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GMW:_The_honesty_of_science_is_being_compromised_at_every_turn

" GM_WATCH "

Thu, 29 Apr 2004 15:47:15 +0100

 

GM WATCH daily

http://www.gmwatch.org

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This is a brilliant essay from Dr Colin Tudge, Research Fellow at the Centre for

Philosophy at the London School of Economics and a three-time winner of the

Glaxo/ABSW Science Writer of the Year Award, as well as former features editor

of New Scientist.

 

He concludes that unless drastic action is taken to challenge the current

corporate take over of science, " the future life of humanity is going to be both

more brutal and far shorter " than it need be.

 

EXCERPTS: " I have seen what I think comes close to perjury many a time - and

often on public platforms - in the name of corporate science. What makes it

worse is the piety that envelops it: the appeal to " evidence " , which for

scientists is the sine qua non. Detractors are not simply derided, but shamed

for their sloppy-mindedness. However, the " evidence " typically presented is

anything but. There are graphs and statistics - the trappings of science - yet

often they signify nothing. "

 

" ...Often the " evidence " presented in defence of, say, GM crops runs to

thousands of pages, apparently covering many hundreds of trials, all of them

carefully designed at great expense in the public interest. When Saddam Hussein

presented the UN with a 10,000-page apologia for the weapons he apparently did

not have, he was greeted with scepticism. The plausibility, diplomats felt, was

inversely related to the bulk. Indeed so. "

 

" ...rationality is increasingly equated with expediency, and expediency with

profit. So it is " rational " to seek to make as much money as possible out of

farming, say, and " irrational " to bang on about employment, and ways of life,

and autonomy, and suchlike abstractions. As the coup de grace, policy is

increasingly decided on the basis of what is " rational " , which is equated both

with what is commercially expedient and with what science says should happen. So

it is that GM crops are being wished upon us on the grounds that there are no

" scientific " reasons for not growing them. Anyone who cares about science - as

well as anyone who cares about humanity, and good thinking - should be appalled

by such nonsense. But it has become the norm, and is presented with all the

pompous piety for which we deride the worst of clerics. "

---

The honesty of science is being compromised at every turn

New Statesman Essay

Colin Tudge

Monday 26th April 2004

http://www.newstatesman.com/site.php3?newTemplate=NSArticle_People & newDisplayURN\

=200404260019

 

Can we still rely on what scientists tell us? Alas, no. Their conferences and

papers are sponsored by industry, their bad results are concealed, their jobs

are threatened if they step out of line. Colin Tudge on the corruption of

humanity's most precious discipline

 

Science - not science-based, " high " technology such as smart weapons or GM

crops, but science itself - is losing its way. Since science is the most potent

agent of change - the ultimately anti-conservative driver of world affairs -

this concerns us all. Some scientists worry about the present turn of events.

Some do their best to circumvent some of the secrecy and greed that are among

its modern manifestations: Sir John Sulston, for example, who put his team's

contributions to the Human Genome Project straight on to the web; or Tim

Berners-Lee, who invented the web in the first place, and

could surely by now be Bill Gates-rich, but who instead made it free - a gift to

humankind, like the ceramics of China.

 

But scientists as a whole do not seem worried enough. Some are waxing fatter

than their forerunners ever dreamt of - mere lucre, after all, had not used to

be the natural reward of the

intellectual. Some in the highest places feel that the present way of doing

things is good enough. It is just the way of the world, they say, and we have to

be " realistic " . Yet scientists of all ranks write to the newspapers and complain

about lack of

public " trust " , which they ascribe to " public ignorance " , to be remedied by

" education " . They are right about the lack of trust, but not about the

ignorance. People are not daft; and you don't have to be a PhD to smell a rat

that is, as colonels used to write from Tunbridge Wells, nibbling not simply at

the fact but at the very idea of civilisation.

 

Science draws upon, and one way or another impinges upon, the furthest reaches

of philosophy. Science cannot decide what is right or wrong but it affects moral

decisions in a whole range of ways. It has been entwined with theology since its

outset -

indeed can be seen as the scion of religion - and the present public spats so

often staged between the more dyed-in-the-wool clerics and the more aggressive

scientists tend to be crude in the extreme. In normal times, these ramifications

are fun. To be sure, there has been the odd burning. But on the whole, the

nature and the limits of science have been cosily contained in donnish debate.

 

What has changed things is modern, ruthless, vicious, crude economics: not

capitalism per se, which has many benign faces, but the neo-monetarist,

globalised, corporatised, no-holds-barred version of it. Science in its

beginnings, and in essence as conceived by Pythagoras, is a divine invention.

But even divinity is now deemed to be for sale and science, in effect, has been

bought. Politicians and corporate bosses often argue that globalisation is good

because it will bring unity to humankind. But it is hard to conceive of anything

more able to disrupt humanity than the privatisation of science, with all its

power to change minds and things. Patenting is necessary. But the widgets that

are granted temporary licence derive from a corpus of knowledge put together by

the genius of all humankind over at least 3,000 years. The sequestration of that

knowledge is theft.

