Swearing is good for you, with Dr Emma Byrne and Samira Ahmed | The Rosalind Franklin Lecture 2025

Often censored, always emotive, swearing is the part of language that speaks when other words fail us. In the Rosalind Franklin Lecture 2025, Emma Byrne unpacks the power of strong language. Using data from medicine and neuroscience, she demonstrates why swearing has such a potent effect on both the speaker and their audience. She draws on her own research, which shows that swearing is used in sympathy and in excitement far more than it is used in anger. She also looks at pleas for civility and asks: do these make for better discourse, or do they just preserve the status quo?

Whether you try not to swear, or you have a broad and lively swearing vocabulary, the Rosalind Franklin Lecture 2025 challenges the still-pervasive myths that surround this most adaptable part of speech.

– – – About Emma Byrne – – –
Emma is an honest-to-goodness robot scientist who, when she’s not developing intelligent systems, writes for Forbes, the FT and the Guardian. She frequently appears on Sky News and the BBC talking about the future of artificial intelligence and robotics. Her PhD in Artificial Intelligence (UCL 2004) led to a research career that spans projects as disparate as modelling the neural circuits that underlie language acquisition to teaching a robot how to run experiments in yeast genomics.

Her interest in neuroscience led to her first popular science book: 'Swearing is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language'. Her most recent book, How to Build a Human is a smart, funny, humane look at what science knows about childhood. It will reassure and inspire parents, would-be-parents, and even once-were-parents about the messy and beautiful process of parenting like a scientist. She recently appeared alongside Ardal O'Hanlan in 'Holy F***' (RTÉ), offering a scientific explanation of the joys of swearing.

– – – About Samira Ahmed – – –
Samira Ahmed is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster who presents Front Row on Radio 4 and Newswatch on BBC One, and was named Audio Broadcaster of the Year at the 2020 British Broadcasting Press Guild Awards. In 2023, she made headlines around the world after revealing the existence of the earliest complete concert recording of The Beatles in the UK – made at Stowe boarding school in 1963. She won Stonewall Broadcast of the Year while a presenter at Channel 4 News. Her documentaries include 'Art of Persia' on BBC Four (2020) and 'Disgusted, Mary Whitehouse' (2022) for Radio 4. She writes a regular column in 'New Humanist' and is writing a BFI Classics book on A Hard Day’s Night.