SCIENCE AND POLITICS: MELDING FACTS AND VALUES

In 18th century Britain, the Admiralty offered a prize of £30,000 - a fortune in those times - to anyone who could find an accurate method of calculating longitude at sea, after a naval fleet ran aground with the loss of many sailors' lives. It was a country clockmaker, John Harrison, who succeeded, greatly reducing the uncertainties involved in the long-distance sea voyages on which much of the British economy came to depend.

In Western economies, this kind of government support for research was the exception rather than the rule until the second half of the 20th century. Massive government investment in technology by all the combatants during the Second World War produced a range of advances with important civil applications, including rocket propulsion, nuclear energy, radar, electronic computers and antibiotics. Governments that had previously put little effort into planning and funding research realised that supporting their countries' inventors and scientists could bring a significant economic return. Ever since, the rate of scientific discovery and technological change has escalated year by year.

These advances, applied in areas as diverse as agriculture, health, consumer goods, transport and entertainment, have transformed the quality of life for people in the industrialised world, and many of those in less developed countries have also enjoyed increases in life expectancy and material welfare. Technological advance, however, brought unforeseen problems, particularly in terms of environmental pollution and biomedical ethics. In the 1960s Rachel Carson's Silent Spring revealed the knock-on effects on wildlife of the insecticide DDT, while a decade or two later meteorologists discovered the hole in the Earth's protective ozone layer caused by chlorofluorocarbons. Disasters such as those at Seveso, Bhopal and Chernobyl contributed to a new mood of doubt about the capacity of science-based industry to regulate itself appropriately. And new biomedical techniques, such as organ transplantation and in vitro fertilisation, raised ethical questions that could not be resolved through scientific argument alone.

In step with these concerns, governments have tempered their support for technological advance with regulatory structures to ensure that it progresses within a framework of public safety. Increasingly the need for regulation has taken on a global dimension, as neither the benefits nor the hazards of technology recognise national boundaries. And in the 21st century, we are learning that regulatory structures must take account not only of a narrow, mathematically calculated definition of risk, but also of the priorities and values of the society in which we live.

In the past five years I have daily had to consider how a government should balance its two roles as promotor and regulator of research and technological development. My term as Chief Scientific Adviser has coincided with the culmination of an international scientific enterprise of greater global significance than the first moon landing: the sequencing of the complete human genome, the "book of life". The books of life of other plant and animal species are also open to those who would read them, and the means exist to cut-and-paste genetic information from one to another. At the same time, we are discovering how much of our own evolutionary past, as written in our genes, is shared with other living things: roughly half of all human genes, for example, are shared with bananas (I sometimes think this is more obvious in some of my acquaintances than others). So, on the one hand, we stand on the threshold of a new era of applications in biotechnology that could transform both health care and food production. But on the other, fears about the unknown risks of this new technology have given rise to a new upsurge of public mistrust in science and scientists. I will return to this theme later in my talk. But first let me review the Government's role in promoting research.

Why should any government support scientific research? Broadly there are three reasons:

• through the advancement of knowledge the culture of the country is enriched; this quest for understanding is the prime motivation for most of the individuals engaged in publicly-funded research
• investment in science buys membership of an international enterprise, and access to the knowledge produced by other countries; it also produces a cadre of well-trained and creative individuals
• it brings direct economic benefits through the transfer of people and ideas to industry: in the words of Prime Minister Tony Blair, "the science base is the absolute bedrock of our economic performance"
  

 

Promotion of research involves a combination of investment, organisation and direction:

• How much should we spend? At around 0.6 per cent of GDP, the UK's investment in basic research throughout the 1990s was relatively low for one of the top 12 scientific nations. Japan, in contrast, was spending over 1 per cent of GDP in 1997 (Figure 1). In 1998, Tony Blair announced increases in spending from government and non-government sources amounting to £1.4 billion over three years. However, spending alone is not directly correlated with scientific output, measured in terms of published papers (or citation of such papers) per capita. The most productive countries are not big economies such as the US and Germany, but Switzerland, Israel and the Scandinavian countries (Figure 2). Combining data on productivity and investment to give a "value for money" figure puts these same countries near the top; but the UK emerges in first place, by virtue of having both relatively high productivity and relatively low investment (Figure 3).
• How should governments deploy their investment so as to stimulate scientific creativity and obtain the best value for their money? The UK operates a system of "dual support" for basic science, which features a highly competitive approach to the allocation of funds for both infrastructure and direct costs. This competitive focus on excellence appears to generate a higher rate of productivity than systems that allocate basic science expenditure via formulae designed to give fair shares to all, or where funding depends on seniority rather than good ideas. Research laboratories in countries that do well on the value-for-money measure are also characterised by relaxed social structures in which younger people are genuinely free to express their individual creativity.
• Ensuring a steady supply of such enthusiastic young people is also critical. Since the mid-1970s, the UK has undergone nothing less than a revolution in higher education, with a fivefold increase in the number of 24-year-olds who are educated to degree level, and a threefold increase in those with degrees in the natural sciences and engineering (Figure 4). In 1998, university graduates made up over 35% of this age group in the UK, compared with just under 33% in the USA. The UK percentage is higher than essentially all other of the 28 OECD countries (whose average is around 20%). This population explosion in higher education is one of the factors in revolutionising the knowledge base on which our culture and our economic future depends. For the UK in particular, the new challenge is to provide incentives to motivate diversity of aspiration among institutions of higher education - with individual institutions emphasising basic research, engagement with local industry, acquisition of professional or vocational skills, in varying mixtures and proportions - while always focussing on excellence.
• How far should governments go in directing the research undertaken by scientists in university laboratories, to maximise the possibilities of a good return on their investment in terms of wealth creation and quality of life? In the UK grants for research are distributed mainly via subject-based Research Councils, who make decisions based on peer review of proposals from individual scientists. In the 1990s the government added an over-arching process for setting research priorities through its Foresight Programme. The programme, now in its second five-year cycle, brings together people from academic, professional and commercial backgrounds to identify areas of opportunity for basic research with a strong prospect of commercial development in the medium to longer term. The reports of the subject-based Foresight Panels feed into funding decisions made by Research Councils and other bodies, but perhaps more importantly begin the process of interaction between academics and people from business and industry that highlights real world problems.
• What can governments do to help turn research output into business opportunities? Schemes launched in the UK in the past two years provide funds to help innovators in universities develop their discoveries commercially, for regional centres to offer infrastructure support for spin-out companies, and to enhance interactions between universities and the businesses in their neighbourhoods. Going wider, other new initiatives aimed at fostering entrepreneurship include focussed tax credits for R & D in small and medium-sized businesses, tax-free stock option schemes, and - even more broadly - first steps toward destigmatising failures of honest adventure, which are inseparable from creative risk-taking. We will have a long way to go, however, before we share the enterprise culture that characterises the US.

These measures are designed to foster a vibrant scientific community and an expansion of technology-based industries, which are needed to offset the UK's decline in many areas of traditional manufacturing. However, science and technology cannot proceed in isolation: they take place within a social and cultural context. In a democratic society, a government's freedom of action depends on maintaining the trust of the electorate in its decisions. In recent years, in Britain in particular, that trust has been eroded with respect to a number of scientific issues, notably those that involve biotechnology. Some of the reasons are obvious, others less so. It has become of prime importance that government advisory and regulatory mechanisms should not only be, but be seen to be, designed with the best interests of the community in mind.

Such distrust for "the new" should be kept in perspective. In earlier times, it was often expressed in draconian terms: Bruno's burning, Galileo's recantation. This being recognised, we should nevertheless ask what are the factors that tend to undermine public confidence in today's scientific decision-making?

• The automatic deference to authority that prevailed in many countries is now being replaced with a greater demand for public consultation, which is a very good thing. At the same time scientific and medical advances and government legislation have greatly reduced risks to health and life expectancy, through accidents or infectious disease for example. There is now an erroneous expectation that life can be "risk-free", and faith in the system tends to be further undermined every time this proves not to be the case.
  
