The honesty of science is being compromised at every turn

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The honesty of science is being compromised at every turn

 

" GM WATCH " <info

Fri, 26 Nov 2004 08:41:58 GMT

 

 

http://www.gmwatch.org

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We circulated this powerful essay at the time but it's so good we can't

resist doing so again. Here's an excerpt:

 

'...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.'

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NS Essay - The honesty of science is being compromised at every turn

NS 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 £30,000 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. For the latest in

current and cultural affairs to the New Statesman print edition.

 

 

 

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