june 2007 a publication of the ba science& publicaffairs

Science&PublicAffairs

Doping in sport

Utafiti inCoastal Kenya

June 2007 a publication of the BA

British Association for the Advancement of Science www.the-ba.net

What is happiness?

Cultural collis

ions in science p10

| SCIENCE & PUBLIC AFFAIRS | June 2007

Y Contents

EditorWendy BarnabyNews EditorVanessa SpeddingChairman of Editorial CommitteeNancy Lane

Editorial CommitteeAnjana Ahuja Lloyd Anderson Clive Cookson Peter CotgreaveDavid Fisk Ian Gibson Dougal GoodmanWilliam Gosling Helen Haste Alan IrwinClare Matterson Ken Okona-Mensah Kathy Sykes

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Y Cover Story 10Utafiti in Coastal KenyaBella Starling, Dorcas Kamuya, Caroline Gikonyo, Sassy Molyneux and Vicki Marsh reveal challenges of communicating research in Coastal Kenya

Y SPATalk 4Carbon rationing: a valuable way of cutting carbon emissions?Mayer Hillman and Claire Fox disagree

Y Focus 6A knowledge economy with science at its coreMalcolm Wicks on engaging the public

Y Shorts 8Bringing the human factor into climate models… Nanotechnology risks must be examined… News in brief

Y OpinionEffective software needs engagement 12Adam Laurie celebrates Open Source

Connecting for health? 13Martyn Thomas calls for a review of the NHS IT programme

Y Exchange 14What is happiness?Rita Carter, Richard Schoch and Sebastian Saville have different recipes

Y Obituary 25Sir Gareth RobertsGordon Duff remembers a champion for science

Y Review 26The most devastating diseases of plantsJames Brown denies the fungi are winning

Y Correspondence 27Understanding the real world… Experimentation on animals

Y Sounding Off 28Do your homework!An open letter to science teachers from Lee Turnpenny and Michael Carroll

Y The Wakeford Watch 29How public engagement came down from the mountainTom Wakeford

Y SET in Parliament 30Combating climate changeIan Gibson wants to invest in plant science

Y Contents

June 2007 | SCIENCE & PUBLIC AFFAIRS | page 3

Features

Cultural collisionsWhat do you do if, like Wellcome Trustmedical workers in Africa, you suddenlydiscover that your cultural baggage is provinghard to bear for the people you are trying tohelp? That, in local custom, your logo of twoentwined snakes foretells death? That therecipients of your therapeutic skills suspectyou of giving their blood to evil spirits?

These were some of the unpleasant findingsof research carried out by the Wellcome Trustin Kenya (pp10–11). Trying to get to gripswith malaria and its transmission, themedical workers were unaware of the waythe local people regarded them and theirefforts.

In response, they developed andimplemented a new approach to communityengagement, which has evolved into aprogramme of partnership and consultationbetween them and the local communities.The two-way dialogue that has resultedbenefits not only the local people, but alsothe science being carried out amongst them.

In Kenya, such engagement is encouraging.But it does not always work. This issue of SPAalso hears about the difficulties of bringingpeople round a table to exchange views.Laura Potts (p19) tried to gather togetherpeople with different opinions on the role of exposure to environmental hazards in the

incidence of breast cancer. The petulanceshe encountered – with one person evenrefusing to sit next to another – gives someinsight into the practical problemsengagement can face.

No wonder that Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientists have stressedthe need for future models to incorporatepredictions of human behaviour, if efforts to mitigate global warming are to beeffective (Shorts, p8).

The need for engagement betweendesigners of software and computer users isspelled out in the Opinion columns. MartynThomas (p13) pleads for an independentreview of the NHS IT programme,Connecting for Health, while Adam Laurie(p12) extols Open Source software becauseits community of experts examines it forbugs and security problems before it islaunched.

Keith Davies (p21) wants to bring back theHaldane model of research, which wouldseparate it as far as possible from politicaland administrative pressures. In his opinion,our current business model of researchundermines public trust. Alan Malcolm (p20)offers a specific example: public mistrust ofGM food. Will it, he wonders, scupper a newadditive for ice cream?

The SPATalk (pp4–5) deals with carbonrationing. Is it a valuable way of cuttingcarbon emissions? Yes, believes MayerHillman, who argues that the only realisticand fair way ahead is by adopting aninternational framework based on equal percapita shares of carbon emissions across theworld’s population. No, retorts Claire Fox,who accuses Hillman of a ‘paralysingobsession with reducing carbon emissions’,and says his prescription will ‘deny the gainsof modernity to the under-developed world.’

Meanwhile, some good news stories.Sandra Knapp and Steve Cafferty (p17)celebrate the 300th anniversary ofLinnaeus’s birth by describing how hiscollections are about to be available online,to the particular benefit of Third-Worldscientists whose countries often suppliedthe specimens in the first place. And JasonHall-Spencer (p24) relates how the publicityhis research received at the 2005 Festival ofScience has led to conservation of preciouscoral reefs off the UK.

Finally, Gordon Duff (p25) pays tribute toGareth Roberts.

Wendy Barnaby, [email protected]

Doping in sport 16Phil Willis looks towards the London Olympics

Linnaeus’s collections go online 17Sandra Knapp and Steve Cafferty celebrate

New help for women in SET 18Industry targeted, reports Roger Livesey

Divided we stand 19People don’t want to exchange views,discovers Laura Potts

The ice protein cometh? 20Alan Malcolm anticipates just desserts

Bring back Haldane! 21Keith Davies argues that the business modelfor research leads to lack of public trust

Action on climate change 22Trust is important to BP, says John Browne

Carbon reduction in the UK: is there any point? 23Gordon Walker and Patrick Devine-Wrightassess community renewables

Festival publicity helped change fishing policy 24Jason Hall-Spencer has a good news story

Dear Claire,The time for denial is long over. Theoverwhelming scientific consensus is that theEarth’s atmosphere has a finite capacity toabsorb greenhouse gases. In just a couple ofcenturies, human civilisation has burnedreserves of the Sun’s energy, accumulatedover millions of years in the form of gas, coaland oil. The result is already seriousdestabilisation of the climate.

We must now all share responsibility forpreventing further ecological catastrophe andthe ensuing loss in the planet’s habitability. A burgeoning world population andaspirations to ever higher standards of livingmake the search for an effective solution evenmore challenging.

It is wishful thinking to believe that the

essential dramatic reduction in greenhousegases can be achieved by voluntary changesin behaviour, by technological innovation, orby green taxation alone.

In the autumn of 1939, faced with theprospect of scarcity of a basic commodity, the government introduced food rationing.We are in an analogous situation now. The only realistic and fair way ahead is by adopting an international frameworkbased on equal per capita shares of carbonemissions across the world’s population. Atleast in principle, do you have any objections?Yours, Mayer

Dear Mayer,While I commend your honesty, I disagreethat climate change is an apocalyptic

catastrophe that should lead to compulsorycarbon rationing. No amount of hyperbolejustifies such draconian austerity.

You talk of ‘overwhelming scientificconsensus’. It is fashionable to hide behindscience to push political messages. However,while science has important things to sayabout climate change, it does not and cannotprovide answers to how we should deal with it in society. Scientific evidence has nojurisdiction in deciding whether we cut energyconsumption or ban incandescent lightbulbs.

Our disagreement is political, not scientific.It centres on how we view human progress.You express Malthusian fatalism about ‘aburgeoning world population’. For me thismeans millions more minds to solve problemsand create prosperity. You reduce the last

Carbon rationing: a valuable way of cutting carbon emissions?

page 4 | SCIENCE & PUBLIC AFFAIRS | June 2007

Y SPATalk

Bangladesh: how to cope when the water rises?

Mayer Hillman and Claire Fox disagree

Y SPATalk


‘couple of centuries’ of ‘human civilization’to the fact that it ‘has burned reserves of the Sun’s energy’.

I note that over the last two hundred yearshumanity has made enormous gains; fromfreeing millions from parochialism – hurrahfor cars and cheap flights – to freeing womenfrom drudgery – hurrah for white goods andmicrowaves. Don’t get me started on howreducing emissions will deny the gains ofmodernity to the under-developed world. Yours, Claire

Dear Claire,You highlight ‘the gains of modernity’ thathave come in the wake of our use of fossilfuels over the last 200 years withoutacknowledging the adverse consequences.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrationsduring this period have risen in line with thisuse to a level that the world has notexperienced for over half a million years.Citing evidence such as this can hardly bedescribed as ‘hyperbole’ or as a cover to ahidden political agenda.

What matters are the practical and moralimplications for current policies. I wonderwhether you would have a differentperspective if you were personally affected?

You dismiss my reference to the burgeoningworld population as ‘Malthusian fatalism’.Look at recent demographic changes beforerejecting this consideration so lightly. And what is the source of your confidence in the ingenuity of ‘millions more humanminds’ to come up with technologies thatwill assuredly result in reversing the processof climate change?

Do you accept that human activity iscontributing to this change? If so, I ask again, do you have any objections to an equalper capita allocation of carbon emissionsacross the world’s population to deliver thenecessary reduction? Or do you have a bettersolution to what you so glibly reject as‘draconian austerity’?Yours, Mayer

Dear Mayer,I don’t deny that the huge social changes mayhave had some ‘adverse consequences’ on the

planet, but overall the consequences ofprogress have been massively positive. Willyou acknowledge the ‘adverse consequences’on humanity of your paralysing obsessionwith reducing carbon emissions? Youadvocate giving up freedom at home andcurtailing development in the Third World.

Historically, ‘human activity’ such as scienceand technology have allowed us to innovateprecisely to deal with whatever nature throwsat us. Ironically, where natural hazards doexist – like scorching temperatures anddrought – people suffer not from the weatherbut for lack of the ‘gains of modernity’such as air conditioning and mains water. Yet eco warriors have opposed building dams to provide energy and water in poorerparts of the world because they clash withenvironmental priorities.

As Bangladesh faces flooding, shouldn’t theurgent task be to build dams, roads and dykes– as countries such as Holland do – thatwould allow Bangladeshis to cope with risingsea levels? Will you join me in promoting theurgent industrialisation of countries likeBangladesh to make them equal with theWest, rather than merely offering the trinketof ‘equal per capita carbon allocation’? Yours, Claire

Dear Claire,You propose that debt-ridden countries such as Bangladesh prioritise spending theproceeds from the industrialisation of their economies to provide protection fromclimate changes caused by our excessivecarbon emissions.

But the costs of building dykes againstinundation along extensive coastlines, airconditioning to keep temperatures down and drought limitation measures, would beprohibitively high. For the same reason, theycould not be covered even by a substantialincrease in overseas development aid setaside from our economic growth.

Moreover, you overlook the fact that amajor source of the evolving catastrophe isthe planet’s limited capacity to safely absorbthe greenhouse gases from industrialisation

and growth! And what if your approach fails:where do the hundreds of millions ofdisplaced ecological refugees go?

The truth is that we are faced with thechoice of either achieving a massive reductionin our use of fossil fuels, or presiding over ourown demise. Sufficient people will notcontribute to this reduction to a sufficientextent and within sufficient time voluntarily.It is being increasingly recognized that theonly solution is a global cap on emissions and their allocation on an equal per capitabasis – the Global Commons Instituteblueprint, Contraction & Convergence. This must be adopted urgently. Yours, Mayer

Dear Mayer,Putting aside your disgracefulscaremongering about hordes of ‘ecologicalrefugees’, your reply perfectly illustrates whycarbon cutting orthodoxy is paralysing. Youcan only view the problems of the Third Worldthrough the narrow prism of global warming.However, it is not ‘our excessive carbonemissions’ that deprive one billion people of clean water or doom the Earth’s poorestto dependence on subsistence farming.Rather, it is your man-made green fatalismthat dismisses any possibility of developmentbecause ‘costs… would be prohibitively high’.

Granted you are even-handed. You preachmiserabilism at home as well as abroad. Youstarted this spat comparing energy rationingtoday with the Second World War. At leastthen temporary sacrifices promised a moreprosperous and free society after the war. You offer us permanent war economy:relentless personal restraint and never-endingconstraints on freedom.

Whatever the scientific truth about thedifficulties warming might pose to our planet,we definitely know that freedom, autonomy,reduced regulation and ambition will benecessary tools – for scientists and politicalactivists – to deal with what faces us in thefuture. To abandon them – as you advocate –would be a far greater catastrophe thananything nature can throw at us. Yours, Claire

Dr Mayer Hillmanis Senior Fellow Emeritus at the PolicyStudies [email protected]

Claire Foxis the Director of the Institute of [email protected]

Granted you are even-handed. You preachmiserabilism at home aswell as abroad. You offerus... relentless personalrestraint and never-endingconstraints on personalfreedom

The only realistic and fair way ahead is byadopting an internationalframework based on equalper capita shares of carbonemissions across theworld’s population

There has never been a better time to debatethe central role science plays in our moderneconomy and society.

As new discoveries are made and newtechnologies emerge over the comingdecades, we are going to have some hugediscussions about their ethical, social andenvironmental implications.

The accelerating pace of change and thechallenges ahead, such as climate change and an ageing population, mean that it hasbecome increasingly vital that we talk aboutwhat the future might look like and what itmight mean.

Science and technology are absolutelycentral to this. Science must be, and be seento be, firmly embedded within society, and itmust earn its licence to operate from society.

Informing decision makingWe need to widen engagement to helpinform government policy and decisionmaking, and also build capacity for debate,reflection, understanding and appreciation of the wider benefits of science andtechnology to society – to create a trueknowledge democracy.

The result will be a society that builds fromits current pro-science stance. It will helpensure a healthy supply of the brightest andbest researchers, and mean that decisionmakers are able to understand and respond topublic aspirations, expectations and concernsaround emerging science and technology.

Research has shown emphatically that theBritish public is not anti-science. Indeed, thevery opposite is true. Over four-fifths of thosesurveyed by my department in 2004 agreedthat science makes a good contribution tosociety, and 97 per cent of people agreed thatit is important that our young people have agood grasp of science.

