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In Sicko, Michael Moore's new film, a young Ronald Reagan is shown appealing to working-class Americans to reject "socialised medicine" as commie subversion. In the 1940s and 1950s, Reagan was employed by the American Medical Association and big business as the amiable mouthpiece of a neo-fascism bent on persuading ordinary Americans that their true interests, such as universal health care, were "anti-American".
Watching this, I found myself recalling the effusive fare wells to Reagan when he died three years ago. "Many people believe," said Gavin Esler on the BBC's Newsnight, "that he restored faith in American military action [and] was loved even by his political opponents." In the Daily Mail, Esler wrote that Reagan "embodied the best of the American spirit - the optimistic belief that problems can be solved, that tomorrow will be better than today, and that our children will be wealthier and happier than we are".
Such drivel about a man who, as president, was responsible for the 1980s bloodbath in central America, and the rise of the very terrorism that produced al-Qaeda, became the received spin. Reagan's walk-on part in Sicko is a rare glimpse of the truth of his betrayal of the blue-collar nation he claimed to represent. The treacheries of another president, Richard Nixon, and a would-be president, Hillary Clinton, are similarly exposed by Moore. Just when there seemed little else to say about the great Watergate crook, Moore extracts from the 1971 White House tapes a conversation between Nixon and John Erlichman, his aide who ended up in prison. A wealthy Republican Party backer, Edgar Kaiser, head of one of America's biggest health insurance companies, is at the White House with a plan for "a national health-care industry". Erlichman pitches it to Nixon, who is bored until the word "profit" is mentioned.
"All the incentives," says Erlichman, "run the right way: the less [medical] care they give them, the more money they make." To which Nixon replies without hesitation: "Fine!" The next cut shows the president announcing to the nation a task force that will deliver a system of "the finest health care". In truth, it is one of the worst and most corrupt in the world, as Sicko shows, denying common humanity to some 50 million Americans and, for many of them, the right to life.

How can we prioritise and regulate, to maximise the chance that applications are benign, and restrain their "dark side"? How can the best science be fed in to the political process?
There is an ever-widening gap between what science allows, and what we should actually do. There are many doors science can open that should be kept closed, on prudential or ethical grounds. Choices on how science is applied should not be made just by scientists. That is why everyone needs a "feel" for science and a realistic attitude to risk - otherwise public debate won't get beyond sloganising. Jo Rotblat favoured a "Hippocratic oath" whereby scientists would pledge themselves to use their talents to human benefit.
Scientists surely have a special responsibility. It is their ideas that form the basis of new technology. They should not be indifferent to the fruits of their ideas. They should forgo experiments that are risky or unethical. More than that, they should foster benign spin-offs, but resist dangerous or threatening applications. They should raise public consciousness of hazards to environment or health.
At the moment, scientific effort is deployed sub-optimally. This seems so whether we judge in purely intellectual terms, or take account of likely benefit to human welfare. Some subjects have had the inside track. Others, such as environmental research, renewable energy, biodiversity studies and so forth, deserve more effort. Within medical research the focus is disproportionately on ailments that loom largest in prosperous countries, rather than on the infections endemic in the tropics. The challenge of global warming should stimulate a whole raft of manifestly benign innovations - for conserving energy, and generating it by "clean" means (biofuels, innovative renewables, carbon sequestration, and nuclear fusion).
These scientific challenges deserve a priority and commitment from governments, akin to that accorded to the Manhattan Project or the Apollo moon landing. They should appeal to the idealistic young. But to safeguard our future and channel our efforts optimally and ethically we shall need effective campaigners, not just physicists, but biologists, computer experts, and environmentalists as well; latter-day counterparts of Jo Rotblat, inspired by his vision and building on his legacy.

