Glasgow born and bred, Gordon Rintoul is director of the National Museums of Scotland. But it’s a project at the opposite end of Britain that he’s currently reading about in Tim Smit’s Eden (Bantam 2001). Smit’s book charts the development of the Eden Project, the biosphere park in Cornwall, and Rintoul is finding it “inspirational”. In terms of visitor numbers, the Eden Project has clearly triumphed over the sceptics, though he questions whether its long-term scientific aspirations will be met.
A lecture given by Richard Dawkins inspired him to dip into The Next Fifty Years: Science in the first…