Yet, we are acutely aware of legitimateconcerns over how certain areas of scienceand technology are governed, and over therelationship between private and publicsector research.

SciencewiseBecause science needs its social licence tooperate, we all need to be part of makinginformed decisions about how we develop anduse scientific and technological advances and

A knowledge economy with science at its coreMalcolm Wicks on engaging the public


Y Focus

Sparking imagination: National Science and Engineering Week

Y Focus


how science and innovation are governed.This is why we have developed a progressive

and world-leading programme of publicengagement with science that takes us farfrom the old and tired public understanding of science model that has held us back for too long. In January, I launchedsciencehorizons – the first ever mass publicengagement programme designed to getthe nation talking about the science andtechnology of the future.

What is important about sciencehorizons isthat we are inviting everyone to take part, notonly the scientists, but the whole community.The aim is to spark lively debates on theseimportant issues.

The discussions will use a specially-designed pack showing how life in 2025 coulddiffer from today and is based on the HorizonScans papers that map out potential futuretechnological developments.

We want everyone to take part. Communitygroups, schools, families and friends up anddown the country have been invited to get together in village halls, classrooms, living rooms and pubs to have their ownsciencehorizons discussions. In fact since thelaunch almost 2,000 discussion packs havebeen requested by community groups andschools across the UK.

Public eventsLarger public events have already taken placeacross the country and are planned in themonths ahead. For example, in April and Maya panel made up of members of the publicand local scientists in Bristol looked at theissues presented in sciencehorizons in greaterdepth. In June, policymakers will participate in a seminar to discuss the results and discusshow the findings can help inform policy, and the final report will be launched at theBA Festival of Science in York in September.

The results of all these activities will beused to inform policy, setting the direction of research and regulation of science and technology.

The project is part of the DTI’s Sciencewiseprogramme that helps policy makerscommission and use public dialogue toinform decision making in emerging areas of science and technology.

Another major national Sciencewise project is drugsfutures. This will explore the

issues around advances in brain science andtheir implications for the future of drugs. It will inform the Academy of MedicalSciences’ advice to government on the future development of drug-related researchand policy.

Stem cell researchI also recently announced another Sciencewiseproject, in the area of stem cell research.

The UK’s two major public funders of stemcell research – the Biotechnology andBiological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)and the Medical Research Council (MRC) –have been awarded a £300,000 grant to run a public dialogue programme to gain insightinto public attitudes to stem cell research.

In this fast-moving and important area ofscience, it is essential to hear public concerns,views and attitudes, as well as to provide anopportunity for scientists to discuss with thepublic the challenges that researchers faceand the potential benefits from thischallenging field of research.

The government believes that stem cellresearch offers enormous potential to delivernew treatments for many devastatingdiseases where there is currently no effectivecure. Huge numbers of people are affected by these diseases and Britain is a world leaderin stem cell research.

But there must be a proper dialogue withthe wider public on stem cell researchbecause we need to raise public awarenessabout the potential opportunities in this area,and researchers in this critical area must beable to hear, understand and respond topublic hopes and concerns. This is why thisnew Sciencewise project is so important.

A key element will be to raise awarenessabout world-class stem cell research in the UKand the progress that is being made towardspotential treatments, while communicatingrealistic examples of its potential.

The public dialogue will start in the next few months with the recruiting of a commissioning group, followed by anofficial launch this autumn.

New public dialogue centreTo take the wider Sciencewise agenda further,the Chancellor announced in the Pre-BudgetReport the establishment of an expertresource centre for public dialogue on scienceand innovation.

This will build, across government, capacityand learning regarding the value, methods anduse of public dialogue in informing policy anddecision making on scientific and technologicalissues. It will operate as a ‘virtual’ resource andis being developed initially through the

existing Sciencewise programme.The drive for wide engagement in science

was a key aim of National Science andEngineering Week that took place in March,with thousands of events around the countryand involving up to a million people, includingreaching over 300 schools that had neverbefore taken part in science week. The week is a great time to look at the work going on in schools and laboratories all around thecountry to see the discoveries of the futureand to help spark the imagination of teachers,pupils and parents.

There is a strong desire among thescientific community to engage with thewider public on wider issues, to build trustand awareness. It is a two-way process, andthis is why I welcome the Beacons for PublicEngagement initiative recently launched byResearch Councils UK, the higher educationfunding councils and the Wellcome Trust.

Ethical codeI am also grateful to the Government ChiefScientific Adviser for his leadership in takingforward the Universal Ethical Code forScientists. The code sets down some basicpractices and beliefs explicitly, and the aim isthat it should be seen as a simple illustrationof the scientists’ promise to the community,and as a demonstration to the public thatscientists take ethical issues seriously.

We must build on our pro-science culture,ensure that we earn public trust, andencourage wide engagement. In fact, wecannot afford not to. The challenges aheadare just too great for the world of science and technology to work in splendid isolation.A knowledge democracy is vital to ourknowledge-based economy.

Links

www.sciencewise.org.uk

www.sciencehorizons.org.uk

www.mori.com/polls/2004/pdf/ost.pdf

Universal Ethical Code for Scientists –

www.dti.gov.uk/science/science-and-

society/public_engagement/code/page28029.htm

Malcolm Wicksis Minister for Science and Innovation in the Department of Trade & [email protected]

Research has shownemphatically that theBritish public is notanti-science. Indeed, the very opposite is true

Such tools would rely on input from socialscientists, economists and politicians. Theywould integrate this input with existingenvironmental models to provide decisionsupport for adaptation. ‘The infrastructure todo this is there already,’ Professor Noone said,referring to the example of the internationalEarth Systems Science Partnership,1 of whichIGBP is a member. But creating such tools stillpresents a research challenge and a culturalone, because of the variety of vocabularies,approaches and models across the disciplines.

Psychological challengeIt is also important that the models takeaccount of the real drivers of pro-social,individual human behaviour, according toAndrew Dobson, professor of politics atKeele University. Documented social scienceresearch shows that people’s urge to act inthe common good can be undermined by‘business as usual’ fixes such as taxes andtechnology pushes. If it doesn’t take accountof such research, the model could be lesssuccessful in revealing the best route forward, he said.

More pressingly, there is also a financialchallenge. ‘The available funding is notsufficient, not by a long shot,’ said ProfessorNoone. ‘The problem is that [the work] does not fit neatly into funding categories.We work across disciplines and nationalboundaries. If we are to develop sustainableadaptation systems, we need information and knowledge that cannot be produced by any individual country or within any onediscipline of research.’

1. Earth Systems Science Partnership: www.essp.org

ShortsBringing the human factor into climate models


Scientists behind the climate research for theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) reports have stressed the need forfuture models to incorporate predictions of human behaviour if they are to steeradaptation and mitigation efforts in the most beneficial directions.

Achieving this will, however, need anunprecedented degree of international andcross-disciplinary cooperation, as well ascoordinated government funding in keepingwith the significance of the challenge,explained Professor Kevin Noone, ExecutiveDirector of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), to Science and Public Affairs.

His comments came in the wake of thesecond instalment of the IPCC’s FourthAssessment Report, Climate Change 2007:Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Thispredicts a bleak future for life on the planetif average temperatures rise more than 2°C.While adaptation will be required everywhere,the report explains that the poorer countries,at most risk from the effects of climate change,will have the greater need for adaptation.

Predicting effects of adaptationThe IGBP, an international network ofenvironmental scientists, is keen thatadaptation strategies should reduce ratherthan add to the stress on the environment.This, they say, requires new evaluation toolsthat can take account of human behaviourand predict the effects of various policy andeconomic options. ‘Adaptation always involvestrade-offs. The question is what level ofjustice and equity we want to build into howwe adapt,’ said Professor Noone.

Experts to assess life’s worthA comprehensive study of the world’sbiodiversity, to include an assessment ofits global economic value and the costof losing elements of it, has beencommissioned by environment ministersfrom the group of eight (G8)industrialised nations alongside Brazil,China, India, Mexico and South Africa.The study will be modelled on lastOctober’s Stern Report on the economicsof climate change. Its publication date has not yet been finalised.

National network for stem cell researchMinister for Science and InnovationMalcolm Wicks has cut the ribbon on the new UK National Stem Cell Network(UKNSCN), a national body designed to‘improve the coordination of stem cellresearch and the dissemination ofresearch results, in addition to providing a focal point for communication withoverseas researchers, the media and thegeneral public.’ See www.uknscn.org.

STEM shortages will stymie businessUK businesses will soon struggle to find employees qualified in science,technology, engineering and maths(STEM) unless the government throwsreal weight behind the issue, according to a report from the Council for Industryand Higher Education and LogicaCMG.Their review found that although STEM graduates have increased innumber since 2002, there are fewertaking STEM A-levels – the nextgeneration of graduates. See:www.logicacmg.com/STEMreview.

Biofuels need higher standardsEnvironmental groups WWF, Greenpeace,the RSPB and Friends of the Earth havewarned that the government proposal to push biofuels take-up – the RenewableTransport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) – could, without tighter controls, actuallyworsen the climate by causing more CO2

to be emitted and by encouraging thedestruction of rainforests, peatlands and wetlands in favour of biofuel cropmonocultures.

Y Shorts

In brief

Human behaviour: crucial in adapting to global warming

Nanotechnology risks must be examined

Y Shorts


A report from the Council for Science andTechnology (CST), which berates thegovernment for failing to fund sufficientresearch into the hazards and risks ofnanotechnology, has prompted widespreadapprobation and a clarion call for targetedfunding into safety research.

How any funding should best be directed is still up for debate, however.

Health failureThe CST’s Nanoscience and Nanotechnologies:a review of government’s progress on its policycommitments1 congratulates the governmenton its support for research intonanotechnology standards and metrology, on minimising workplace and public exposureto nanomaterials, on its internationalnanotechnology role, and on dialogues withindustry and the public. It is less impressed,however, by the progress made on researchinto toxicology, health and environmentaleffects of nanomaterials.

‘Over the last five years government hasspent an average of only £600,000 per year to research the toxicology, health andenvironmental impacts of nanomaterials. This compares with total government fundingof £90 million in 2004 alone to advanceresearch in nanoscience and nanotechnologiesand promote their commercialisation,’ saysCST. It points the finger at an over-reliance onresponsive-mode funding and calls for astrategic programme of spending directed at these research areas.

Academies’ supportThe Royal Society and Royal Academy ofEngineering backed the report’s findings.

Professor Ann Dowling, chair of theacademies’ working group which producedthe 2004 report, Nanoscience andNanotechnologies: Opportunities andUncertainties, said: ‘This report reinforces the academies’ serious concerns about thegovernment’s lack of progress in ensuringthat these exciting technologies develop in a way that maximises their benefits whileminimising any potential risks.’

She reiterated the call for targeted research funding to reduce the health andenvironmental uncertainties, saying thiswould be ‘a vital step to ensuring thatnanotechnologies are well regulated andinspire the confidence of the public andinvestors.’

Industry backingThe Nanotechnologies Industry Association(NIA) also endorsed the review, agreeing that ‘more needs to be done to support theresponsible advancement of nanotechnologyinnovation in the UK’, including assessing the potential hazards. It backed calls for ring-fenced funds for lifecycle analyses andrisk assessments.

Dr Steffi Friedrichs, the Director of the NIA, explained: ‘The emphasis should be toconduct the right tests at the right time – i.e.to test those substances that are closest tocommercialisation. The nanotech industriesrecommend that toxicologists (and fundingbodies) work together with the industries and other stakeholders so that tests can beprioritised according to their commercialstatus. We strongly support the multi-stakeholder debate in nanotechnology.’

The issue of how to deal with toxicologyresearch data would need to be addressedtoo. ‘The release of research data into thepublic domain must be handled carefully,’explained Dr Friedrichs, adding that previouscodes of conduct between toxicology labs and companies have successfully tackled the problem and that the NIA is confident itcan be solved.

1. See www2.cst.gov.uk/cst/news/Files/nano_review.pdf

Vanessa Speddingis the News [email protected]

Medical nanobot: we need to understand the risks

Time to change career direction?The Campaign for Science & Engineering(CaSE) has called for improvements in thequality of science and engineering careersguidance for students, based onobservations published atwww.sciencecampaign.org.uk/documents/2007/CaSE0704.pdf. Meanwhile,Scientists for Global Responsibility reporta dramatic increase in interest in theirethical science careers work: 6000 copiesof their publications were requested inthe last year alone. See www.sgr.org.uk

Flying should carry health warningThe Institute for Public Policy Research(ippr) says the government shouldintroduce cigarette-style health warningsat airports and on advertising for airtravel. Presenting information such asestimates of emissions from the flightin question and comparisons ofemissions for the same journey made by alternative transport would encouragemore responsible behaviour, theirresearch suggests.

Hybrids should be allowed, with careThe Science and Technology Committeehas concluded that creating human-animal chimera or hybrid embryos is necessary for research but thatthey should not be developed beyond 14 days nor implanted in a woman. The committee criticised the HumanFertilisation and Embryology Authority for delaying its ownassessments and the government for its ‘prohibitive’ proposals.

Science advisers to play stronger partThe government has responded to theScience and Technology Committee’sreport on its use of science in policymaking. It has acknowledged the need to raise the profile and impact of itsDepartmental Chief Scientific Advisersand to further involve them and the Chairs of the Scientific AdvisoryCommittees in departmental policy-making. It stopped short, however, of approving a GovernmentScientific Service.

In brief

research and treatment for some types ofstudies, and the resource constraints faced by households and the public health system.

An underlying challenge is that in Kigiriamaand Kiswahili – the local languages – thereare no equivalent, widely understood, termsfor Western concepts of ‘research’. Terms suchas ‘utafiti’ and ‘uchunguzi’ were, rather,synonymous with ‘investigation’ or ‘test’ forclinical treatment.