Some commentators on biotech, robotics and nanotech worry that when the genie is out of the bottle, the outcome may be impossible to control. They urge caution in "pushing the envelope". But we cannot reap the benefits of science without accepting some risks. The best we can do is minimise them. The typical scientific discovery has many applications, some benign, others less so. Even nuclear physics has its upside: its medical uses have saved more people than nuclear weapons actually killed.
The uses of academic research generally cannot be foreseen. Ernest Rutherford, the leading nuclear physicist of his time, famously said in the mid-1930s that nuclear energy was "moonshine"; the inventors of lasers did not foresee that an early application of their work would be to eye surgery; and the discoverer of x-rays was not searching for ways to see through flesh.
Science in the 21st century will present new threats more diverse and more intractible than nuclear weapons did. It will pose ethical dilemmas. But a blanket prohibition on all risky experiments and innovations would paralyse science and deny us all its benefits.
Scientists sometimes abide by self-imposed moratoria on specific lines of research. A precedent for this was the so-called "Asilomar declaration" in 1975 whereby prominent molecular biologists refrained from some experiments involving the then new technique of gene-splicing. Just last month, experts in the more advanced techniques of "synthetic biology" proposed a similar ban.
But a voluntary moratorium will be harder to achieve today: the academic community is larger, and competition (enhanced by commercial pressures) is more intense. To be effective, the consensus must be worldwide. If one country alone imposed regulations, the most dynamic researchers and companies would migrate to another that was more sympathetic or permissive. This is happening already in stem cell research.

But this catastrophic threat could be merely in abeyance. In the next 100 years, geopolitical realignments could lead to a nuclear standoff between new superpowers, which might be handled less well than the Cuba crisis was. Moreover, we are confronted by a proliferation of nuclear weapons (in North Korea and Iran for instance). There is now a growing risk of nuclear weapons going off in a localised conflict, and the Bulletin's clock stands at seven minutes to midnight. The nuclear threat will always be with us.
But what are the promises and threats from 21st-century science? Science offers immense hope, and exciting prospects. There are genuine grounds for being a techno-optimist.
The technologies that fuel economic growth today - IT, miniaturisation and biotech - are environmentally and socially benign. They are sparing of energy and raw materials. They boost quality of life in the developing and the developed world, and have much further to go. That is surely good news. But opinion polls reveal public concern that science may be advancing too fast to be properly controlled. It is not only advancing faster than ever, it is opening up the prospects of new kinds of change.
Whatever else may have changed over preceding centuries, humans have not for thousands of years. But in this century, targeted drugs to enhance memory or change mood, genetic modification, and perhaps silicon implants into the brain, may alter human beings themselves. That is something qualitatively new in our history.
Our species could be transformed within a few centuries. And there are other disquieting prospects. Collective human actions are transforming, even ravaging, the biosphere - perhaps irreversibly - through global warming and loss of biodiversity. We have entered a new geological era, the anthropocene. We do not fully understand the consequences of rising populations and increasing energy consumption on the interwoven fabric of atmosphere, water, land and life.
We are collectively endangering our planet, but there is a potential threat from individuals too. "Bio" and "cyber" expertise will be accessible to millions. It does not require large, special-purpose facilities as do nuclear weapons. Even a single person will have the capability to cause widespread disruption through error or terror. There will always be disaffected loners, and the "leverage" each can exert is ever-growing. It would be hard to eliminate such risks, even with very intrusive surveillance.The global village will have its global village idiots.

During the cold war, the superpowers could have stumbled towards armageddon through muddle and miscalculation. Robert McNamara was the US defence secretary during the Cuba missile crisis. He later wrote that we then "came within a hair's breadth of nuclear war without realising it. It's no credit to us that we escaped - Khrushchev and Kennedy were lucky as well as wise." The prevailing nuclear doctrine was deterrence via the threat of "mutual assured destruction" (with the apt acronym Mad).
Each side put the "worst case" construction on whatever the other did, and overreacted. The net result was an arms race that made both less secure.
Another who spoke out after retirement was Solly Zuckerman, the UK government's longtime chief scientific adviser. He said "ideas for new weapon systems derived in the first place not from the military but from scientists and technologists merely doing what they saw to be their job: the momentum of the arms race is fuelled by technicians in governmental laboratories and in the armaments industries". In Zuckerman's view the weapons scientists were "the alchemists of our times, working in secret ... casting spells which embrace us all". The decisions that racheted up the arms race were political, but scientists who developed new weapons could not disclaim their share of the responsibility.
The great physicist Hans Bethe also came round to this view. He was the chief theorist at Los Alamos and worked on the H-bomb, but by 1995 his aversion to military research had hardened, and he urged scientists to "desist from work creating, developing, improving and manufacturing nuclear weapons and other weapons of potential mass destruction".
Some of Bethe's colleagues started a journal called the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. On its cover is a clock, and the closeness of its hands to midnight indicates the editor's judgment on how precarious the world situation is. Every few years the minute hand is shifted. When the cold war ended, and the nuclear threat eased, the Bulletin's clock was put back to 17 minutes to midnight. There was less chance of 10,000 bombs devastating our civilisation.

