杏吧原创

The relationship between science and the people in whose name it is done has changed dramatically over the past 50 years. Bernard Dixon, who edited New 杏吧原创 during some of the most turbulent of them, looks back and discovers that something important has been left out of the mix.

ALL countries have a (mostly unwritten) contract with science. To greater or lesser degrees, governments fund it, call upon it in times of national emergency, berate it for not delivering when tiger economies seem to be edging ahead, and shower it with praise when genomes are cracked or stem cells grown into bladders. Within that social contract, researchers operate at some point between relative freedom and central direction, while the public is either virtually excluded on the grounds that it is an ignorant laity, or appears to dictate policy through tabloid headlines.

Things were not always like this. Over the past 50 years, every aspect of this contract has been rewritten 鈥� for good or ill. This magazine (which I edited from 1969 to 1979) was born in part out of concerns about the standing of science and scientists in the UK. This was reflected in the issues the magazine featured early on: the national shortage of scientific expertise, the need for higher investment in research and development, and the lack of recognition of the importance of science, especially in the political and business worlds.

No doubt the scientists of the 1950s, like all professionals at all times, would have appreciated greater status. Hindsight shows, however, that in the UK at least, science was enjoying widespread respect and a degree of financial comfort not experienced by other sectors of society. Wartime achievements such as radar and penicillin remained fresh in the minds of those who held the purse strings 鈥� and in the public imagination. The threats to science were yet to become real.

Ironically, it was not Margaret Thatcher but Shirley Williams, the education and science minister in the Labour government from 1967 to 1969 (now Baroness Williams of Crosby), whose words came to symbolise the tectonic shift that occurred in the financing of research and in the underlying political realities. In an article in The Times in 1971, she wrote: 鈥淔or the scientists, the party is over.鈥� They could no longer expect to receive the funding increases that they had in the past. They would have to justify their budgets 鈥� and fight for them.

There were to be many threats in subsequent years, the most acute being the cuts in university research imposed by Thatcher鈥檚 Conservative government in the early 1980s. It is no accident that changed times produced individuals capable of fighting these battles. Look around the institutions of science today and you鈥檒l find them headed by people who, whatever their record in research, are streetwise and assertive. In the first half of the 20th century, the sole criterion for appointing such leaders would have been their intellectual prowess.

Beneath these assertive generals at the top of scientific bodies are battalions dedicated to fighting their corner. The Royal Society, for example, formerly content to relax behind its label of excellence, now has machinery for dealing with the media, Parliament and the public. So, to varying degrees and with varying degrees of competence, do other scientific societies and institutes. The need to fight for cash is one of two related imperatives that have emerged as vital for the survival of science. The other is the challenge of coping with a public whose support and adulation can no longer be guaranteed.

The rise of environmental campaigning in the 1960s and 1970s, coupled with the emergence of lobby groups attacking targets ranging from the pharmaceutical multinationals to recombinant DNA research, encouraged the growth of a significant 鈥渁nti-science鈥� movement that had to be answered.

It might be argued that under my editorship in the 1970s, New 杏吧原创 went too far in encouraging what was then fashionably known as radical science. We did publish an unusually wide range of articles from sources as diverse as Friends of the Earth and the UK Atomic Energy Authority, thus providing a platform for debate on controversies. And they were legion: this was the decade in which conventional science came under fire from many quarters. Participants in this wide-ranging debate included everyone from philosophers and historians emphasising the provisional nature of scientific truth or the notion that scientific discourse was but one among many, to campaigners with specific political and environmental agendas.

Although many scientists simply ignored these shifts, the following decade saw more constructive initiatives in response to what the scientific community believed was a threatening mood of public disenchantment. In 1986, an inquiry chaired by the geneticist Walter Bodmer spawned the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science (COPUS), designed to get scientific issues across to a disaffected populace. In 1989, the Edinburgh Science Festival was inaugurated as an annual event and a fresher, more spontaneous complement to the elderly, committee-bound British Association. This was followed by similar events in Cheltenham and elsewhere.

One lesson is that to be successful such initiatives need to survive and evolve. So while the government-backed PEST (Public Engagement with Science and Technology) has rightly replaced PUS, COPUS no longer exists and has not been replaced. This is a shame: there are dangers in not having formal ways to think about the complex relationship between science and society.

鈥淭here are dangers in a short-term view of the relationship between science and society鈥�

There have been various attempts to offer useful models for public dialogue. In April 1988, for example, the First International Conference on the Release of Genetically Engineered Microorganisms (REGEM1) was held in Cardiff. With media facilities and a public component, the event was a model of transparency, offering a range of opinion on an issue that had triggered public anxiety. It was intended as the first of a series, but ended up a one-off because the conference organisers considered the job of public reassurance was complete.

On an even grander scale, the 17th International Congress of Genetics, held in Birmingham in August 1993, included a major innovation 鈥� a whole week of sessions designed for the public to debate and discuss all the live issues surrounding genetics. Sadly, hopes that the event would serve as a template for future national and international congress organisers also proved groundless. Despite its success, organising committees have tended to see such ventures as too risky.

The third potential model was the UK National Consensus Conference on Plant Biotechnology, held in London in November 1994. Though sponsored by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), the three-day event and its two preparatory meetings were addressed by critics as well as supporters of biotechnology. The conclusions of the final report, and to a large extent the programme itself, were controlled by a highly diverse 鈥渓ay panel鈥�. But it, too, was a one-off. No one at the top of the BBSRC saw the need to develop the model.

Had there been efforts to build on these initiatives and create enduring mechanisms whereby people could talk to or debate with scientists, it is at least possible that episodes such as the debate over genetically modified (GM) food in the UK would have involved less hysteria and more reason. Instead, we saw a demonisation of GM crops that smacked of the medieval witch-hunt. Amplified by large sectors of the media, the furore persuaded some scientists that the public was hostile to their work, when real data from the Eurobarometer survey (set up by the European Commission to canvass public opinion across member states on a range of issues) provided a far more nuanced view.

Fifty years ago, many UK scientists were socially respected, yet unreasonably monastic and needlessly anxious about their financial support. Today, certainly in biosciences, their chief worry is likely to be apparent public suspicion. If they want to really engage the public, they should take a fresh, hard look at the three templates I have outlined.