Local concernsLow understanding of research is common all over the world, indicating the challenges ofachieving ethical ideals in any setting. In Kilifithis low understanding – and the resourcedifferences between the research centre andgeneral community – led some communitymembers to request a level of health serviceprovision well beyond the standard remit ofresearch teams, and others to fill the gaps ininformation and understanding with theirown explanations for routine activities.

In filling the gaps, community membersdrew on fragments of folk lore, religion andtraditional beliefs. Rumours became commoncurrency, often exchanged with humour aswell as concern: Why do the doctors need totake so much blood? What are they doingwith it? Are they mixing it and selling it? Or

Utafiti in Coastal KenyaBella Starling, Dorcas Kamuya, Caroline Gikonyo, Sassy Molyneux and Vicki Marshreveal challenges of communicating research in Coastal Kenya


boards. Community engagement has beenparamount: research teams have routinelyconsulted local administrative leaders inadvance of all community-based research;and information is disseminated throughthese leaders, ‘barazas’ (public meetings) and print materials.

Community perceptionsGiven the widely acknowledged gap inunderstanding of research between scientistsand the communities who often participatein research, researchers in Kilifi set outin 2001 to explore community perceptions of research.

They found that most people were joiningstudies for their immediate individualbenefits, and without a good understandingof the research elements of activities. Inter-related reasons included a therapeuticmisconception of research, the difficulty evenresearch staff had in distinguishing between

Meaningful community participation hasbeen advocated for many types of healthresearch for some time. Forms andmechanisms are debated, but there is broadagreement on the potential for increasedparticipation to afford greater protection,respect and empowerment to communitieswhile facilitating research.

Nowhere is this notion more relevant thanwhere research is needed the most – indeveloping countries. They bear the highestburden of disease. It is also in developingcountries that the contrasts in cultural andsocial norms and technological know-howbetween researchers and researchparticipants are often the greatest.

But are citizen voices present or heardwhen developing and carrying out research in such settings?

Wellcome Trust research in KenyaThe KEMRI (Kenya Medical ResearchInstitute)/Wellcome Trust ResearchProgramme is based just north of Mombasa,in Kilifi District.1 With a popular touristcoastline set on the Indian Ocean, the districtcontains the poorest constituency in Kenya. It has a high malaria burden, particularly inchildren: 35 per cent of admissions to KilifiDistrict Hospital’s paediatric ward are due tomalaria, and resistance to malaria drugs is areal problem. Bacterial and viral infections arealso devastating.

Going back as far as 1949, the Programmehas explored health concerns fundamental to the District. The centre has now developeda strong international reputation for its wide-ranging interdisciplinary research coveringclinical, basic science, epidemiological andpublic heath aspects of major childhood andadult disease. Each year, thousands of localpeople give their consent verbally or inwriting to take part in the Programme’sresearch. Over 4,000 parents consent for their children to be involved in clinical studies – both observational andinterventional – every year.

Throughout, research has always beenconducted to the highest international ethicalstandards. All research, including informedconsent processes, is reviewed and approvedin advance by local, national and ofteninternational scientific and ethical review

Y Cover Story

Villagers gathering for a community meeting The Kalifi team

Why do the doctors need to take so much blood? Are they mixing and sellingit? Or giving it to evilpeople or spirits?

Y Cover Story


giving it to evil people or spirits? Interestingly,very similar rumours and concerns have beenreported around medical research activitiesfrom different settings in Africa, includingsome thousands of miles away.

The Wellcome Trust logo, shown on theProgramme’s vehicles, depicted twointertwined snakes. Snakes are a well-recognised symbol for devil worshipping inKenya, and this logo was of particular concernin an area in which two intertwined snakeswere reported to foretell a death in the family.People also questioned the Programme’sinstitutional policies, asking, ‘Why can’t moreof us be employed there?’ and challenged the composition of previously establishedcommunity advisory boards, set up throughcommunity leaders.

It seemed that, despite the team’s bestefforts and a generally positive view of theProgramme, misunderstandings and concernsabout its work persisted.

Community representationIn response, the Programme has begun todevelop and implement a new approach tocommunity engagement, based on actionresearch and participatory processes.2

Researchers began by seeking communityviews on engagement strategies. Workshopsinvolving community representatives, theDistrict Health Management team,researchers from the Programme and anexternal group of ethicists, policy experts and communication advisors, drafted acommunication strategy for the Programme,including community engagement. Thepriority area for increased communication in Kilifi was the population living around theDistrict General Hospital, around 240,000 innumber, who account for most of the hospitaladmissions, as well as research participants.

The thorny issues of defining the‘community’, ensuring fair, balanced andaccurate representation, and avoiding over-politicisation and tokenism are well describedin the literature on community engagementin medical research, drawing particularly onexperience from HIV/AIDS research. In Kilifi a particular dual challenge was a clear needfor greater community participation inresearch, and no obvious existing channels to achieve this. In response, research staff aredeveloping a novel strategy for communityrepresentation through the widespreadcommunity-based organisations (CBO) in the district.

CBOs cover a wide variety of constituencieswithin the community, ranging in size fromsmall to large, and representing women, men and young people through activities

such as income generation, sport, drama,music, health and farming.

Through surveying registered andunregistered CBOs in a pilot area (populationaround 98,000), membership in CBOs wasconfirmed to be high: one active CBOmember to every 11 people in the population.CBOs were asked to nominate their ownrepresentatives for a new network of 140KEMRI community representatives (KCRs)across all the areas involved in research.Nominees were endorsed as representativesat public meetings that included outreachactivities such as local drama and song.An estimated 6,000 local people attendedthese meetings.

Representatives’ roleThe elected KCRs undertake to strengthencommunication between KEMRI and thecommunity through regular and ad hocfeedback meetings with KEMRI communityliaison staff, and through informally passingon information about KEMRI’s activitiesduring their normal daily activities ashousehold, community and CBO members. Inthis way, they provide an additional interfacefor information exchange, a platform for thedevelopment of greater mutualunderstanding between researchers and thecommunity, and maintain the visibility andcontribution of modest communities.

Apart from communication roles, KCRshave also influenced institutional policy.Researchers are now asked to specify at theoutset who their communities are and howthey will engage with those communities atdifferent stages of the research project. Forunusual or particularly large studies, study-specific community engagement strategiesare developed and supported through localreview processes and a team of communityfacilitators working with KCRs and othercommunity representatives on the ground.

The training of all staff who interactdirectly with community members has begunto be coordinated across the programme and strengthened by the inclusion of teachingon research concepts, participants’ rights and communication.

Numerous community members have been

invited into the research centre for open days,including tours and question-and-answersessions, and now even all non-scientific jobsat the Programme are widely advertised atthe local level.

Programme vehicles carry only the name,and not the logo, of the Wellcome Trust. Mostimportantly, the way in which the Ministry of Health and KEMRI interact locally is beingre-considered, and there are far more forumsfor open dialogue between research staff andcommunity members at all levels.

PartnershipWhat started as a small-scale communicationprocess has evolved into a programme ofpartnership and consultation betweenresearchers and Kilifi communities.

The journey has just begun, and evaluationof the community engagement strategycontinues. The hope is that meaningfulcommunity engagement is strengthening theprotection, respect and empowerment of thecommunities to whom the KEMRI/WellcomeProgramme owes so much. The two-waydialogue that has grown benefits not onlyKilifi people but also the science being carriedout amongst them.

Evaluations over time aim to assess theeffectiveness and sustainability of thesestrategies, provide information that can begeneralised to similar research settings, andcontribute to debates on the universality ofethical principles for research.

1. www.wellcome.ac.uk/assets/wtx022250.pdf

2. V Marsh, D Kamuya, C Gikonyo, Y Rowa, S Molyneux,

(2007). Beginning community engagement at a busy

biomedical research programme: experiences from

KEMRI CGMRC-Wellcome Trust Research Programme,

Kilifi. Submitted for a forthcoming Social Science &

Medicine Special Issue.

Dr Bella Starlingis International Activities Manager,Medicine Society and History, at the Wellcome [email protected]

Dorcas Kamuya, Caroline Gikonyo, Sassy Molyneux and Vicki Marshare research staff responsible for the design and implementation ofcommunity engagement work forKEMRI/Wellcome Trust in [email protected];[email protected]

Researchers are now askedto specify at the outsetwho their communities areand how they will engagewith those communities atdifferent stages of theresearch project

Effective software needs engagement


generation. I am not associating you withthem but people in your line of country. What do we do then, just give up?’

Whilst I can sympathise with his viewpoint,it is, in my opinion, a question of engagement,and I think this exchange is a good illustrationof that whole issue.

There is a huge community of Open Sourcesecurity experts out there, able and willingnot only to look at security problems thatalready exist or may be found in newproducts, but also to advise and help designprotocols and systems that solve these kindsof problems before they hit the streets. Theybring with them a wealth of experienceworking in probably the most hostileenvironment known to man: the internet,where pretty much every security problemone could possibly think of has already beentested or theorised, and valuable lessonslearned on how (and how not) to do things.

However, this group is rarely consulted inthe early stages of consumer or governmentprojects, and only tend to get involved afterthe fact when they take it upon themselves todo so, often by pointing out serious issues, tothe discomfiture of the affected parties.

Commercial world lags behindThis engagement usually takes the form of‘Full Disclosure’, in which the manufacturer or

vendor is privately informed of the issue andgiven time to produce a fix before it is madecompletely public. Interestingly, Lord Mitchellassumed that Microsoft were ahead of thisgame. As someone who has lived through theevolution of the internet and witnessed firsthand Microsoft’s gradual engagement withthe wider community, it is fairly amusing tosee them being hailed as the leaders in thisfield, when they are, in internet timelineterms, very much ‘the new kids on the block’.

It’s worth remembering that it was fullyfive years after the internet became apractical reality that Microsoft finally caved in and added the internet standardnetworking protocol (TCP/IP) to its defaultstack in Windows 95. It wasn’t until theWindows Millennium Edition release in 2000that they included automatic updates, twoyears after the Open Source communityprovided them for Linux.

They are currently promoting ‘ResponsibleDisclosure’ (their version of ‘Full Disclosure’)as a means of engaging with the Open Sourcesecurity research community, but again, they are many years behind, as this has been standard practice in the Open Sourcecommunity itself for over 10 years. However,this is not to say that Microsoft aren’t trying,and I don’t want to come across asparticularly anti-Microsoft.

Consumers benefitThe Lords Committee is expected to publish its report this summer, and one of the things I hope will come out of it is the realisation thatthe commercial world does not always have allthe answers (and even when it does, they mayhave simply adopted what for the rest of ushas been commonplace for some time).

Open Source has a lot to offer. At the end of the day, Open Source software only existsbecause it does what it sets out to do, does itwell, and does it primarily for the benefit ofits user base which is, increasingly, all of us –the consumers.

1. See http://tinyurl.com/2jyhbq

Earlier this year, I had the honour of beinginvited to give evidence to the House of LordsScience and Technology Select Committee onpersonal internet security.1

I was speaking for the Open Sourcecommunity alongside Alan Cox, who helpeddevelop the programme that constitutes thecentral core of the Linux computer operatingsystem. We were opposite Microsoft whowere representing commercial software ingeneral and themselves in particular.

It was a fascinating experience, and a greatopportunity for a layman to see a small partof the inner workings of government and tohear what kind of issues get their attention.

Little consultationThe most meaningful discussion came at theend when Alan and I started to describe thekind of attacks that could be applied by thetechnically proficient against the unwittingconsumer, if the technology they wereprovided with didn’t adequately protect itself.It was all very ‘James Bond’, talking aboutfooling electronic fingerprint readers and thelike, but it elicited a very meaningful responsefrom Lord O’Neill of Clackmannan, who said:‘You guys are great at telling us what is wrongbut you never give us any solutions because itseems that one of your other colleagues istrying to work out how to rip off the next

Adam Laurieis a freelance security researcher. His latest work can be found onhttp://[email protected]

Y Opinion

Adam Laurie celebrates Open Source

Open source: engagement benefits the users


Y Opinion

Connecting for Health, the NHS NationalProgramme for IT (NPfIT), is meant to ‘deliverbetter, safer care to patients’.1 However, it isshowing many of the symptoms displayed bylarge IT projects that have failed in the past.

Twenty-three of us, all professors ofcomputing and systems at UK universities,have called for a review. We have a wide rangeof IT experience, and have studied manyfailed projects, as well as many thatsucceeded. Our professional opinion is that aconstructive, independent review is urgentlyneeded, to ensure that the risks to NPfIT areproperly recognised and managed.

We are not asking to carry out the reviewourselves: we simply believe thatprofessionals should speak out whennecessary in the public interest.

Source of most problemsMost IT project disasters stem from problemswith requirements or specifications, usuallybecause the future users of the system havenot been involved enough. Either therequirements keep changing, or they are afocus of conflict – for example, if the users ofthe system do not want to adopt new workpractices the system will impose. When aproject’s requirements keep on changing, the project will be delayed, costs will rise and things may get out of control.

Desperate attempts to contain costs and to keep to milestones reduce flexibility andlead to other compromises, as suppliersinterpret their contracts ever more strictly.When milestones slip, the slips typically getconcealed by re-interpreting the specificationor the milestones, as people often prefer topostpone the day of judgment.

Sometimes, real technical problems arise. It often turns out that the designers hadsimplistic fault assumptions: thedependability criteria turn out to be wrong, or missed, or both. Even when a workingsystem is introduced, if the specification does not fit the real needs, users may createso many work-arounds that the project’sgoals are undermined.

Problems specific to NPfITIn the case of NPfIT, there are many reports ofchanging specifications, delays, cost escalation,dependability problems, and significanttechnical issues. We have made some of thesereports available to a general readership.2

The Department of Health hasacknowledged that the specifications (whichdate from 2002 and 2003) are now obsolete;as Connecting for Health learned more aboutusers’ real requirements, the specification hasevolved significantly. It has become clear thatthe system will require the clinical professions to work differently. We have heard manyclinicians criticise the proposals asimpractical, or complain of a lack ofinformation about the system’s current goals.

