Fifty years ago C.P. Snow, a research scientist, former civil servant and novelist who had paced the “corridors of power” before he invented the phrase, delivered a lecture in the Cambridge Senate House. Entitled “The Two Cultures”, it warned of the growing gulf between scientists and “literary intellectuals”, a class he described as “natural Luddites” who not only sneered at science as an inferior branch of learning and were ignorant of the Second Law of Thermodynamics but in their complacent uninterest in the scientific revolution were blind to the menaces of nuclear weapons, overpopulation and the gap between the rich and poor. They were, he announced portentously, slowly leading Britain into Venetian decadence.

His lecture was often naive, in parts sloppily argued and at times as bland as his novels. But it touched on an issue that had resonance in postwar Britain: why had the education system so neglected science that most people could no longer understand the language, let alone the purpose, of those new technologies that were in the forefront of social and material “progress”?

Snow might have begun a useful debate on the teaching of science and the breadth of knowledge needed to be a public figure as rounded - indeed, almost spherical - as Snow. But then came the riposte. F.R. Leavis, a prickly, puritan Cambridge literary critic, delivered an ad hominem attack on Snow of such astonishing vitriol, so reptilian in its fusillade of personal abuse, that all discussion of the “two cultures” was lost in the cacophony of scandal. Not only were Snow's warnings ridiculed; but the very notion that science was talking a language others could not follow was denounced as philistine nonsense.

The debate has not been stilled. Nor should it be. Science may not be the simplistic panacea for the world's ills that Snow envisaged, nor have his vaunted figures proving the superiority of Soviet scientific education been vindicated by history. But there is an urgent need to base policy on sound scientific principles, to grasp the overriding importance of empirical evidence and to see the ethical dimensions of where science is taking public policy. Snow would be wrong to suggest now that the literary dilettanti still run the Establishment. They do not. Not can the “arts” in general be posited as polar opposites to science. Is not some of the best writing today thoroughly conversant with particle physics, astronomy or genetics, areas of knowledge of widespread and passionate interest? Are scientists not equally able to shape public culture and strive for a Renaissance fusion of diverse branches of learning?

There is not a total mutual incomprehension. But there is a problem of language. Mathematics, the shorthand for so much science, is not easily accessible. Much scientific argument is presented in jargon that to outsiders is baffling. Realms of knowledge essential for any rational discussion have been fenced off by a school system that for millions of pupils ends science education at GCSE. This must be recognised. Science - and engineering - must not be alien territory for politicians, the media and policymakers. This is why The Times is supporting the Cheltenham Science Festival and why it is sponsoring debate on such issues as genetic testing. The Two Cultures must not diverge. It is up to policymakers to heed Snow's warning - even if 50 years late.