MARTIN REEE: We think it odd if parents don鈥檛 care what happens to their children even if it is beyond their control. Likewise even the purest scientists should care what happens to their work. They should welcome benign applications of their ideas and warn against and resist dangerous or threatening spin-offs.
All scientists are expert witnesses and should be engaged in dialogue with the wider public. But when it comes to making decisions, the views of scientists should carry no special weight.
The main impediment to spreading the benefits of science are economic and political. In our grossly unequal world, it is more profitable to provide luxuries for the rich than necessities for the poor. What is required here is not more science, but either drastic redistribution or governmental subsides, or some other social science innovation.
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Some people accept the need to control or redirect the applications of science but claim nonetheless that pure research should be left untrammelled. But that鈥檚 simplistic. There is no sharp demarcation between the two. Science is moulded by technology and society.
Are there areas of academic research鈥攖he kind of science done in university laboratories鈥攖hat the wider public should try to hold back? To some extent the answer is yes, if the work involves experiments to which there are ethical objections. But what if the experiments seems OK but the outcome could be mischievously and damagingly applied? I think the answer is yes here too. We could direct funds away from a field which although interesting might lead to problematic applications.
I want to close with a pessimistic thought鈥攚hat might happen when thousands, even millions, of individuals have the technical capability to work in biotechnology. Devastation could then be caused by a single fanatic. It will be hard to stop such a threat from growing unless we can reduce the blatant inequities that fuel the grievances of the disaffected. We need to ensure that globalisation doesn鈥檛 just benefit the rich countries. Aiming at this worthy goal for the wrong reasons is better than not aiming at it all.
STEVE FULLER: In the 18th century, when people talked about science as the force of enlightenment, they meant science was integrated into people鈥檚 lives. So regardless of whether you were working on an experiment you would be able to understand, talk sensibly and perhaps even participate in decision making on scientific research. Those days are long gone, but my interest as a sociologist of science and as someone committed to the democratisation of science is to recover that kind of Enlightenment ideal.
One level where this ideal has been lost is to do with the democratisation of science in society and the fact that the public and science are acknowledged to be at odds with one another. It is not that the public dislikes science. The sales of popular science books have never been higher. Science provides a public level of spirituality previously fulfilled by religion.
Why people get upset is that they don鈥檛 understand how science interacts with politics, industry. More than that, they have no forum in which to exercise their opinions about science. If we want to talk about the democratisation of science and society, we have to come up with institutions that enable the public to participate.
I suggest we need the consensus conference. The idea is basically a citizen鈥檚 jury, with members of the public as jurors, and expert witnesses from the scientific community and special interest groups. The jurors鈥� brief is to draw up policy guidelines within which the legislators will decide the policy.
In consensus conferences you find that the public comes up with very reasonable guidelines, and can think beyond personal or family interests. I may not want gene therapy but I may allow it for someone else because the evidence seems to be reasonably good and it doesn鈥檛 seem that dangerous.
One of the things people like about this process is that their opinions are taken seriously. The scientific community often thinks that the problem with the public is ignorance and fear when in fact it is lack of participation. With consensus conferences, little by little, you would find greater integration and greater openness through participation, and that people came to trust the scientist more and the scientist to trust the people more.
WILLIAM STEWART: I regard the 1970s as the dark ages of scientific research in the UK, with very specific projects with grants for two to three years, regular six-month reports, and most of the decisions of the research councils taken by redundant scientists who couldn鈥檛 do their research, found jobs as administrators and then tended to dumb down science.
It became apparent that there were key problems that needed resolution, problems to do with the environment, agriculture, economy, health, quality of life. And that most of the solutions were science and technology-based. It was also noted that the UK did about 5 per cent of the world鈥檚 research and that there were a plethora of labs around the world that were doing the same thing.
So the next stage was to use science to give us a competitive edge in some key areas. That鈥檚 what led us into the Technology Foresight Programme. It directed science, not into producing more plants that can fix nitrogen within three to five years, but into broad areas of importance to the UK.
I became totally convinced that science and technology had much to offer, not in 100 years but over the next 10. I think that the taxpayer should not be paying everyone to do a PhD irrespective of the quality of that PhD. And also I wonder about Nobel prizes. We emphasise Nobel prizes but each one costs the UK taxpayer about 拢20 million. Is that a good use of resources?
I do believe, however, that the very best scientists should be given the freedom to carry out their research. And it is best if they work at a university where there is a lot of private resources available for them.
For the bulk, it would be better for them to be broadly directed, broadly influenced by what they can do for the UK, by spinning out new companies, improving the environment, producing better agricultural crops, and so on. If we can鈥檛 do that, then I question the extent to which the taxpayer should consider it.
VANDANA SHIVA: The most important way in which science has been directed is through funding. What science does, where it goes, what it produces, is very much a function of what money goes into it.
Much of the science that evolved in the grand institutions like the one in which we stand tonight redefined dramatically what would be counted as knowledge. The sciences of ancient cultures like China and India were put into the non-science category. Today large numbers of people in the world are turning to disciplines like Ayurvedic medicine, yet for 200 years they have not been funded in the West.
The recent speech of Tony Blair shows how science is being directed. Mr Blair justified his speech as being inspired from my country. He said he met a group of academics in Bangalore who told him: 鈥淓urope has gone soft on science. We are going to leapfrog you and you will miss out.鈥� He said they saw Britain as overrun by protesters and pressure groups who use emotion to drive out reason.