Nuclear scientist Joseph Rotblat campaigned against the atom bomb he had helped unleash. Is it time for today's cyber scientists to heed his legacy?
Joseph (Jo) Rotblat was a nuclear scientist. He helped to make the first atomic bomb. But for decades he campaigned against what he had helped unleash. Until he died last year, aged 96, he pursued this aim with the dynamism of a man half his age, inspiring others to join the cause. He was born in Poland in 1908. His family suffered great hardship in the first world war but he was exceptionally intelligent and determined, and managed to become a nuclear physicist. After the invasion of Poland, he came as as a refugee to England to work with James Chadwick at Liverpool University. He then went to Los Alamos, New Mexico, as part of the British contingent involved in the Manhattan Project to make the first atom bomb.
In his mind there was only one justification for the bomb project: to ensure that Hitler did not get one first. As soon as this ceased to be a credible risk, Jo left Los Alamos - the only scientist then to do so. He returned to England and became a professor of medical physics, an expert on the effects of radiation on human health, and a compelling and outspoken campaigner.
In 1955, he met Bertrand Russell and encouraged him to prepare a manifesto stressing the extreme gravity of the nuclear peril. He secured Einstein's signature too; this "Russell-Einstein manifesto" was then signed by 10 other eminent scientists. The authors claimed to be "speaking on this occasion not as members of this or that nation, continent or creed, but as human beings, members of the species Man, whose continued existence is in doubt". This manifesto led to the initiation of the Pugwash Conferences - so called after the village in Nova Scotia where the inaugural conference was held. There have been 300 meetings since then. Jo attended almost all of them.
When the achievements of these conferences were recognised by the 1995 Nobel peace prize, half the award went to the Pugwash organisation, and half to Jo Rotblat personally, as their "prime mover" and untiring inspiration. Particularly during the 1960s, the Pugwash Conferences offered crucial "back-door" contact between scientists from the US and the Soviet Union when there were few formal channels. These contacts eased the path for the partial test ban treaty of 1963, and the later anti-ballistic missile treaty.

This leads to an interesting idea -could some people be immune to some of the effects of magic? People who suffer from autism, for example, tend to have difficulties gauging facial cues, so their attention is less influenced by where somebody is looking. "You'd expect that somebody who suffered from autism would be more likely to spot the cigarette trick," agrees Kuhn.
The next step is to look at the brain directly. Working with psychologists Tim Hodson and Ben Parris at Exeter University's Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, Kuhn plans to put people in functional magnetic resonance imaging machines to study which parts of the brain activate when they watch magic tricks.
"We're very interested in the part of the brain that detects cause and effect relations," says Parris.
In particular, the experiments will monitor the dorsal lateral pre-frontal cortex, which is known to be the bit of the brain that registers surprise, and the anterior cingulate, which is activated whenever something incongruous happens in our immediate environment.
Of course, magic is more than just surprise, so the researchers will be looking for something more. "When you're watching magic, there is just a split second when you're in disbelief and that's what we're looking for, that exact moment," he says. "The magic spot."
"No one's done this and it's unclear whether it'll be a single part of the brain or a network," says Parris.
But while psychologists slowly get to grips with the way magicians manage to trick our brains, is there not a risk that the magic will lose its power? That it will cease to be amazing? Wiseman thinks not. "What we get is a more informed audience," he says. "It's a little bit like juggling - you appreciate the juggler more once you've tried to juggle three balls and then you suddenly realise how hard it is to juggle seven."
The research will have benefits for the practitioners of magic, too. "What they will realise is that the human mind is a lot more fallible than we magicians expect," says Kuhn. "Maybe magicians are too careful in the way they conceal their secrets in front of an audience. They can probably get away with quite a bit more."