Costs now appear much higher thananticipated, and Accenture has already leftthe project. There is sharp technical debateabout whether the proposed data standardsare fit for purpose. Some earlyimplementations have been criticised sharplyon their usability and dependability.

We cannot be certain how serious theunderlying problems in the project mightbe, but our experience suggests that thesymptoms may well be the early signs of a failing project.

Action for reviewWe sent an open letter to the HealthCommittee of the House of Commons in Aprillast year, expressing these concerns. This ledto many people contacting us with specificissues: from clinicians to health servicemanagers to experts in computer companies.

We discussed our concerns with Dr RichardGranger, Chief Executive for Connecting forHealth, and the NPfIT management team,who agreed that an independent review couldbe useful. Dr Granger asked us for draft termsof reference for an independent review; weresponded nine months ago but HealthMinister Lord Hunt has now ruled such a

review out. Two of us met the new NHS ChiefExecutive in January this year, but he too saida review was unnecessary. Yet every monththat passes provides further reports thatsharpen our concerns.

There are two possible ways of viewingNPfIT. The optimistic view is that thespecification is now stabilising intosomething that can be built, and that willdeliver benefits to the NHS. The pessimisticview is that things have run out of controland that, even if the planned systems aredelivered, they will not be worth the costs, or the delays.

We hope that the optimistic analysis iscorrect, in which case an independent reviewcan help by improving communications andbuilding stakeholder confidence. We fear thatthe pessimistic analysis may be correct, inwhich case an independent and constructivetechnical review can provide evidence andrecommendations to help the NHS to recover.Either way, our expert and impartial opinionis that there should be a review.

1. See the programme’s website,

www.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk/. SPA asked Connecting

for Health to defend the programme, but they were

unable to deliver a piece.

2. See www.nhs-it.info

Martyn Thomasis Visiting Professor in SoftwareEngineering at Oxford University andDirector and Principal Consultant atMartyn Thomas Associates, and speaksfor the 23 [email protected]

Connecting for health?Martyn Thomas calls for a review of the NHS IT programme

NHS IT programme: making medicine safer?

our brains insists that human consciousnessis in some way ‘spirit stuff’ which is God-givenand therefore not ours to meddle with. To doso is hubris.

This, I believe, is what really standsbetween us and happiness – superstition.It is time we got rid of it, and took control ofour own brains.

Conquer superstition,urges Rita Carter

Take control ofyour brain


It may sound like magic, but the evidencesuggests that it works.

Let’s meddleEventually, I believe we will use techniqueslike this to transform ourselves from theinside out. But I fear it will be a long timecoming, because this approach is bedeviled by a kind of ‘yuk’ factor. We don’t want tobelieve in blatantly physical remedies for our discontents because we don’t like toacknowledge that we are entirely physicalentities. Some ancient superstitious part of

Happiness is a state of mind – an experience.And experience is a physical phenomenon.

Perceptions, moods, thoughts andsensations do not exist in some mysteriousspiritual dimension; they are bodily functions,some of which we can now describe in quiteprecise chemical and anatomical terms.Change your brain and you have changedyour mind.

I propose that we do just that: use ourburgeoning knowledge about the brain, alongwith the ingenious technology we aredeveloping, to produce happiness directly.

Beyond chemicalsThere is no question that this can be done.Mind-altering chemicals have always beenused on a massive scale and in the last coupleof decades millions of people have been liftedout of misery by antidepressants. They work.

Yet people hate to admit this. Those thathave benefited from drugs like Prozac tend toexplain the change in them by saying thingslike: ‘I decided to get out more’, or ‘I startedcounting my blessings’, or ‘I fell in love’. Theyoffer these as causes of their transformation,without acknowledging that they would nothave happened without the drug.

Altering brain function It is true that all drugs have a downside –altering brain function by putting a chemicalthrough the bloodstream is bound to produceside-effects and hit and miss results. Happily,though, our increasing knowledge of brainfunction is allowing us to use much cleanerand more precise technology. Brain implants,for example, are already showing positiveresults in people with severe depression.

I am not suggesting that every unhappyperson should have a device put in their brain.The principle, though – altering the electricalfunction of the brain directly, rather than viachemicals – can be used also in non-invasivetechniques. Transcranial MagneticStimulation, for example, involves merelywaving a magnetic wand over the skull.

Y Exchange

Rita Carteris a medical [email protected]

What is happiness?Rita Carter, Richard Schoch and Sebastian Saville have different recipes

Happiness: how to find it? James Nunn

Y Exchange


We’ve lost the ability to understand theessentially moral nature of happiness.

We’ve settled for mere enjoyment of pleasure,mere avoidance of pain. Somewhere betweenPlato and Prozac, happiness stopped being alofty achievement and became an entitlement.

More than two thousand years ago, when theancient Greeks first thought about what ‘thegood life’ means, happiness was a civic virtuethat demanded a lifetime’s cultivation. Now, it’s everybody’s birthright: swallow a pill, gethappy; do yoga, find your bliss; hire a life coach,regain your self-esteem.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. We canenrich our lives by encountering the greatreligious and philosophical traditions ofhappiness – and then put them to work in our lives today.

In the right placeThose traditions insist that we do not have tobecome someone else to be happy.

In a way, that’s trivial: how can we be otherthan who we are? But what’s far from trivial isthe belief that to find happiness we must turn

our backs on everything that is familiar, forgea new life, perform extraordinary acts, orexchange a dismal present for a fantasticfuture. Such efforts are wasteful because theysquander the opportunity that is alwaysbefore us: to become not someone else (that’sthe perverted goal of the ‘makeover’) but abetter version of the person we already are.

Whoever we are, in whatever circumstanceswe face – and for nearly all of us, they will beordinary ones – the possibility of happinessalways surrounds us. We are always in theright place, though we do our best to forget it.

Hard workThe sages and the saints also tell us somethingthat we’re reluctant to hear: happiness is hardwork. True happiness is the orientation of yourlife towards meaning, purpose, and value. It’s a reflection upon the quality, the character,of your life as a whole. Happiness isn’t aboutfeeling good – it’s about being good.

That’s what Aristotle meant when he calledhappiness an activity – because it requires skilland focus. Far from being a state of passive

enjoyment, like relaxing in a bubble bath, or eating a box of chocolates, happinessdemands effort.

The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius saidthat happiness feels more like wrestling thandancing, because being happy means ‘standingprepared and unshaken to meet whatevercomes’. Happiness, then, is something that weresolve to achieve, and to strive for it meansthat we regard our life as a journey in which wemove purposefully toward that ultimate goal.

How do we get to happiness? It’s like thatjoke about the tourist in Manhattan who,realizing that he’s lost, asks a passerby, ‘How do you get to Carnegie Hall?’ Theanswer: ‘Practise!’

Richard Schochis Professor of the History of Culture atQueen Mary, University of London. He isthe author of The Secrets of Happiness:Three Thousand Years of Searching for theGood Life (Profile Books, 2006)[email protected]

Being good, not feeling goodHappiness needs effort, argues Richard Schoch

The idea of happiness, what constitutes itand how it may be achieved, changes withtime and place.

Human beings have, throughout history, ineach time, place, and culture, used drugs ofvarious kinds to modify, extend and intensifyhappiness. We humans have evolved inpartnership, in symbiotic relationship, with awhole multitude of mood- and mind-alteringchemicals. We are not the only animals toengage in these practices, but it seems thereis something specifically human which leadsus to use drugs and to develop socialpatterns, stories, myths and explanations ofsuch uses: to generate drug cultures.

Good drugsThere is a range of contemporary drug takingthat is socially accepted, and sometimespositively encouraged.

We regard it as a civilized thing to enjoy aconvivial glass of wine at table; and indeedalcohol oils the wheels of most socialgatherings. Beyond this, if we are feeling low,we visit our doctor, who is likely to prescribean antidepressant for a while to pick us up; or,

if we are too ‘up’ already, a tranquillizer tobring us down. Drug companies are labouringcontinually over a spectrum of new productsto make us more intelligent, awake, potent,competitive and happy, and our governmentsand corporations approve. Huge sums arespent on pushing these new products. Theseare the good drugs.

Bad drugsThe bad drugs are obvious; we hear aboutthem often.

Addiction to heroin, dependence oncocaine; now perhaps even the return ofReefer Madness. The illegal drugs, those fromwhich our governments must protect us, even those of us who do not wish to beprotected. The lines seem clear cut, and weare told that they are. No happiness here.

Yet substances regularly cross theboundary. A hundred years ago, opium was to be found in almost every home: God’s Own Medicine. Curing everything fromheadache to toothache to insanity; the ideathat it could be made illegal was unthinkable.Tobacco, meanwhile, appears to be making

the reverse journey, from a must-haveaccessory for those who aspire to beauty,modernity and coolness, to a loser’s habit.

The dividing line is not a natural part of theworld, but a line we ourselves draw. It changesover time and place, and can be redrawn.

UglinessThe ugly is the outsider’s world: the worldinto which one is cast when one transgressesthe boundaries of the good. It is largely theproduct of our own policy: the ‘war on drugs’.

Drugs and their use have always been, and are likely to remain, a part of theequation of human happiness. The sooner werecognize this, the less needless unhappinesswe will generate.

Sebastian Savilleis Executive Director of Release(www.release.org.uk). The website hasdetails of Release’s 40th anniversaryconference on 18 [email protected]

The good, the bad and the uglySebastian Saville reflects on drugs and happiness

where doping has been proven, and thereshould be a mechanism whereby cheatingathletes would have to repay all financialgains going back to their last clean test.

Athletes should also have to disclosesources of doping before they are allowed toreturn to competitive sport, and we wouldeven urge the government to look at theexperience of those countries which havecriminalised doping in sport.

Legal techniquesOur inquiry also looked at legal enhancementtechniques like nutrition and improving ourunderstanding of the mechanics of movement– methods which can only enhance the healthof the competitor. But the temptation to actillegally will always be there.

It would be a sad moment for sport in the UK if the 2012 Olympic Games wereremembered as a major sporting event inwhich illegal doping detracted from itssuccess. We believe that if the governmentand sporting bodies concerned act on ourrecommendations, this can be avoided.

1. See Human Enhancement Technologies in Sport,

www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmselect

/cmsctech/67/67.pdf

Doping in sportPhil Willis looks towards the London Olympics


boosting the number of red blood cells in thecirculation, usually intravenously, in order toenhance performance in endurance events.

Gene doping, or the modulation of anathlete’s genetic material, is another area ofconcern. Genes of interest to the sportingworld could include those involved inincreasing production of naturally occurringsubstances such as Insulin-like Growth Factor-1 which stimulates muscle growth and speedshealing and repair. Other techniques couldeffectively switch genes on and off as required.

RecommendationsAs a Committee, we feel more needs to bedone if the UK is to play clean. Science shouldbe used to develop more sophisticateddetection techniques, including testing bloodsamples as well as urine. We also want it tobe mandatory for UK athletes to competeinternationally in the 12 months prior to thegames before they are eligible to take part, asthis would make it easier to detect unusualincreases in an athlete’s performance.

A separate body needs to be established to undertake drug testing of athletes in thiscountry, independent of UK Sport and thenational governing bodies of individual sports.This should also be responsible for monitoringand evaluating potential new substances andmethods as they are developed.

The Committee also supports the idea of a pilot project looking at the feasibility of a doping passport. This would be used torecord an athlete’s physiological profile overset time points during their career. A four-yearban should be imposed in all incidences

Sport matters to people, and any scandalassociated with British sportsmen or womenresonates way beyond the immediate sportingworld. An athlete caught enhancing his or herperformance by illegal doping methods can bea matter of national humiliation.

With this in mind, the Science andTechnology Committee set out to ‘horizonscan’ what may be the human enhancementtechnologies (HETs) of the next decade, and to examine the UK’s arrangements for countering doping in the run up to andduring the 2012 Olympics.1

Not in the starting blocksSo, which illegal HETs could threaten theintegrity of the 2012 Olympics? As the bodydirectly responsible for anti-doping in the UK, we expected UK Sport to have a goodknowledge of these and to be involved in thedevelopment of methods to test for them.However, this was not the case. We wereconcerned to find that in response to our call for evidence to this inquiry, UK Sporthad to consult a number of leading experts to identify this information and that it does not ‘horizon scan’ on a regular basis.

A number of witnesses in our inquiry were more informed. For example, we heardthat pharmaceuticals of interest in thesporting world may include stimulants which act on the central nervous orcardiovascular systems, perhaps in raisingaggression, confidence, or alertness.

Illegal methodsA well-known example of a modern designerdrug is Tetrahydrogestronone (THG), an anabolic steroid modified to make itundetectable under normal drug testing. THG was discovered following a majorinvestigation in 2003 which resulted in theBritish 100-metre sprinter Dwain Chambers,amongst others, receiving a two-year ban.

Hormones may also pose a threat to fairplay during the 2012 Olympics. Examplesinclude Human Growth Hormone which canaid recovery from injury, promote strengthand burn fat; or glycoprotein hormoneerythropoietin (EPO) which regulates redblood cell production and hence the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood.

Blood doping is also thought to besomething the testing authorities will need tobe vigilant for in 2012. This is the practice of

Y Feature

Phil Willisis Chairman of the House of CommonsScience and Technology [email protected]

More needs to be done if the UK is to play clean

Linnaeus’s collections go onlineSandra Knapp and Steve Cafferty celebrate

Y Feature


The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus was born300 years ago this year. The Linnean Societyof London holds 14,300 specimens of plantshe collected or received from friends andcolleagues, and other collections of insects,animals and letters. As part of thecelebrations of the Tercentenary of his birth,the Society has embarked on a large-scaleprogramme to create a digital archive of all of these important specimens.

These collections are never lent outsideLondon, and the digitisation will helpscientists all over the world. The high qualityimages for the first elements of the projectwill be available through the Linnean Society’swebsite from the end of 2007.