• Science education in schools focuses too much on facts, rather than process, leading to the misleading impression that science is a kind of "Trivial Pursuit", dealing in certainties rather than, as is more often the case, conclusions based on the balance of probabilities after evaluation of the available evidence. Many policy decisions, for example on the long-term environmental consequences of the cultivation of GM crops, have to be made while there are still significant ecological questions to be answered, and there is therefore a degree of uncertainty. Debate among scientists on these issues, which is an essential part of the process of acquiring knowledge and understanding, can be perceived as vacillation and weakness.
  
• While contemporary public mistrust of scientific decision-making is by no means a uniquely British phenomenon, it was greatly exacerbated in Britain by a single episode. The BSE epidemic that caused huge damage to the British beef industry in the 1990s, and which has led to some dozens of human deaths, was an example of an unforeseen hazard that government action failed to avert until it was too late. The damage to public confidence was arguably compounded by the perceived atmosphere of secrecy in which policy decisions seemed to be taken, combined with over-confident reassurances about food safety from ministers (which later proved to be unfounded).
• The aftermath of the BSE crisis left a cloud of suspicion which I think still overshadows discussions related to food safety in the UK, and elsewhere in Europe. Newspapers across the political spectrum have caught this mood and amplified it with campaigns against "Frankenstein foods", as they term products derived from genetically-modified crops. In the highly competitive media industry, none has wanted to be left out, and dispassionate reporting of the science has been eclipsed by politically-oriented campaigning. A study carried out recently in the UK found that at the height of these campaigns, in the spring of 1999, fewer than 15 per cent of articles on GM food were written by specialist science correspondents. Over this period, the same study classified essentially all radio and television, and 8 of 11 newspapers, as reporting in a "campaign" rather than an informing "non-campaign" mode. Along with all this, a broad coalition of pressure groups with interests in the area of the environment, consumer affairs, organic food and anticapitalism added opposition to GM foods to their campaign aims.

The crisis in public trust is one of the greatest challenges facing scientific policymakers today. To ignore such widespread fears would simply be wrong. It also would be politically damaging, and play into the hands of those who advocate "direct action" such as the destruction of GM test plots. But to follow the fickle weather vane of public opinion is no solution either. A decade ago restrictive legislation introduced in Germany in response to public concern almost destroyed its indigenous biotechnology industry, with companies including BASF and Boehringer Mannheim choosing to site their factories and laboratories overseas. Since the mid-1990s the economic pressures of reunification have led to cross-party support for efforts to stimulate regional biotechnology industries, and Germany now has more biotech companies than any other country in Europe. But it still has several years' ground to make up in terms of products and market value.

In the UK we have sought to move forward by broadening the scope for public consultation on scientific issues while continuing to rely on the highest standards of expert technical advice. The overriding priority of the government is to put proper controls in place to regulate biotechnology and genetic modification, so that the environment and the health of the public are protected. The UK has recently adopted a new advisory framework whose key principles are wide consultation, transparency and timeliness.

In future all committees that are involved in providing specialist advice on biotechnology, such as the Advisory Committee on Releases into the Environment (ACRE) or the Genetics and Insurance Committee (GAIC), will ensure that their membership, terms of reference, plans of work and findings are made publicly available in a form which is accessible to the non-specialist. At the same time three new advisory bodies - the Food Standards Agency (FSA), the Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission (AEBC), and the Human Genetics Commission (HGC) - will have a forward-looking, strategic role that encompasses broader ethical and social concerns. Their members have a wide range of interests and expertise, and most of their sessions will be held in public.

This restructuring reflects a dawning recognition that the enterprise known as "the public understanding of science" must be complemented by more strenuous efforts on the part of science to understand the public. Naive expectations that if only the public understood more science they would find it more acceptable have turned out to be far from reality; detailed surveys show that those countries whose citizens score highest on quizzes about scientific facts and methods also are more likely to worry about the unintended consequences of new technologies. This is how it should be! So, it remains important that scientists should be prepared to engage with the public, explaining what they do, and why, in terms that are accessible to the majority. It is a great mistake to dismiss genuine worries about science and technology as merely the result of ignorance.