Frankly, no Indian speaks that language, even in the biotech industry. The commercialisation of science is having a heavy impact on the institutions of Bangalore. Monsanto is harvesting the best work in Indian molecular biology through the Institute of Science and we have had students sitting on the lawns wanting that agreement made public. Britain does not have a special protest tendency. Irresponsibly introduced biotech has a habit of generating protests wherever it goes.
Science is being directed by invisible actors, and it is interesting that not once in his speech did Mr Blair mention the real actors on whose behalf he is speaking. The privatisation of science is going to destroy what little fragile internal democracy science has.
Amartya Sen in New 杏吧原创 was saying that economics needs to be modelled on science, and that science is based on give and take. You can鈥檛 have science without sharing knowledge. A crisis of the new direction of science is that no thought has been applied to how to continue the give and take that makes knowledge grow. If we don鈥檛 have a bigger debate on science you are going to see the end of science, and that is the real challenge.
JEREMY WEBB, NEW SCIENTIST: These days there seems to be no such thing as an independent scientist. Is the blurring of the lines between academia, government and industry causing a loss of public trust, and shouldn鈥檛 we be stopping industry from buying up our best talent?
VANDANA SHIVA: The new partnerships that are emerging between science and business are very efficient at harvesting knowledge but they are useless at maintaining the generation of future knowledge. They do not nurture the social base in the scientific community or the political base beyond the scientific community. Science is a public enterprise and a social endeavour. Wall Street can get good quarterly returns out of science, but Wall Street is a bad director of science.
STEVE FULLER: It would be good if science journalists as a rule looked into the financial and political interests of scientists who seem to be outspoken on various public issues, and make that a routine part of reporting. Once scientists know the impact that that exposure would have, maybe they would think twice about getting involved.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Peer review, the lifeblood of science, seems to become considerably more problematic for research that falls between disciplines. How do you address that?
VANDANA SHIVA: There is a suggestion that you don鈥檛 really need publications any more. Let students go to patent offices and read patent applications. Having read many patent applications, I can tell you we will create generations of scientifically illiterate people, because patent applications are not about communicating science.
We need to address how science will be communicated in the new context of commercial science. The big worry for me is that fraudulent science used to be a fringe activity. Today it has become the dominant way in which facts are being generated, especially in biotech. There鈥檚 no public check today on the difference between fraud and fact.
WILLIAM STEWART: That statement worries me quite a lot. I get the impression sometimes that the less somebody knows about a subject area, the easier they find a solution to it. It鈥檚 absolutely wrong to believe that there is fraud all over the place in science. On the point about interdisciplinary areas, I agree it is much more difficult to get grants in those subjects, just as it鈥檚 more difficult to get a double-first.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: How do we strive for progress in science while ensuring that we do not cause harm?
MARTIN REES: We all share this dilemma. If we want to achieve benefits we have to take risks. Freeman Dyson wrote an essay entitled 鈥淭he hidden costs of saying no鈥�, the theme of which was that if we are overcautious鈥攆or instance, in making the development of a drug too long and expensive鈥攚e will forgo potential benefits. There鈥檚 always a trade-off. But it鈥檚 very important that advice on that trade-off comes from people not involved with the experiment.
CRISPIN TICKELL: This lies at the heart of the argument about the precautionary principle.
STEVE FULLER: We need to be able to monitor the consequences of scientific research once it has been allowed to go forward. Sometimes we seem to operate with an 鈥渁ll or nothing鈥� strategy: we either allow it to go on indefinitely, or we don鈥檛 allow it at all. We need institutional safeguards that allow us to say we鈥檝e gone too far.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: I鈥檇 be unhappy if we were left with the feeling from this discussion that commercialisation is of necessity dishonourable.
VANDANA SHIVA: Commercialisation per se is not the issue, and commercialisation after the research has been done is definitely not problematic. The issue is the scale of commercialisation. Five companies control the biotech field in agriculture. It鈥檚 about what I call Wall Street science. For Wall Street to dictate what should be counted as science is a corruption of the very foundation of the scientific enterprise.
STEVE FULLER: If commercial interests in science were declared more openly, the corporate sector might fund more openly rather than just exploiting what universities are doing. I鈥檇 like the corporate sector to be more obvious, rather than operating behind the scenes.
MICHAEL LE PAGE, NEW SCIENTIST: One of the most striking examples of what you might call the misdirection of science is that we spend $100 billion on the International Space Station, yet very little money on diseases that kill millions of people like HIV and malaria. Is this situation acceptable, and if not what can we do about it?
VANDANA SHIVA: The situation is not acceptable. We are facing a whole new challenge: the combination of the emergence of new technologies, and the emergence of new property rights on knowledge. These are fundamental shifts that deny people their rights to healthcare, food and water. We need a referendum in every society about the future of science and technology.
STEVE FULLER: We need more transparency about the context in the way decisions about funding in science are made. It鈥檚 not always the case of one science project versus another science project.
MARTIN REES: It is entirely unacceptable that the benefits of globalisation are going to the developed world. The lack of research into tropical diseases, the lack of a market for drugs in developing countries鈥攖hese are a symptom of an overall inequality that affects the world in so many different ways, far beyond science.