– Mr Anagnostopoulos, what aroused my interest is that you are an avid traveller. Is it true that you have visited 83-85 countries?
– Now it’s 88 with those I visited in the summer.
– Have you always had the desire to travel?
– I have it since I was a small child, as with my parents I spent the summers travelling round Europe by car, going camping. That’s how I realized that by exploring the planet you see the diversity and you acquire knowledge about civilization, culture, environment, flora and fauna. The subject of wildlife is also something that interests me a lot. From the summers I have spent lying on the beach, I hardly remember anything. But if you ask me about when I went to Mongolia, I know what to answer you and what exactly I was doing just about every single moment I was there. Because a different experience leaves a mark in your memory. At the same time, you mingle with different people and you become “richer” as a person.
– I have read that you have done a programme with Al Gore on Climate Change.
– Correct. Al Gore has a programme that he calls Climate Reality, through which he does some training sessions throughout the year. I participated in this workshop in San Francisco in 2012, and it’s an experience I remember very clearly. However, in order not to exaggerate things, I was not the only one. We were a group of 200 people from all over the world when he did the workshop, which he does regularly 3-4 times a year.
– I guess it is of great interest to learn something new from this person and to get in touch with people who have similar interests.
– For sure. Al Gore is also a charismatic speaker, but I think that of all the groups of people I have been involved in, the most interesting is Ashoka, the global network for social entrepreneurship.
– You are also the first Fellow of Ashoka from Greece.
– Yes. There it was a “hard-going” test! I went through a lot of interviews and procedures that included one with a psychologist who assessed if you could bring about a positive social change, to interviews with three serial entrepreneurs from the UK. Eventually I made it.
– When did you start to get involved in social entrepreneurship? Because your relation to science I think started earlier.
– I was involved in science earlier. I did not establish SciCo to become an entrepreneur. I founded it because I enjoyed explaining science and I liked playing on stage. That is why our first actions were theatrical performances of popular science. My relationship to science began much earlier, indeed. From (the age of) 18 to 30 I did a first degree, postgraduate and doctorate in genetics with a scholarship in London and with several research publications. At the age of 30, I came back to Greece to do postdoctoral research on hereditary cancer. I had completed fourteen years moving with momentum in the field of science research when I participated in a communication and science competition, organized by the British Council in 2007. In this competition, Famelab, you had three minutes to communicate a scientific subject to the general public. That’s where I realized I wanted to do this now. Create performances that explain science topics amusingly and in simple words. With a five-member team, we played for 30,000 children for 3 years. At the same time, because this was not viable, I worked for 5 years in a multinational pharmaceutical company, in the Marketing and Strategy Department. There I learned much, because the corporate environment is extremely structured. In 2013, I left and since then we have started to take on projects. Starting with theatre, continuing with experiential learning in executives and children in a fun way, and then with festivals and many more.
– In addition to the Athens Science Festival that you do every year, and which has a great response, I have seen some events you are organizing in some metro stations.
– Yes, “Mind the Lab” from “Mind the Gap” (heard in the London Underground). We, as a social enterprise, aim to disseminate science. Some of our actions are scientific events and festivals, which are repeated every year, not only in Athens, but also in other cities and Cyprus. In the 5 years we have been organizing the festivals, we have had 200,000 visitors, of whom we have found, through questionnaires and interviews, that 80% are already positively inclined towards the sciences. So we wondered how we could reach an even wider audience, beyond the Athens Science Festival, and we decided to do the first festival of interactive demonstration of experiments and science, at the metro stops, worldwide. So we created Mind the Lab, and we set it up as a pilot project in Athens last year at 8 stations, and this year it was held in September in Athens and in November in Berlin, Edinburgh and Madrid. The Global Association of Science Museums may also participate in 50 cities around the world. If this happens, it will be a Greek social innovation that within two years has scaled up on a global level.
– How do children respond to all these?
– Children have a fascinating innocence in the way they ask or perceive certain things and a directness as well, because they do not have social filters or “social software,” as I call them. In 2007, before SciCo, I was a curator at an excellent Science Communication Exhibition at the Athens Concert Hall, where the history of man and chimpanzee was depicted, underlining that we have 5 million years behind us, up to a common ancestor. You could see the evolution of humans from Homo erectus to the various intermediate stages and today’s Homo sapiens. And while I was explaining to them, a kid asks me: “That is, chimpanzees did not evolve at all?” Obviously the chimpanzees also evolved, but the approach of the exhibit was totally anthropocentric, where the evolution of the chimpanzee was depicted in a graph (wrongly) as a straight line. Something that the kid caught onto. This is genius, if you think of it in its simplicity, as an observation element.
– Do you have a personal vision for the organization?
– The basic vision is to be able to impart a way of thinking, which is creative, but is based on data and facts—and I am not just referring to scientific facts. It is not our goal to turn everyone into scientists or engineers. We envision a rational-thinking society, with free-thinking people who rely on their own judgment.
– Thank you very much for the extremely interesting discussion we had.
– Thank you.