Linnaeus’s systemThe science of taxonomy is that of describingand documenting the natural world, and of discovering the relationships betweendifferent kinds of plants and animals. Today,many different sorts of data, from physicalcharacteristics, to behaviour, to genesequences, are being used to describe andstudy the identity and evolutionaryrelationships of organisms.

In order to maintain a standard set ofnames and usage, taxonomists use a systemestablished by Linnaeus in the mid-eighteenth century, and modified andimproved since. Linnaeus ‘invented’ the two-word scientific names we still use todayfor living things – Homo sapiens (our ownscientific name), Solanum tuberosum (thepotato) and Drosophila melanogaster (thefruit fly) are all names that use Linnaeus’sbinomial naming convention.

Research obstaclesLinnaeus and subsequent taxonomists usedspecimens to show how names applied toactual plants and animals. Later generations of taxonomists established rules for naming(today the Codes of Nomenclature), amongwhich is included the concept of a typespecimen. A bit like the gold standard, the typeis ‘the’ specimen designated by the persondescribing a new species. Other specimens are used to show variability, but the type is a fixed point to which a name is tied.

Types are very important for decisions aboutthe identity of organisms, and are critical forthose who are describing and documentingdiversity. Type specimens are carefully looked

after by herbaria and museums, and aresometimes lent to scientists working in otherparts of the world. Some, however, are veryfragile, or too historically precious to be lent,and scientists need to come to the institutionwhere they are held to examine them. This can be prohibitively expensive, andoccasionally impossible due to travelrestrictions, especially for scientists from thedeveloping world. Most of the world’s diversitylies in the developing world, while most typespecimens are held in the developed world.Enter technology to the rescue!

Widening accessIn recent years British institutions that holdplant collections (including the NaturalHistory Museum, the Royal Botanical Gardens,Kew and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh)have prioritized access for colleagues notonly in the developing world, but also to the general public. The historically importantplant specimens held by the Linnean Society(often among the oldest type specimens for widespread species) are uniquelyimportant for science and access to them is of global interest.

An image of the type specimen will oftenenable a scientist to make a decision as easily as the real thing; digital imaging isrevolutionizing access to scientificallyimportant primary data. Plant specimens – asessentially 2D objects – are particularly well-suited to imaging, and if the image is highenough quality, even tiny features can be seen.

Conserving biodiversityIt may seem that the digitization of suchspecimens is an esoteric exercise, useful onlyto a few academics. These digital images,however, will be important in many ways.Conservation of biodiversity, one of the greatmodern challenges, depends partly on theability to accurately identify and namespecies of plants and animals. Universalaccess to the images of type specimens willhelp us to stabilise naming, and to bettercommunicate about threats.

The Global Strategy for Plant Conservation(GSPC) has as one of its targets a widelyaccessible working list of all known plantspecies. Digital access to those importantspecimens tied to names will help pull thebotanical community together to achieve this goal.

Linnaean specimens are particularlyimportant for conservation. Many of thosespecies described by Linnaeus are today ourmost invasive weeds. Accurate identificationwill help identify new areas of spread ofinvasive species, one of the five greatestthreats to biodiversity identified by theMillennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA).Digitization to improve access is importantnot only for these scientific and conservationgoals, but also brings the treasures held in ourgreat collections to a wider public, as part of acultural and scientific heritage we all share.

Links

The Linnean Society of London (www.linnean.org)

Global Strategy for Plant Conservation

(www.plants2010.org)

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (www.maweb.org)

Dr Sandra Knapp and Steve Caffertyare at the Department of Botany, The Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, [email protected] [email protected]

A specimen of Protea lepidocarpodendron – the black-bearded sugarbush – from Linnaeus’s herbarium.Linnaeus named the genus Protea in honour of the god Proteus, who could change his form at will,because the plants had such varied and differentflowers Acknowledgement: Linnean Society of London

funding for the Athena SWAN charter; butin the future the UKRC and the ECU will beproviding joint funding.

1. www.royalsoc.ac.uk/athenaswan/awardwinners.htm

2. www.setwomenresource.org.uk/en/advice_services/

employers/

New help for women in SETIndustry targeted, reports Roger Livesey


promotion of the careers of women inscience, engineering and technology in highereducation and research, and to achieve asignificant increase in the number of womenrecruited to top posts.’

So far, 25 members have signed up to theAthena SWAN charter and 16 SWAN awardshave been made – 11 bronze and five silver.Some case studies can be found on theAthena website.1

Details of the CEO Charter and UKRC QualityMark can be found on the UKRC website.2

To date, the UKRC has provided sole

March 2007 saw the launch of the CEO (ChiefExecutive Officer) Charter for Women in SET,backed up by the UKRC (UK Resource Centrefor Women in SET) Quality Mark. The Charterapplies to industry the approach pioneered inthe 2005 UKRC Athena SWAN Charter, whichis accompanied by a system of SWAN awards.

The aim of the UKRC CEO Charter is toincrease the participation, at all levels, ofwomen in SET, to develop and communicatethe business case for gender equality and topromote change within major companies and networks.

The CEO Charter and the Quality Markwere launched by Minister for Science andInnovation, Malcolm Wicks, at the UKRCannual conference in March this year.

At the time of writing, the UKRC CEOCharter had been signed by the CEOs of two major companies, thus committingthemselves and their senior managements to actively support this aim. One UKRCQuality Mark had been awarded – toFreescale Semiconductor, which has a majorsemiconductor manufacturing operation in East Kilbride. The company impressed the UKRC sufficiently to be awarded the markat ‘silver’ level (assessment is an ongoingprocess and a company might be expected to start at the lowest level, ‘bronze’, andproceed through ‘silver’ to ‘gold’).

Commenting on the award of a silverquality mark, the UKRC final assessor Dr ClareWilson, Employer Liaison Coordinator, said:‘This was an excellent performance, especially considering the relatively shorttime Freescale has been working in the area.However, it built on excellent work on otheraspects of equality with very good existingapproaches in a wide area, for example itsapproach to flexible working.’

The two major companies which had signed the CEO Charter were Atkins and BTOpenreach. More are in the process of signing.

Businesses of any size are eligible to applyto sign the CEO Charter.

SWAN CharterMembership of the Athena SWAN Charter,which has been administered by the RoyalSociety, is open to all UK universities,university departments and researchinstitutes which are committed to workingtowards the achievement of the aims of theAthena Project: ‘the advancement and

Rachel Morfill works flexiblyA Chartered Electrical Engineer and DataAnalysis Manager at National Grid, Racheljoined 14 years ago as a graduate – one ofthree women among 16 men.

The changes since then have contributedto her staying at National Grid. ‘It’s whenyou have a child you find that working 9 to 5and staying late isn’t always the rightoption,’ she says.

Rachel believes it was important thatthese changes were driven from the top,lead by Steve Holliday, who is now thecompany CEO. ‘National Grid would nothave moved forward without the seniorlevel support,’ she says, ‘but it’s not justthat; a big problem for women is lack ofconfidence, and knowing that there’ssupport behind you gives you theconfidence to be yourself.’

Rachel works flexibly, working from home one day a week to meet familycommitments. In addition, over half of herall-male team works flexibly. ‘It’s not just athing for women,’ she says.

An example of the change was thedifferences Rachel experienced during hertwo periods of maternity leave. ‘The firstmaternity leave was only three months buton my return I was completely out of touch.The second time I was on leave for a yearbut the introduction of a “Keep in touch”scheme meant when I came back, I knew allthe new faces and was up to date ondevelopments,’ she says.

The voluntary scheme ensures thatemployees on leave receive regular news by email, are invited to team briefings andsocial events and hear of job vacancieswhile they are away.

Roger Liveseyis the UKRC’s Public Relations [email protected]

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Skilled workers are good for business

Divided we standPeople don’t want to exchange views, discovers Laura Potts

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‘It’s all good data’, my colleague SarahNettleton would reassuringly remind us,after another frustrating episode in

our research project Divided We Stand:bridging differential understanding ofenvironmental risk.1

True enough: as social science, the projectyielded some fascinating insights into howand why people were reluctant to talk andlisten to each other;2 but I am left with anagging disillusionment about the process,and its implications for the ‘new socialcontract’ between science and society.

Hearing different viewpointsThe explicit aim of the project was to bringtogether different viewpoints on the role ofexposure to environmental hazards in theincidence of breast cancer, by providingopportunities for all the participants to heareach others’ arguments and evidence.

We involved a range of communities ofinterest: women with personal experience of breast cancer, lay health activists,environmental campaigners, specialist breastcancer nurses, oncologists, public healthpractitioners, epidemiologists, biologists andtoxicologists. We were also keen to establishmore equitable participatory processes forscience and policy-making, and to examinethe relationship between professional and layknowledge. As well as using traditionalqualitative research methods – interviews,

focus groups, participant observation – weorganized three hearings: one in a city, one ina rural market town, and one in an area withconcern about a recent cluster of cases. And,finally, a national hearing in Westminster,supported by the chair of the All PartyParliamentary Party Group on cancer.

How hard can that be? Surely, justbusiness as usual for experienced socialresearchers? But the stumbling blocks weencountered were far greater and moreintractable than we anticipated.

Unwilling participantsGetting people to take part at all was thefirst problem. A cancer epidemiologist toldme we were ‘barking up the wrong tree’. An oncologist argued there was no pointhis coming to a local hearing because ‘theadvance of our scientific understanding inthese areas is unlikely to be facilitated bydialogue’. A Department of Healthspokesperson claimed that the primaryprevention of breast cancer wasn’t on their agenda.

There were a few sticky moments in theprocess of the hearings too: at the nationalhearing, the director of an environmentalNGO refused to sit next to the CEO of a UKpublic health body. Places round the tablewere allocated alphabetically, but still sheinsisted on moving to another position.

What was going on? Professionalismdemands boundaries for both discipline andidentity, through vocabularies and practices.It seemed to be very hard for some toovercome those learned behaviours, and oldhabits of stereotyping and mutual suspicionof The Other die hard.

All sorts of evidenceThe contemporary ‘tyranny of the evidencebase’ overlooks the existence of differentsorts of evidence, and of different sorts ofpeople’s concerns. Arguably, we get a morecomplete picture of the multi-factorial jigsawof breast cancer causation if we are moreinclusive; a recent Demos report3 asserts the value of all sorts of expertise. In the US,the community-based research initiativesupported by National Institute forEnvironmental Health Sciences is taking just such an approach, but our experience inthe UK suggests it may be decades beforethat might be adopted here.

Common groundIn a posthumous review, John Higgins4 wroteof Edward Said’s commitment to finding‘common ground’ as ‘a fundamental moraland political principle’: ‘identifying andoccupying such common ground are not easytasks because they are activities that caninvolve a questioning rather than a fortifyingof self, and usually mean giving up the senseof security that comes with the absolutedenigration of your opponent’.

Our hearings were organized on the basisof the best advice we could find, frombusiness, deliberative democracy and humancommunication – and years of experience associal researchers. They demanded, as Higginssuggests, considerable ‘intellectual effort’, andwhile we were not, perhaps, blessed as Saidwas, with ‘uncommon talent…charm andpersonality’, we were welcoming, informative,reliable and committed.

Next moveIt’s time to move on. A colleague and I have anew project under funding review. We wantto bring together the genetic researchers andthe environmental researchers looking atcauses of breast cancer, to learn from eachothers’ work and begin to shape policies forprimary prevention.

The questions framing this dialogue willcome from a broadly based steering group,and will attempt to establish a commonlanguage for understanding what contributesto the continuing rise in incidence of thedisease. I’m optimistic that the lessonslearned from Divided We Stand will help usestablish some common ground this time.

1. Divided We Stand, bridging differential understanding of

environmental risk, as part the Economic and Social

Research Council’s Science in Society programme

2. www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/

Plain_English_Summaries

3. Jack Stilgoe, Alan Irwin and Kevin Jones: ‘The Received

Wisdom: opening up expert advice’

4. Higgins, J., 2004. Times Higher Education Supplement,

9-7-2004

Laura Pottsis Reader in Public Health and theEnvironment at York St John [email protected]

The theory: different from the reality

by yeast (not the same ones as fish use), and so this sequence was constructed inthe laboratory using an automated DNA

synthesiser. The actual molecule made had never previously existed in nature.

This was then inserted into the same type of yeast that for several years has beenused to make vitamin pills for health foodstores, and for several millennia to makebread and beer.

The promoter was placed under the control of a gal switch, meaning that thedesired protein synthesis could be switchedon by the introduction of galactose into thefermentation medium.

Everyone’s a winnerSo we now have a product that helps toconserve fish stocks in the sea, reduces thenutritional imbalance of a popular food, anduses a traditional food grade yeast. There iseven a side benefit – if your ice cream thawsslightly between supermarket and home, oreven while little brother is making up hismind at lunch which variety to go for, whenthe ice cream is refrozen, it reforms much of its original texture, rather than producingthose nasty crystals which stab the tongueand gums.

But for those who have been payingattention, it is of course a GM product(albeit not transgenic), and therefore likely to be banned by anti-hedonistic dodos suchas Peter Melchett and Michael Meacher.

Will the public swallow it? Only time will tell.


while swimming in waters which may bebelow 0oC (and yet which do not freezebecause of the saltiness of the oceans)?

Amazingly, a whole family of proteins exist which, by an interaction (not totallyunderstood in molecular terms) with water,alters the way in which the liquid freezes. In particular, the crystals that form whenfreezing does eventually takes place, aremicrocrystalline rather than the long needlesthat are usually present.

When these proteins are included in icecream manufacture, they enable both thesugar and fat content to be significantlyreduced, with no loss of organoleptic (thatsmooth seductive mouth feel!) quality.

The problem is that to produce enough for Europe’s vast appetite for ice cream (now increasing thanks to climate change)would involve wiping out much of the fishstocks of the North Atlantic. Therefore, everconscious of such environmental challenges,the decision was taken to put a relevant geneinto yeast and to produce the protein byfermentation. This approach therefore mimicsthe production of blood clotting factors totreat haemophiliacs, which stops them frombeing infected with HIV.

