Royal Institution's new director Sarah Harper: we must show gold standard for science

Second woman to be appointed in RI's 218-year history identifies role, in era of fake news, to supply trusted data across many issues from health to climate change and robotics

When Michael Faraday ran the Royal Institution, one of the oldest scientific organisations in the world, the 19th-century chemist took time to pile into public discourse. He ranted about dangerous pollution in the Thames. He debunked the fad of table-turning and blamed the educational system for allowing such nonsense to thrive.

Nearly 200 years later, scientists are still tackling bad thinking and big problems. For Sarah Harper, an Oxford gerontologist who takes the helm proper at the RI on Tuesday, the rise of denialism, fake news and alternative facts, combined with rapid advances in research that raise deep questions for society, mean that a grasp of science, and all its uncertainties, has never seemed more vital.