions are always capable of overwhelming rationality. But the real rub is that it's not just in the religious or the underdeveloped world that we can observe this. The same is true in the developed world where the dollar is venerated with as much blind intensity as any god anywhere.
And that is the truth of it: science, for all its championing of rationality, is still controlled by forces which are deliberately anti-rational. Alongside the daily doses of market puffery for technology, the Pentagon has been pumping out its propaganda this month. As ever, the message is that Armageddon is again just around the corner: regional nuclear arms races; proliferating chemical and biological weapons and terrorists threaten us all. Maybe so. But seeing as the Pentagon controls most horror weapons in the world, it's hardly being too paranoid to see this latest push as simple justification for George Dubya's planned military expansion.
That's the world's most powerful government using PR to push its own business objectives for science. The big private corporations and the middle-range corporations and the smaller outfits do likewise. Science has always been a political subject and never more so than when business pretends that it's not. It's not geeks and nerds we should fear these days - it's business anoraks, whose alchemy would turn everybody into entrepreneurs, even though we already have more than enough of those for our Tribunals to be getting along with.