Constructing a moleculeThe DNA was not of course extracted fromfish – nobody wants to think of such a sourcewhile tucking into a Magnum.

First the protein sequence was determined.Using the genetic code, it was then possible topredict several gene sequences which wouldbe capable of coding for such a molecule. Wenow know which triplet codons are preferred

For more than a decade, those opposed inprinciple to GM technology have banged onabout all the benefits accruing to producersand not to consumers (assuming of coursethat you exclude those whose pension fundsare invested in profit-making companies).

Even those who by their job description (eg Chair of the Food Standards Agency) areobliged to sit on the metaphorical fence,have begged for the scientists and theindustry to provide something other thanyellow rice with which to tickle the palates of the UK electorate (or at least their under-voting-age offspring).

And now here it is.

Mush Most of us know that when water freezes, it is unusual in expanding. Burst pipes are one thing, but at least fish can swim aroundunderneath the ice on ponds and the ocean.

The consequences for the food industry areslightly more complex, not to say disastrous. It is difficult to freeze foods such asstrawberries because the ice crystals thatform so disrupt the cell structure that, on thawing, all that results is mush.

One way to deal with this is to takeadvantage of the fact that any substance –including molecules such as sucrose, glucoseand fructose – depresses the freezing pointof the solvent it is dissolved in. However thisaffects both the taste and the nutritionalqualities of the product.

The hunt has long been on for an alternative.

Fishy lessonsHow do fish keep their body fluids liquid

Dr Alan D. B. Malcolmis Chief Executive of the Institute of

[email protected]

Y Feature

The ice protein cometh?Alan Malcolm anticipates just desserts

Never in nature: less sugar and fat but equally smooth

The author is a member of the Advisory Committee on

Novel Foods and Processes which has recently reviewed this

product.

He is also a former Chair of the British Nutrition

Foundation, and was Deputy Chair of Technology Foresight

on Food and Drink.

Any views expressed here are his own and do not represent

those of any of the above.

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not only economic sustainability intoaccount, but also environmental and social sustainability. They emphasise theimportance of internalizing the views andpriorities of both internal and externalstakeholders in a spiral process driven bysuccessive rounds of innovation, while beingsensitive to social, environmental andeconomic considerations. This approachproduces a very different model to the oneconstructed around a single simple notion like wealth creation.

Science in modern societyWe live in a scientific society, and science is atthe vanguard of innovation and clearly has alarger role than simply being the connectivetissue that holds society together. However, if science is to survive in the business context,it will need to be able to deal with theconflicts of interest that will undoubtedlyarise between different stakeholders.

The last few years have seen the public’sdistrust of science grow when it comes to theenvironment and the issues concerning theirwellbeing. In these circumstances, it needs to be open, accountable and demonstrategood governance.

Overall, in a democracy, this will require adelicate balancing act, that can cope with thedifferent vested interests of the variousstakeholders. Whether this can be done witha constitutional approach that incorporatestriple sustainability thinking, without a returnto public sector funding and the HaldanePrinciple, is an open question.

recommended that the research required bydifferent government departments should beseparated as much as possible from politicaland administrative pressures. We shouldconsider reinstating Haldane’s principle whenit comes to public service research.

Science in a business contextThe social philosopher and business thinkerCharles Handy argues that the traditionalraison d’être of businesses – to maximisereturns for shareholders – is outmoded. He thinks that future companies will have constitutions.

Society can be seen to be made up ofbusinesses as a wall is made up of bricks. But modern walls are held together by mortarwhich is the connective tissue between thebricks. I would therefore like to suggest thatour education system, its art and its scienceare in part the connective tissue that holdsthe wall together. Turning science into purelyanother outmoded business or brick willweaken the wall.

Traditional business models have focusedminimally on economic sustainability andmaximally on growth and wealth creation.But this focus is changing. New businessmodels adopt a triple sustainability, taking

Science advice to government is unavoidablypolitical. This conflict of interest has driven a wedge between science and society. If science is to survive in its current business-oriented research context, it will need to beable to deal with the conflicts of interest thatwill undoubtedly arise between differentstakeholders.

Trust in a business environmentOver the last several years, there has beengrowing concern within the scientificestablishment that the integrity of science is being undermined. For many scientists, this loss of faith seems unfair and simplyunwarranted.

Where controversial biotechnology isconcerned, others claim that today’s distrustis very real and based around conflicts arisingfrom questions around perceived benefitsand, perhaps more importantly, ownership.Research that may benefit some sectors ofbusiness may not be compatible with thepublic good, leading to conflicts of interest.

Even within the scientific community itselfthere are tensions. Taking the issue of GMcrops, for example, there can clearly be aconflict of views between molecularbiologists, who insist on the precision andsafety of genetically modified crops, andecologists, who are more cautionary aboutthe benefits and consequences of their use.

Revise the business modelIt is around these and similar issues thatsociety wishes to see science as transparentand accountable. Over the last two or threedecades, however, there has been a change inthe relationship between scientific knowledgeand research. The ‘gatekeepers of knowledge’used to be the editors of journals and careersdetermined by previously published research;today, modern laboratories are headed by aChief Executive Officer and the newgatekeepers are the grant-awarding bodieswhose membership includes people withindustrial and commercial interests. Theemphasis has changed from past research,to future research, and with this a change in bias from public service to business andwealth creation.

It may be that we need to abandon theidea of science as wealth creator, and onceagain put greater distance between customerand contractor. The 1918 Haldane report

Dr Keith Daviesis a senior research scientist ininvertebrate pathology at [email protected]

Bring back Haldane!Keith Davies argues that the business model for research leads to lack of public trust

GM corn: tensions between different groups

The views expressed within this manuscript are strictly

those of the author and it is written in his personal

capacity as a citizen scientist; the opinions expressed are his

own and do not represent the views of Rothamsted

Research or the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences

Research Council of the United Kingdom.

| SCIENCE & PUBLIC AFFAIRS | June 2007

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legitimacy in the communities in which weoperate would suddenly prove fruitless.

One clear theme emerges strongly fromthese major, long-term risks. They sharecommon solutions. There is an urgentneed for us all – national governments,companies and individuals – to act now inorder to slow the pace of energy demand, to improve our energy efficiency and toreduce carbon emissions.

Taking actionIn the last 10 years, BP has tried to take a lead in the industry on all these issues, butespecially on climate change. In 1997 we ‘left the church’ of large oil companies and I committed BP to reducing our owngreenhouse gas emissions to 10 per centbelow 1990 levels. We met that target sevenyears early, in 2002. I have also called for thedevelopment of an international carbontrading system.

BP is investing some of the cashflowsreceived from oil and gas in our newalternative energy business. We are investingin solar and are on track to triple ourmanufacturing capacity of solar photovalvicpanels within two years. We are developing aworld-leading wind power business. We haveassembled a large land bank. We are alsoinvesting in other innovative technologies,including carbon capture and storage.

One of the areas with most promise isbiofuels. BP already buys and blends over 500 million gallons of ethanol in the US. And earlier this year we committed $500m to a biosciences institute at the University ofBerkeley, California, which will develop newcrops and new techniques to supplementthe contribution to cleaner fuels alreadymade by ethanol.

The challenges we face are serious and if wedo nothing, they could be catastrophic. Butthe history of human development shows thatif we work together and retain our trust ineach other, our confidence and our optimism,we can triumph over almost any adversity.

Three fundamental values have alwayssustained human development: trust,confidence and optimism. Yet today, thosevalues are suddenly being undermined by concerns about energy security and global warming.

Trust, confidence and optimism have takenus from a primitive economy, in which everyindividual and every family had to look afterthemselves, to an integrated society in whichwe rely on others to provide the basics of life,such as food, clean water and, of course,energy. If we reaffirm our values, they willhelp us meet the challenges of our own time too.

Companies, too, require trust, confidenceand optimism if they are to be successful. As far as BP is concerned, we have had ourproblems in the last two years, including atragic accident at our Texas City refinery, inwhich 15 of our colleagues died, and an oilspill in Alaska. We are determined to restoretrust in our operations and we are workingwith everybody, from unions, to employees to regulators to apply the lessons learned,particularly those related to process safety.

Long-term risksThere are three long-term risks which we allought to be concerned about. The first ispolitical. Instability in the Middle East, thethreat of confiscation and the risk of energybeing used as a political instrument are allcontributing to concerns that the supply ofenergy could one day be seriously disrupted.

The second risk is rising demand. Oil is notrunning out. At current levels of demand,there is estimated to be 40 years of oil andgas supplies. But the rapid development ofChina, India and other emerging economies isinevitably putting a strain on production.Demand in 15 years’ time could easily be 25per cent higher than it is today.

The third risk – and the one about which I feel most passionately – is climate change.The science is still evolving, but the balance of opinion in the scientific community hastipped decisively towards believing that thetemperature in the atmosphere is rising, and this has been caused by man-madecarbon emissions.

Climate changeIn his film An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore saysclimate change is a planetary emergency. But

Lord Brownewas until recently Group Chief Executive of British Petroleum (BP) [email protected]

Action on climate changeTrust is important to BP, says John Browne

Ethanol: BP is researching supplements

it is also a humanitarian one. Climate changejeopardises all our confidence in the future. Itraises the prospect of rising sea levels, moredesertification, crop failure and heat waves.

Furthermore, as far as the energy industry isconcerned, there is the additional risk that weand our products will get the blame for globalwarming. If that happens, the time and effortwe have spent carefully building up trust and

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energy, and that there were spin-offs ofvarious forms. In the case of Gamblesby, theproject was being picked up through the weband site visits as an example for other villagesto follow. Villagers had developed localexpertise in ground source heat pumptechnology, and individual local villagers hadbeen motivated to install microgenerationtechnology in their own homes.

Such catalytic and positive outcomes arenot always realized so readily. In one of ourcase studies, a community became verydivided over the development of a small windfarm project set up by local farmers. Itsclaimed community credentials did not stop it being viewed, by some locals at least, asjust as intrusive as any other wind farm.

Community benefitsWe found that projects are most acceptedand most productive when local people are extensively involved, and when there are clear beneficial collective outcomes forthe community.

The research shows that there is muchenthusiasm for a localized communityapproach to renewable energy becoming part of the hybrid and distributed form thatlow carbon energy generation in the UK will need to take. The approach is also animportant part of the process through whichpolicy initiatives can stimulate change andinnovation at a local level.

1. The project was funded by the ESRC.

Project web site: http://geography.lancs.ac.uk/cei/

communityenergyproject.htm

supply electricity or heat to communitybuildings or to bring money and jobs intocooperative community ventures.

The development of such projects has beenactively supported by government policy since2001. We identified over 500 projects underdevelopment at the end of 2004, with manymore since taken forward largely in ruralcommunities across different parts of country.The alternative technology activists of thepast have become the community projectmanagers and consultants of the present,inspiring a diversity of people to becomeactively involved.

GamblesbyThe small rural community of Gamblesby inCumbria had endured foot and mouth and adecline in facilities to the point where onlythe village hall remained. This had fallen intodisrepair, and badly needed a better heatingsystem. In order to attract funding forrenovation, the village hall committee ofretired professionals, businessmen and localfarmers produced a business plan thatstressed renewable energy and materials and a high input of DIY from the village. With advice from the local support team of the Community Renewables Initiative, the committee obtained grants – includingfor under-floor heating fuelled by a groundsource heat pump.

Villagers got involved in different ways:digging trenches in the car park for theunderground piping, barrowing ballast andplumbing the system. The result was aheating system that was easy to use andeconomic to run. A phase 2 project involvedthe installation of a 6Kw wind turbine.

OutcomesIn the context of the carbon reductionagenda, this project may seem insignificant.However, such projects can set wider socialdynamics in motion. In researching this andother case studies – including wind farms,biomass district heating systems and solarinstallations – we were able to examine whatlocal people learnt from being involved.

We found that all the projects had some positive impact on local people’sunderstanding and support for renewable

When faced with the extraordinary scale ofthe challenges involved in reducing carbonemissions, it is easy for local actions to appearfutile. If China is on a trajectory of growththat in terms of total carbon emissions isprojected to overtake that of the USA, is thereany point in people in the UK reducing theirinfinitesimally small current and futurecontribution to the global carbon footprint?

For an increasing number of people,communities and businesses in the UK, theanswer to that question is a clear ‘yes’. Forsome, it is a matter of doing the right thingand acting on responsibilities to current andfuture generations; for others, a morepragmatic need for the UK to lead by exampleand to realize the wider benefits that a moresustainable economy or lifestyle might bring.

Whatever the motive, we find manyexamples of initiatives that can contributetowards shifting to a low carbon economy, andeach of these needs to be properly evaluated.

Community renewablesOne such initiative, examined in a recently-completed research project,1 is communityrenewable energy.

Community renewables sit somewherebetween the big private windfarms of themajor energy players and small microgeninstallations on domestic roofs. They involvemany different forms of renewable energytechnology – wind, solar, biomass, groundsource heat pumps, microhydro – installed to

Professor Gordon Walkeris at the Department of Geography and Lancaster Environment Centre at Lancaster [email protected]

Dr Patrick Devine-Wrightis at the Department of Architecture at Manchester [email protected]

Gamblesby village hall with its new turbine John Perkins

Carbon reduction in the UK:is there any point? Gordon Walker and Patrick Devine-Wright assess community renewables

rich provinces (on Rockall and Hatton Banks)to bottom fishing gear.

Publicity changed policyThis has been a major success story. The BAFestival brought new scientific findings to wider public attention, and this hasultimately influenced positive changes inpolicy for the long-term benefit of all.

The work raised many issues, includingimprovements to the satellite monitoring offisheries and the development of a coherentnetwork of offshore marine protected areas. It is gratifying that these issues are beinggiven urgent attention by policy makers bothat UK and EU level.