 

Conversations with many scientists over many years have given me some insight

into why so many of them seem content to put up with what to onlookers seems so

foul. First, scientists say, science at its core is not as badly served as

outsiders think. Most " basic " science - the really fundamental ideas, such as

natural selection and the theory of relativity - is still paid for out of the

public purse, and its course is still decided by intellectuals, who follow the

ideas where they will

lead. Only the applications - the translation of basic ideas into technologies -

are in private hands. Despite appearances, core science maintains its

Pythagorean purity.

 

Second, some point out that input from commerce is not all bad. It provides

much-needed cash, and science is a lot more expensive in these days of linear

accelerators and PCR analysers than it was when Archimedes mused and sketched in

the sand. And the particular problems posed by industry have often prompted the

most profound insights. The laws of thermodynamics arose from study of the steam

engine. Louis Pasteur founded modern microbiology in the 19th century on

research undertaken for makers of wine and breeders of silkworms. Gregor Mendel

set out to solve problems of interest to plant breeders and founded the science

of genetics. It is fun and creative to turn a good wheeze into something that

actually works, and perhaps does some good, as a new vaccine may do.

 

Third, and more crudely, academic salaries are low. It is hard to raise a family

in a university town on GBP30,000 a year. Professors knocking on the door for

Nobel prizes may be paid less than supermarket managers, even without the free

car.

With a foot in industry, they can be rich, or at least be up there with the

solicitors and estate agents. Why not? Do they deserve less? Beyond any doubt,

academe and commerce can work very well together to everybody's benefit, and

often have. Many scientists, like most of us, just muddle along as best they can

and, if a drug company will pay them and nobody else will, well, what should a

poor post-doc do?

 

But a lot can go wrong, and does. It is good for science that taxes pay for core

research. But why, the taxpayers may reasonably ask, do the material fruits of

that research then pass into private hands?

 

If we believe that the world as a whole must be run by corporations - that they

alone have the competence and that corporations survive only by doing what

people want and need - then it is fine and dandy that people at large should

give them a head start. Otherwise, the present arrangement seems like a bad

deal.

 

In truth, industry and science are locked in a positive feedback loop: good for

both, in a way, but nothing much to do with the outside world. Industry provides

the wealth that finances the

science that produces the high technologies that enable the industry to make

more wealth, and so on and so on. But industry cannot afford to be altruistic,

as its executives are wont to point out. It cannot finance science that does not

increase its own wealth. So we have the situation so well recognised in medicine

- of drugs developed for western diseases, which are often minor irritations,

while the biggies of the world, such as malaria and all the other still rampant

tropical infections, are largely neglected.

 

With Aids, the drugs developed primarily for the rich have been made available

to (some) poor people only after up-to-the-wire protesting. Last year in the

Lancet, Dr Bernard Dixon asked whether Sars might be treated by the well-tried,

century-old

technique of " passive immunity " - injecting antibodies originally derived from

infected patients and multiplied in some neutral organism. This method can be

greatly improved by modern

biotechnology. Would it not work? Later a drug company executive told him: " Of

course it would. But we've looked at it and there's no money in it. " Goodness

me.

 

In agriculture the conflict is even more stark. The real threat of genetically

modified crops is not that they will poison us but that they are designed to

place all agriculture, including that of the developing world, in the hands of a

few companies. If the developing world takes its farming down the western

industrial route that those companies follow, half of its enormous population

will be permanently out of work. All in all, anyone who believes that big

corporations do work in the interests of all humanity is living on another

planet. Yet I have met many people in high places who do believe this.

 

More pernicious still is the way that privatisation has corrupted the fabric of

science itself. Science is dead without honesty, which should be judged as the

lawyers judge it: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. As

things are, this most

fundamental principle is compromised at every turn. Bad results are concealed;

apparently favourable results are bruited in the spirit of PR; people are bought

and/or threatened so that they comply, and even that once final guarantor of

honesty, " peer review " , is now routinely circumvented.

 

A cause celebre, described in a book out this year from Sheldon Krimsky of Tufts

University School of Medicine, Massachusetts (Science in the Private Interest),

is that of Dr Nancy Olivieri, who in the 1990s worked at the University of

Toronto and Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children. She was

sponsored by the Canadian Medical Research Council and the drug company Apotex

to test the company's new treatment for thalassaemia, an inherited form of

anaemia very common in the Mediterranean and south-east Asia though not so much

in Canada.

 

She found the drug did not work as well as Apotex hoped, and had worse side

effects than the company had expected. She prepared to publish, as scientists

should, and Apotex threatened to sue her. Then the university sacked her. Apotex

was preparing to donate $12.7m to the university, and its president was lobbying

the Canadian government on the firm's behalf. Olivieri was finally exonerated

and reinstated. But her case leaves a permanent stain, not on her but on

academe; and as university vice-chancellors struggle to keep their

institutions alive in a world that apparently regards academe as a luxury, it is

naive in the extreme to suppose that it was, or is, a one-off.