Those who express concern about possible threats to the environment through genetic modification of crops, or about the impact of multinational commercial interests on subsistence farmers in developing countries, or about the possibility of changing the genetic make-up of unborn children, are expressing values that are widely shared. I share them. A value in which I have a particular interest, and which the nations of the world endorsed at the Rio Summit in 1992, is the preservation of biodiversity. The demands of an ever-growing human population are destroying our fellow species at a rate fully comparable with those which characterised the Big Five episodes of mass extinction in the fossil record (such as that which extinguished the dinosaurs). There are utilitarian arguments for preserving biodiversity: species represent the raw material of the biotechnology of tomorrow, and we risk the collapse of ecosystems if we remove too many species from their delicately-balanced structures. But a third argument, no less valid, is simply the ethical, value-based argument that we have a duty of stewardship to the species with which we share the planet.

We need to encompass a wide range of views in a debate about what kind of world we want to live in. Once we can agree on the values that motivate us as members of our societies, we then need to ask how best to pursue those values. Here I part company from those who would cast scientific rationality as the problem. For me it is essential to finding a solution. Action must be taken on the basis of facts, not prejudice. Our values will indicate what questions we should be asking about the natural world and humanity's impact on it; our science will ensure that the answers have a solid foundation. There can be a paradox here: we often need passionate, value-based concerns to motivate action, but cold, fact-based analysis as the basis for the actions themselves. Where there is uncertainty, costs and benefits need to be weighed on the basis of all available evidence; if a risk seems small but the possible consequences devastating, as in the case of BSE, then a precautionary approach may be the best option.

Advances in science and technology, especially those emerging from a new understanding of the molecular basis of life, have happened so rapidly that governments the world over have been caught unawares, first by the possibilities of the technology itself and secondly by the public's reaction. They have been left scrambling to make policies in a context of scientific uncertainty and vociferous public opinion. Inevitably policymakers are swayed by the culturally dominant belief systems - be they ethical, political, commercial or scientific - in their own countries, which can lead to lack of harmonisation between one country and another. The issue of international trade in genetically modified foods, for example, has already led to hostile confrontations between supporters and opponents of the technology.

We need to start a new debate at the international level, listening to and learning from the values of countries from North and South, East and West, and pooling scientific knowledge, with a view to achieving some consensus on the problems that face us and how best they might be solved. We have a model in the form of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which collates the expertise of over 3000 scientists from around 170 countries, to delineate a landscape of scientific knowledge and uncertainty - areas of agreement; areas of broad consensus but still with differing minority opinions; and areas of plain ignorance. Such a communal painting of the scientific landscape was hugely helpful in persuading governments to agree to begin controlling emissions of greenhouse gases at Kyoto in December 1997.

The need for international agreement is twofold. Prohibitions on procedures involving biotechnology become meaningless when they can be easily circumvented by travelling to a country with less restrictive standards. More seriously, a decision taken in one country could have consequences that transcend national boundaries. For example, there are concerns that transplanting humanised pig organs to human patients could trigger a pandemic of unrecognised pig viruses in the human population; country-by-country is clearly not the best way to address this question.

The OECD conference on the health and safety aspects of GM foods, which took place in Edinburgh at the end of February, was a step in the right direction. It drew participants from a wide range of backgrounds, including members of the lobbying organisations that oppose GM. I would like to see this initiative develop into a more permanent structure with a broad remit on biotechnological issues, embracing developed and developing countries, scientists, consumers, environmentalists and anyone else with an interest in finding a way forward through this difficult area. A brief survey of sources of contention includes medical ethics, health and safety, animal welfare, environmental protection, intellectual property rights and access to new drugs.

I believe we need to do more to extend such discussions across the range of 21st century science and technology, so that we can outline international agreements on the broader questions that are already upon us, and be ready for new ones that will emerge as the century unfolds. The world's population of 6 billion is set to almost double by 2050. Meeting the needs of those people is a political problem, but one in which science will have a major part to play. The challenge is to distil from emotional and ethical arguments - arguments that come from the heart - the values that will govern the choices we make. But we still need scientific analysis - cold rationalism if you will - to choose the tools that will best help us to meet our objectives.

Hanover Mark.3