Festival publicity helped change fishing policyJason Hall-Spencer has a good news story


also able to suggest practical solutions tobetter harness these resources.

Industry collaboration On the back of this publicity, I was grantedaccess to government satellite tracking datashowing where the international fleets offishing boats were trawling. It turned out thatareas that were rich in reef-forming coralswere generally avoided by fishermen due tothe damage the rough grounds caused totheir gear and their catches. However, on atypical deep-water fishing trip each vesseltrawls 30 square kilometres of seabed and, onoccasion, the habitats formed by long-livedorganisms are severely impacted.

By showing the industry charts of wherecorals were known to occur, and overlayingsatellite tracking details of where they fished, it was possible to design closed areas that excluded trawling and other forms of fishing that impact the sea bed. It was clear that the last thing the fishingindustry wanted was to be seen to be wilfullydamaging the marine environment, and theywere proactive in suggesting closed areasthat would benefit their long-term economicsustainability. Our joint aim was to create a‘win-win’ situation, coupling effective habitatconservation with no economic loss to thefishing industry.

It was imperative that we avoidedsuggesting the closure of areas that coulddisplace trawling effort from habitats that hadbeen impacted onto areas that were pristine.

LobbyingWith industry involvement and a soundscientific basis, the World Wide Fund forNature and I began to lobby the EUDepartments of the Environment andFisheries.

Since the 2005 BA Festival, colleagues and I have highlighted the issues on lecture toursof fisheries advisory groups and internationalscientific symposia. We have helped theInternational Council for Exploration of theSeas to formulate advice to the EU and theNorth East Atlantic Fisheries Commission.

Between January and March 2007, theconcerted and collaborative efforts of manypeople paid off with the closure of large coral-

In the late 1990s, I saw chunks of coral reef being trawled up off the UK at a timewhen the fishing industry was moving intodeeper waters along the EuropeanContinental Shelf edge.

As a trained marine biologist I wasflabbergasted, since the text books said that coral reefs were restricted to warmtropical waters.

It turned out that corals were amongst thefirst life forms discovered during pioneeringdeep-sea surveys off southwest Ireland in1869. In fact, at least as many coral speciesare described from the deep sea as fromshallow waters and large, reef-forming coralshave been known to occur in the cold watersoff Scandanavia since the times of Linnaeus.However, it is only in the past few years that advances in acoustic survey and digitalunderwater filming technology have allowedus to film and study these deep-waterhabitats in detail, rather than relying onremote sampling such as with grabs.

Festival of Science publicityAt the BA Festival of Science in Dublin in2005, I was able to showcase new video taken off the southwest of Ireland from aninternational expedition surveying previouslyunseen pristine habitats at a depth of 1000 meters. The videos revealed spectacularnew species of corals, but also showed that deep-sea trawling was inadvertentlydamaging coral reefs that were thousands of years old.

The Royal Society had published evidenceobtained in the UK, France and Norway thatshowed trawling damage to deep-seahabitats all along the deep-water margin of the European continent. At the 2005Festival, this issue really caught the publicimagination. I was giving a presentation ofnew expedition results that were podcastlive on the internet, and this was followed by a flurry of newspaper and internetarticles together with interviews about thestory for radio and TV. This provided me with opportunities to dispel the myth thatthe deep sea is a monotonous expanse ofmud, and to get across the message that, in fact, we have a rich complexity of deep-sea habitats around the British Isles. I was

Dr Jason Hall-Spenceris a Royal Society University ResearchFellow in the Marine Institute atthe University of Plymouth. He will be giving a series of lectures on Europe’s deep-water realm at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition on 2–6 July [email protected]

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Long-legged squat lobsters which live on a previously undescribed species of precious black coral west of Ireland

Sir Gareth RobertsGordon Duff remembers a champion for science

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Gareth Roberts was a distinguished researchphysicist who played a key role in keepingeducation and science at the top of thegovernment’s agenda. President of WolfsonCollege, Oxford, at the time of his death, he was a strong and charismatic leader,capable of achieving a consensus whereothers could not.

The son of a quarryman, Roberts was bornin 1940 in Penmaenmawr, North Wales. Raisedin a Welsh-speaking home, he learnt Englishat school and attended chapel every Sunday.From the John Bright Grammar School inLlandudno, he progressed to the UniversityCollege of North Wales at Bangor, gaining aFirst in Physics in 1961, followed by a PhD inthe nascent field of semiconductor physics.

By the age of 34 he held the chair ofphysics in the New University of Ulster atColeraine. In 1976 he moved to DurhamUniversity, and was elected a Fellow of theRoyal Society in 1984.

In 1990 he was appointed Vice-Chancellorof Sheffield University, a role in which he wasstrikingly successful. His personal qualities of integrity and fairness engendered trust,and enabled him to implement far-sightedpolicies – for example, widening social accessto the university – with strong support fromall the faculties.

Many of his initiatives had their origins inRoberts’s ‘Town and Gown’ dinners, which he hosted with his wife, Carolyn, at theiruniversity residence. On these evenings,guests took part in much-enjoyed quizzes

(which invariably included the question, ‘In what year did Cardiff win the FA Cup?’).

Campaigning against cutsIn 1995 Roberts was elected Chairman of theCommittee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals,now known as Universities UK. His two-yearterm of office was among the most turbulenton record, as the CVCP collided with thegovernment over its continuing cuts inuniversity funding. Led by Roberts, the CVCPjoined forces with the campus unions tomount a vigorous campaign to make thepolitical parties and the public aware of thefinancial plight of the universities.

The resulting Dearing Inquiry into HigherEducation, commissioned in 1996, drewheavily on input from the CVCP. The NewLabour government accepted many of theprinciples in the 1997 Dearing Report,building on the key recommendation thatthe costs of higher education should beshared among those who benefit.

Roberts then joined the Board of the HigherEducation Funding Council for England(Hefce). He was a powerful advocate forresearch funding for universities, while hisdetailed review of the Research AssessmentExercise – the vehicle through whichuniversities receive much of their researchincome – was presented to the UK’s fourhigher-education funding bodies in 2004.

Gareth Roberts chaired the Research CareersInitiative (1997-2002), aimed at enhancing theworking conditions, training and employmentopportunities of over 37,000 contract researchstaff in UK universities and colleges.

SET for SuccessHis pragmatic approach led to an invitationfrom the Chancellor of the Exchequer, GordonBrown, to undertake a comprehensive reviewof the supply of skilled scientists needed to support a competitive modern economy.Roberts’s report SET for Success, published in 2002, highlighted the serious shortages inthe funding and supply of scientists, engineersand mathematicians in UK schools anduniversities, and the steps needed to remedythe situation. The government gave its fullbacking to his report, investing £1.25bn inscience and technology at all levels.

Roberts was an inspirational President ofthe Institute of Physics (1998–2000) and thedriving force behind the foundation of theScience Council, launched in 2000. Last year,he was appointed Chairman of theEngineering and Technology Board.

Science in schoolsIn recent years, Roberts became increasinglyinvolved in promoting the study of scienceand technology in schools. He chaired andreorganised both the Network of ScienceLearning Centres and Setnet, the DTI-sponsored body responsible for school science enrichment, and was Presidentof the Association of Science Education. An engaging (and humorous) public speaker, he presented the Royal Institution/ BBCChristmas Lectures in 1988, on ‘Science andTechnology in the Home of the Future’.

There was an endearing Welshness aboutGareth Roberts – he lost neither the lilt in his voice nor the deep love he felt for hishomeland. At all times his family came first. He was a life-long and loyal supporter of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club.

When cancer was diagnosed towards the end of last year, Roberts continued with fortitude and equanimity in the sameorganised and dignified way in which he had conducted his entire life. He was workingat home up until the very end.

Sir Gordon Duffis Florey Professor of Molecular Medicine at the University of [email protected]

Sir Gareth Roberts: endearing Welshness

Many of his initiatives hadtheir origins in Roberts’s‘Town and Gown’ dinners,which he hosted with hiswife, Carolyn, at theiruniversity residence. On these evenings, gueststook part in much-enjoyedquizzes (which invariablyincluded the question, ‘In what year did Cardiffwin the FA Cup?’)

Because little by little, plant pathologistsand plant breeders have made steadyimprovements in the resistance of wheatto the stem rust fungus.

Wheat alone provides a catalogue ofdiseases (powdery mildew, glume blotch, leafrust are others) which have been reasonablywell controlled by patient application of thescientific method in breeding new varieties,developing fungicides and improving cropmanagement. Even the control of potatoblight and coffee rust has been improved inthis way, though they are still noxious pestswhen conditions suit them.

The Triumph of the Fungi leaves the readerwith the impression that our food, furnitureand landscapes, not to mention car tyres, are at the mercy of a barbaric army ofmicrobes. Yet plant pathologists serve thesame role in combating these alien forces as Roman soldiers did on Hadrian’s Wall:constant vigilance, skirmishes and sorties, a few hard-fought battles in an unpleasantenvironment have kept most diseases at bay.The fact that there is little or no news aboutthe vast majority of fungi is the good newsabout plant pathology.

The most devastating diseases of plantsJames Brown denies the fungi are winning

The Triumph of the Fungi: A Rotten History, by Nicholas P. Money (Oxford University Press, 2007, ISBN 0-19-51891-X)


Professor Money writes engagingly andinformatively about heroes and heroines ofplant pathology such as Anton de Bary, whodiscovered how late blight infects potatoes,and Marie Schwartz, who showed thatDutch elm disease is caused by a microbe.

At his best, he grips the reader’s interestwith accounts of how key discoveries weremade and how the science has oftenbecome entangled with politics. So it isdistracting to find such a passage cutshort by a personal anecdote or a frivolousremark. I was left with the strangesensation that Money does not believe his subject will actually hold the reader’sattention unless the scientific pill is heavilycoated with humorous sugar.

Frivolity and sensationalism cometogether at the end of the book, with aspectacular but implausible suggestion that masses of fungal spores caused theextinction of large, flightless dinosaurs (but apparently not the small, featheredones, the birds). Maybe this just addsanother crazy notion to the pile of ideasabout the Cretaceous mass extinction, but it will not help to persuade readers that there is serious science elsewhere in the book.

The triumph of the humansThere is an entirely different story to tellabout plant diseases, a quieter but moreoptimistic tale about the triumph of thehuman mind.

Fungi are indeed permanent threats tofarms, forests and gardens. They adapt tonew plant varieties, they become insensitiveto fungicides and new pathogens arise andspread. Yet by and large, people learn to copewith them and control them. Stem rustcaused devastating epidemics on wheat inthe USA in the 1950s, but fifty years havepassed without comparable damage. Why?

Plants are assailed by an extraordinaryrange of diseases: blotches and blights,rusts and mildews, rots and wilts.The Triumph of the Fungi romps through thehistory of research on some of the most deadly ailments caused by fungi and the superficially similar but unrelatedwater moulds.

The title consciously echoes a classic ofpopular science writing from 1940, TheAdvance of the Fungi. The author, E.C. Large,an engineer turned plant pathologist,explained to a non-specialist readership howthese microbes cause diseases and howpathologists had learnt about them.In the decades since The Advance waspublished, new diseases have appeared and spread, huge progress has been made inthe science of plant pathology and methodsof disease control have improved greatly.

It might seem that the time is ripe for a new book which tells non-experts about thecurrent state of this subject, so vital foreconomic production for food and rawmaterials. Sadly, The Triumph is not that book.

Devastating fungiHas the advance of the fungi become a triumph? Professor Money seems to think so. He is concerned with the mostspectacular and destructive diseases ofcrops and forests: the rust which devastatedcoffee in Sri Lanka, potato late blight whichbrought famine to Ireland, chestnut blightwhich ravaged forests in eastern NorthAmerica. Yet these diseases are remarkableprecisely because they are exceptional. It isquite mistaken to think that agriculture ison the brink of a fungus-induced calamity.

Not only does The Triumph focus on eye-catching but unrepresentative diseases, butmuch of it is written in a flippant mannerwhich does not help to explain someunfamiliar and occasionally obscure science.

Professor James Brownis a project leader in pathology of cerealcrops at the John Innes Centre, [email protected]

Y Review

Not so rotten after all

Understanding the real worldM. D. Smith challenges a dogma

Experimentation on animalsGill Langley corrects some misconceptions

Y Correspondence


It was refreshing to read Kevin Anderson’sforthright opinions on the post-Sternbandwagon (‘Climate change in a myopicworld’, SPA March 2007, pp 6–7).

The ‘inconvenient truth’ is that it is theenergy profligacy of our western way of lifewhich is the cause of greenhouse warming.Those who believe that, with just a few minor,painless adjustments we can continue on ourmerry way while the rest of humanity catchesup, and still avoid dangerous climate change,need to think again.

If there is a central dogma of modernpolitical life, it is this: economic growth is

good; more economic growth is better;limitless economic growth is best of all.Anyone from outside political life whoquestions the central dogma facesaccusations of ‘not living in the real world’.

Why is this? For decades, free-marketeconomists and big business have hammeredhome their message that quality of lifeincreases in direct proportion to economicand material wellbeing. So good a job havethey done that most of the western worldbelieves it to be true. Comparative studies ofmental health, however, suggest otherwise: if anything, we are less happy now than our

parents’ and grandparents’ generations were50 years ago.

Science has a message for all of us,politicians, economists and consumers alike:the real ‘real world’ is entirely indifferent toour economic wellbeing; the real ‘real world’,indeed, is indifferent to our very existence. A life with less may be a happier life. It iscertainly better than no life at all.

M. D. SmithSelby, North Yorkshire

Corina Hadjiodysseos says that anti-vivisectionists argue against animalexperiments on the basis that they are not ‘necessary’ (SPA March 2007, p 26).

As a scientist who has campaignedprofessionally against animal research for 30 years, I believe she has mischaracterisedour opposition.

Those who oppose animal experiments do soprimarily for two reasons. The first is that it’sunethical deliberately to cause pain or sufferingto sentient individuals (humans or animals ofother species) without their freely-given, fully-informed consent, and when the affectedindividual is not expected to benefit personallyfrom the intervention. This moral framework iswidely accepted for the human species.