 

I have seen what I think comes close to perjury many a time - and often on

public platforms - in the name of corporate science. What makes it worse is the

piety that envelops it: the appeal to " evidence " , which for scientists is the

sine qua non. Detractors are not simply derided, but shamed for their

sloppy-mindedness. However, the " evidence " typically presented is anything but.

There are graphs and statistics - the trappings of science - yet often they

signify nothing.

 

I remember a recent defence of golden rice, genetically engineered to be rich in

Vitamin A, and hence to save the lives and sight of millions in the developing

world. There were pictures of molecules and of poor blind children, and rows of

figures to show how many could be helped, were it not for the tiresome

non-governmental organisations. But the speaker did not point out that Vitamin A

is, in effect, carotene, one of

the commonest molecules in nature. It is the yellow pigment that is present

(masked by the chlorophyll) in green leaves, and in yellow roots such as carrots

and cassava as well as fruits such as papaya and mango. If people practise

horticulture, they have Vitamin A aplenty, and traditional farming always

included horticulture. Problems start when traditional mixed farms are replaced

by monocultural commodity crops for export to make cash for the owners of the

new estates. Golden rice is not the antidote to old-fashioned inadequacy, as the

speaker implied. It merely solves (partially)

a problem created by modernity.

 

Then there is the new spectre of " confidentiality " , a long name for secrecy.

Trials to test the safety of innovations, from toothbrushes to GM crops, used to

be carried out by government scientists. Now, increasingly, they are by law in

the hands of the producers themselves who - again protected by law - are not

obliged to reveal all their results and methods. We must just take their word

for it. Often the " evidence " presented in defence of, say, GM crops runs to

thousands of pages, apparently covering many hundreds of trials, all of them

carefully designed at great expense in the public interest. When Saddam Hussein

presented the UN with a 10,000-page apologia for the weapons he apparently did

not have, he was greeted with scepticism. The plausibility, diplomats felt, was

inversely related to the bulk. Indeed so.

 

Peer review? Well, it has never been quite what it was made out to be. There has

always been bias. Much worse, however, is the state described by Richard Horton,

editor of the Lancet, in the New York Review of Books last month. Drug companies

now pay academics to give papers at international

conferences, reporting favourable results from trials. (The companies also pick

up all the other delegates' expenses, including evening concerts and day trips,

and generally shower them with gifts. I have picked up the odd diary myself over

the years.) These papers are then published, and commonly appear as supplements

in respectable scientific journals, often with little or no peer review and with

no direct input from the editor. This is PR, but it is solemnised by the

reputation of the journal, in turn built up by the honesty of others.

 

There is one final twist, an abstract one but perhaps most damaging of all.

Science, since its outset, has been fostered as a rational pursuit. It is the

ultimate cerebration. Scientists sometimes appear as cold fish even though they

are driven by

passion. They suppress their passions as a matter of strategy, to keep their

thoughts clearer.

 

Yet all serious scientists, from the Greeks onwards, have recognised the

limitations of their cerebrations. First, they acknowledge that the human

ability to find out, and to understand, is limited. Second, they recognise that

however hard they try, they can never eliminate subjectivity or mistakes.

Science is often presented as a seamless edifice of certainty, " rational " all

the way through, where in reality it has the texture of Dundee cake: currants of

" fact " and raisins of

well-tried theory contained in a dough of rhetoric and supposition. It relies

far more on untried dogma than is commonly admitted. Third, scientists with a

taste for philosophy - as the best ones have - recognise that " rationality " is

not all there is. It is only half of being human

 

This idea is expressed in many ways - the Greeks pitting Apollo against

Dionysus; Thomas Aquinas insisting that understanding requires both the

empiricism of science and divine revelation; David Hume proclaiming that we

cannot derive " ought " from " is " ; and the entire Romantic movement, emphasising

the absolute need for emotional response as a guide to human action.

 

Now, in the debased discussions that pass for critical debate, science is

flaunted as if it had in fact achieved its own ideal, as if it really is as

" rational " as its best exponents aspire to be.

That is a mistake in itself. To compound matters, rationality is increasingly

equated with expediency, and expediency with profit. So it is " rational " to seek

to make as much money as possible out of farming, say, and " irrational " to bang

on about employment, and ways of life, and autonomy, and suchlike abstractions.

As the coup de grace, policy is increasingly decided on the basis of what is

" rational " , which is equated both with what is commercially expedient and with

what science says should happen. So it is that GM crops are being wished upon us

on the grounds that there are no " scientific " reasons for not growing them.

Anyone who cares about science - as well as anyone who cares about humanity, and

good thinking - should be appalled by such nonsense. But it has become the norm,

and is presented with all the pompous piety for which we deride the worst of

clerics.

 

Scientists and politicians are forever banging on about the need for " public

debate " on the various manifestations of science, albeit with the implication

that the status quo is basically fine and that the net flow of ideas should be

de haut en bas. Well, we do need a public debate, but not the kind usually

proposed. To put things right we need to dig very deep indeed, back to

Pythagoras, and on from there, taking in most branches of moral philosophy,

economics and theology. Otherwise the future life of humanity is going to be

both more

brutal and far shorter than it needs to be.

 

This article first appeared in the New Statesman.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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