"People could be looking very close to where the cigarette was being dropped without even seeing it," he says. "Other people were looking quite far away but they did actually did spot the cigarette."
"What it shows is just how much of the picture in our head of our surroundings is a massive construction, based on expectations, what we think is important, what we normally encounter and so on," says Wiseman. "And that's what magicians are very good at exploiting."
Misdirection of an audience, therefore, depends on more than just making people look the wrong way - the truly successful magician misdirects attention. Often, attention is focused on where a person is looking, but this can be manipulated. "You might be looking at a scene and then you hear a voice from the back so your attention is moved towards the back and your processing of visual information will be impaired at the front," says Kuhn.
Verbal suggestion can also play a big role in misdirection. In a recent study, Wiseman looked at how the classic metal-bending tricks, employed by magicians the world over and perhaps made most famous by Uri Geller, used verbal cues. In his experiment, he showed a group of students a video of a trick where a magician bends a key, apparently using his psychokinetic ability (in fact, the bending was done by sleight of hand). The magician then placed the key on a table and the video ended with a static shot of the bent key, which did not bend any further. But a voiceover from the magician at this stage suggested that the key was indeed continuing to bend.
The results, published this year in the British Journal of Psychology, showed that 40% of people claimed to see the key continuing to bend during the static shot at the end of the video. In the control group, where there was no voiceover from the magician, only 5% reported that they saw the key continuing to bend.
Of course, suggestion can take other forms.
"With the ball experiment, we discovered that people aren't just looking up at the ball, they're looking at facial clues to judge where the ball is going to end up," says Kuhn. "If the magician doesn't look up in the air, the trick doesn't work. People feel that they're watching the ball but what they are doing is monitoring the magician's face and cues and using that information to guide their eye movements."

"Magicians are manipulating your consciousness. They are showing you something impossible," says Wiseman. "They're getting you to construct a narrative, which simply isn't true. So that means they know how to make you aware of certain things and blind to other things. What I'm hoping is that magic, this entertainment vehicle that has been around for a long time, will give us a real insight into the deep mysteries of consciousness."
Our brains filter out a huge amount of the mass of sensory input flooding in from our environment. Kuhn explains that we see what we expect to see and what our brains are interested in. "Our visual representation of the world is much more impoverished than we would assume. People can be looking at something without being aware of it. Perception doesn't just involve looking at an object but attending to it."
In Kuhn's recent work, he performed a trick where a cigarette seems to disappear. It involved no sleight of hand or secret. It was a simple case of dropping the cigarette into his lap. "It happens right in front of the spectator's eyes but I misdirect their attention away from the cigarette," says Kuhn.
While his spectators watched, they wore eye trackers (essentially a couple of cameras that monitor eye movement and provide an exact location of where a person is looking in a scene).
It is known that we only receive high-quality information from the area we are fixated on, right in the centre of our field of view. If you stretch out your arm, it is about two thumbs' width at the centre of your vision - everything else is pretty much blurred. The way we compensate for this is to move our eyes around to fill in the gaps and create a better picture of the world around us.
Kuhn's results, to be published in the journal Perception in the next few months, showed that simply staring at the location of the deception was not enough for people to discover how the trick happened.

Magic is all about convincing others that the impossible has just happened. And that deception is achieved with a high degree of skill and showmanship.
"We're starting to realise that magicians have a lot of implicit knowledge about how we perceive the world around us because they have to deceive us in terms of controlling attention, exploiting the assumptions we make when we do and don't notice a change in our environment," says Wiseman. "There is an enormous amount of really detailed instruction on how to perform magic. People are always blown away by how detailed a description you'll have."
A card trick that lasts four or five minutes, for example, might have 20 pages of detailed text to describe exactly where to look, what to say, what to do and so on. And a lot of the understanding of a trick has to be from the perspective of the audience.
While the magician's dexterity is important, the audience is also a vital participant in the deception. After all, it is in their minds that the illusion is created. "Magicians seem to be able to carry out secret actions in front of their audience without being spotted. I'm interested in why people don't perceive those actions," says Gustav Kuhn, a psychologist at Durham University.
A simple example of misdirection is used in the coin drop trick. "What you're doing there is pretending to take the coin from one hand to the other but, in fact, leaving it in the original hand," says Wiseman. "What's important is that you're looking where you want the audience to look. You're not looking at the coin, you're looking at the empty hand. In terms of movement, you're moving the hand that doesn't contain the coin to attract people's attention over to that hand."
Another trick, where a magician pretends to throw a ball up in the air, takes the misdirection a step further. "People often experience the ball moving up in the air even though there is no ball present," says Kuhn. They claim to see a ball moving but obviously it's not there so it must be in their mind."
Psychologists can use these tricks to catch a glimpse into how our minds interpret the world around us.