Since there is no logical or biologicaljustification to distinguish morally between all humans and all other animals, the positionis also valid for other sentient species. Mostanimals cannot give consent and will notbenefit from experiments conducted on them.

Assumed benefitsThe second argument used by many anti-vivisectionists is that the validity of medicalresearch on animals has largely been assumedrather than proven. The government’s ownadvisory committee agreed that animalresearch ‘has to be judged case-by-case andsubjected to detailed, critical evaluation’.1

There has been little such evaluation, butvery recently a number of systematic reviews

have revealed certain animal experiments tohave been badly designed and poorlypredictive of human outcomes.2

1. Animal Procedures Committee (2003). Review of

cost/benefit assessment in the

use of animals in research, p25-26.

www.apc.gov.uk/reference/costbenefit.pdf

2. P Perel et al (15 December 2006). British Medical

Journal doi:10.1136/bmj.39048.407928.BE

Dr Gill Langleyis Science Director at the Dr HadwenTrust for Humane [email protected]

Ignorance fosters barbarityDarwin bequeathed us the fabric connectingall biological diversity, from bacteria to thenature of human consciousness. There is no other valid scientific explanation for howspecies emerge. Read that again – no otherscientific explanation. If your school insists on teaching ID, then it should at least beobligated to scrutinise it with the rigour ofscientific analysis, whereupon its flaws willbecome evident, and you can then point outexactly what is going on. Teachers, do yourhomework!3

Responsible education requires conveyingthe importance of how to think. Rachel Ankenysuggests ID opponents assume a general laynon-appreciation of what science is. However,it is Truth in Science and the ID movementwho exploit both the assumption that the laypublic is too stupid to recognise pseudoscience,and its susceptibility to marketing ruses. We should not assume that religious groupswho foster their image as bastions of moralintegrity would never resort to such strategies.

Be wary of the pontificating of those whoyearn for a return to what they paint as a morepastoral world. On the contrary, promotingignorance fosters medieval barbarity.Creationism and ID are not just Christianideals, but appeal to fundamentalists of other faiths. It is now plausible that, by virtueof the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006,the teaching of evolution is under threat fromzealots who may be able to claim their beliefsare being illegally offended.

Now, more than ever, public scientificawareness is essential. Truth in Science andthe Intelligent Design movement, whileposturing as science, are underhandedlymarketing a faith position.

1. www.truthinscience.org.uk/site

2. R. Ankeny, Science & Public Affairs (December 2006),

‘Intelligent design: Why is such junk science so popular?’

3. See http://bcseweb.org.uk/ for a useful

information resource

Do your homework!


Scepticism, then, should consider why ID advocates have none to proffer.

Any attempt to dislodge a scientificparadigm like evolution has first todemonstrate the same explanatory power.Consider whether ID accounts for theextinction of over 95 per cent of species that have ever inhabited the earth; and thenumerous imperfections that afflict extantliving organisms (and yes, that includeshuman beings). Any intelligent designerwould surely not engineer bodies that carrybuilt-in flaws – it would indicate a deficient,imperfect intelligence.

This is where ID backfires: an attempt toblend evolution with occasional supernaturalintervention is a resort to discredited ‘God of the Gaps’-style theology, rejected by themajority of thinking religious people. Don’tbe misled by supposed distinctions, asrecently advocated by Rachel Ankeny in this magazine.2 ID is merely creationism in its latest guise. As such, it is not onlypseudoscience, but also shallow religion (and consequently has no legitimate place in religious education classrooms either).

Recently, a nascent Christian organisation,absurdly named ‘Truth in Science’,1

distributed glossy paraphernalia to thescience departments of UK secondary schoolsand sixth form colleges.

The material promotes so-called IntelligentDesign (ID), advocating its inclusion as analternative to evolution in science lessons. To date, this marketing ploy has apparentlyproven effective in persuading at least 59schools of its scientific worthiness.

TacticsCreationist ideals are being propagated insome of the increasing number of faithschools, which already constitute a third of our education system, a perfectly legalconsequence of the non-separation of churchand state. Moreover, the decline in the actualproportion of graduates with science andmaths degrees is happening at a time whenreligious politics are increasingly in the publicconsciousness. And now Truth in Sciencepositions itself as arbiter of what should betaught in all science classes.

Truth in Science’s tactics conform to thedeclared ‘wedge strategy’ of the politicallyand media-savvy ID movement: the objectiveof equal time in school classrooms as thebasis for attacking scientific materialism. Theensuing ‘scientific’ controversy is ripe mediafodder, perpetuated by a limited number of pro-ID scientists who, first and foremost,happen to be committed theists. The publicitygenerated affords ID undue credibility as an alternative scientific explanation in asupposedly balanced debate on evolution.

No evidenceThis might seem a noble enough venture andit is good to be sceptical; after all, evolutioncannot answer all questions on the history of life, can it? ID proposes that evolution isdeficient in its account of gaps in the fossilrecord, and what it considers the ‘irreduciblecomplexity’ of certain natural structures (the eye and the bacterial flagellum being pet examples). However, whether or notyou accept this charge, defaulting to anunexplained ‘designer’ (by implication, ‘God’)does not constitute a scientific alternativebecause it fails on one fundamentalrequirement – evidence! You don’t have to believe evolution; but refutation requiresevidence for a plausible alternative argument.

Dr Lee Turnpenny and Dr Michael Carrollare in the Human Genetics Division andCentre for Human Development, StemCells & Regeneration, at the University of [email protected]@soton.ac.uk

Y Sounding Off

Pawns in the evolution debate

An open letter to science teachers from Lee Turnpenny and Michael Carroll

How public engagement came down from the mountainTom Wakeford

Y The Wakeford Watch


When I was young I was in digs occupied by fellows with Oxbridge degrees. I thought, ‘My God, clever fellows’ – you know – ‘keep yourmouth shut when they’re doing the crossword‘cos you’ll say the wrong word!’ One of themwas a principal lecturer: a brilliant chap.

One day he went out on his bike and thechain came off. He walked all the way back for me to put the chain on. He couldn’t do it, so I showed him, but a week later the samething happened again. I discovered a mancould be brilliant in his own way — butcouldn’t put a chain on a bike.

I realised then there was a thing called theeducated idiot; that common sense was spreadacross the population and that there areprofessors who are idiots – just the same asthere are navvies who are idiots. For the firsttime in my life I began to realise that to beeducated and to have one of these wonderfuldegrees didn’t confer wisdom on you. So whenI go to the NFU [National Farmers Unionmeetings] and hear that a famous professorsaid something – well, maybe he can’t puta chain on his bike, either!

This is the story told by a Cumbrian farmer to Peter and Jean Williams, the as-yetunsung pioneers of two-way processes ofengagement between citizens. In 1987 these two extraordinary people took partin conversations which, two decades later,are beginning to influence the way the UKgenerates new knowledge.

The Williams had spent their whole livesamong the Lakeland fells. They were held inhigh esteem by the isolated hill farmers who

packed their children off every day to thesmall school where Peter was headmaster.Then, just after he retired, the Chernobylreactor melted down.

Facts wrongOver the next few weeks, hill farmers inCumbria and Wales found themselves at thewhim of government agencies and theirscientists. Large numbers of sheep wereprevented from going to market or evenculled, based on the guesswork of supposedexperts at MAFF (the Ministry of Agriculture,Fisheries and Food - now DEFRA, theDepartment for Environment, Food and RuralAffairs). These same officials predicted thatthe hillsides would soon contain so littleradioactivity that the disruption to farmerswould be minimal. People who worked thefells, and others, suggested that MAFF’smodels were based on erroneousassumptions, but they were ignored.

In fact, the MAFF scientists had got theirfacts drastically wrong. Among the errors theyhad made was to assume a sheep’s diet wasjust grass. Yet farmers knew that for much ofthe year sheep survived by eating lichens andmosses, which concentrate radioactivity intheir tissues, leading to sheep swallowing farmore radiation than in the scientists’ models.Twenty years on, some Cumbrian farms stillcan’t sell their lambs.

Hands-on expertiseHoping to understand more, Peter and Jeanteamed up with Brian Wynne, a socialresearcher who had also grown up in thearea. They sat with local farmers, not asexperts extracting data, but as co-inquirers.

Williams, Williams and Wynnedemonstrated that the knowledge of non-scientists such as farmers, shepherds andother farm workers was more reliable than

much of that used to deal with the crisis byMAFF officials. Yet, this hands-on vernacularexpertise was often dismissed by theunaccountable scientific elite as merely beingthe ignorance of lay people.

Inspiring others to carry out similar co-inquiries, Wynne has prompted new thinkingthat has gradually brought concepts of citizenparticipation and public engagement inscience into the mainstream. Organisations asdiverse as DTI’s Sciencewise, Greenpeace andthe Rowntree Trust have adopted two-waymechanisms of dialogue, allowing theperspectives of non-specialists to be discussedon equal terms with those of specialists suchas scientists, engineers and social researchers.

A good listenerThe Beacons of Public Engagementprogramme reflects this growing acceptanceof the importance of non-specialists. The higher education funding bodies forScotland, England and Wales are investing £8 million into changing the culture in ourlearning institutions with the aim of‘specialists involving, listening to, developingtheir understanding of, and interacting withnon-specialists’.

Though Peter Williams died shortly afterthe Chernobyl research was complete, he andJean made a vital contribution to showing ourscientific academies that wisdom and goodjudgement are partly about being a goodlistener - not something you can learn merelyvia a university degree.

Further reading: Alan Irwin and Brian Wynne 1996,

Misunderstanding Science?: The Public Reconstruction of

Science and Technology. Cambridge University Press.

Tom Wakefordis Director of Co-Inquiry and PublicEngagement at PEALS Research Centre,Newcastle University [email protected]

The perspectives of non-specialists are discussed on equal terms with thoseof specialists such asscientists, engineers andsocial researchers

Scientists at the John Innes Centre haveisolated several genes which control whethera plant needs a cold period before it willflower. This cold ‘trigger’ can be bred in andout of plants to produce winter and springvarieties. This technology will be increasinglyimportant as the temperature rises.

More investmentIt is clear that plant science has a central roleto play in our future and in combating climatechange. Yet at the same time there are talksof job losses in plant science institutions.Rothamsted Research experienced a net staffreduction of 17 during 2005/06. The JohnInnes Centre in Norwich is at present a worldclass institution producing world classresearch in this area. But how long will Britainremain at the forefront of plant science if wedo not make the necessary investment?

BP recently decided to establish a $250million biofuels research centre in Californiarather than the UK. One of the persuadingfactors was that Governor Schwarzeneggeragreed to match the investment while theBBSRC was only able offer £20m.

If climate change is an important issue for government, and it seems that everythingfrom the Labour Government’s ClimateChange Bill to David Cameron’s organictrainers suggest that it is, then plant sciencemust be made a national priority, soon.

1. See www.llnl.gov/pao/news/news_releases/2007/NR-

07-04-03.html

Combating climate changeIan Gibson wants to invest in plant science


pesticides which other crops such as rape-seed have been criticised for.

At Rothamsted Research they are growingshort-rotation-coppice willow. This will growon marginal land and requires little input. If we can get 350,000 hectares of UK landgrowing ‘second generation’ bioenergy cropswhich can then be processed to produce fuels such as biodiesel, this will meet sevenper cent of UK petrochemical needs withoutreducing food production and with very little input.

The BBSRC has just put in £20m to theresearch. But we face a situation where,before the research is done, many companiesand countries are going ahead and plantingvast areas of biofuel crops which are actuallydamaging the environment.

If we are able to produce more bioenergycrops in the UK we will be able to control how they are farmed and regulate the CO2

emitted. We will also guarantee our futureenergy security.

Biofuels v. foodInevitably there will be a competition for farm land between biofuels companies andthe food industry. Bioscience offers us thepotential solutions we need.

It is predicted that, by 2050, the averagetemperature in East Anglia will have risen by 3 degrees Celsius. In addition to this, there will be greatly reduced rainfall, greatlyincreased water evaporation and a great dealmore CO2 in the atmosphere.

Arable farmers will need crops which can grow and be harvested under variabletemperatures and rainfall. Farmers will facenew infections and parasites. Wetter winterswill make cereal crops more prone to fungaldiseases such as Fusarium ear blight. We willsimply not be able to continue on with thesame crops or the same variety of crops whichare traditionally grown in the UK.

Bioscience solutionsAs well as increasing rain water catchments,irrigation and irrigation efficiency, we mustalso look at the genetic make up of plantsthat survive in extreme climates. We canprotect cereal crops from fungal diseases byintroducing genes with a natural resistance.Once we isolate the genes which allow plantsto cope with temperature, these too can bebred into commercial crop varieties.

Climate change has become the media storyof the decade, and rightly so.

When it comes to combating it, however, it seems that planting trees to offset carbonemissions could actually contribute to globalwarming unless the trees are planted in thetropics.1 First generation biofuels are alsogiving us a nasty surprise. The deforestationof developing countries, currently taking place in the rush to make way for biofuelplantations, is having a far more severe effecton the planet than many of us imagine.

Climate change presents us with a setof extremely complex problems. So whatis the solution? It comes in the form of UKplant science.

BiomassInstead of looking abroad to solve our energyneeds, we should be concentrating efforts inthe UK on a ‘second generation’ of bioenergycrops which use biomass.

Miscanthus, switch grass, willow andpoplar can all be grown in the UK. They useless land area than existing biofuel crops, are renewable and carbon neutral. They donot use the same volume of chemicals and

Dr Ian Gibson is MP for Norwich [email protected]

Y SET in Parliament

There will be competitionfor farm land betweenbiofuels and food.Bioscience offers uspotential solutions

How long will Britainremain at the forefrontof plant science if we donot make the necessaryinvestment?

june 2007 a publication of the ba science& publicaffairs

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