Particularly depressing was Nina Fedoroff’s invocation of the mythical anti-science brigade, once beloved of Tony Blair and countless British Chief Scientific Advisers. I once came across someone who was anti-science. It was in a review of an academic paper. This unnamed person thought that all of human progress since the invention of agriculture was a massive collective error. Thankfully, few would agree.

My over-riding impression is that ‘anti-science’ is a term that is imaginary and unhelpful. It describes almost nobody and it gets us nowhere. Climate deniers are not anti-science, they are anti- a political view that considers environmental protection as important. Creationists, too, have moral objections to the implications of an evolutionary worldview (John Evans is very good on this). In both cases, these groups use science arguments as their vehicle because they are more sophisticated sociologists of science than the scientists themselves. Where scientists see their evidence as a solid stage on which the public drama of policy can take place, creationists, denialists, anti-vaccinationists and others see a precariously balanced house of cards. Yes, they are stupid and wrong, but calling them ‘anti-science’ doesn’t help. Hitting these people over the head with bigger and bigger science hammers will not win the argument, it will simply confirm their suspicions.

One reason the term ‘anti-science’ raises my hackles is that I think the big beasts of science who use it might be talking about a group that includes me. We social scientists and policy folk have been known to ask difficult questions of science that have been interpreted as attacks. The Science Wars, if they ever took place, helped no-one. Sociologists were left looking petty, and scientists were overly defensive.

The use of the term ‘Anti-science’ reflects a privatisation of the idea of progress that is dangerous for science and society. As soon as science is seen as inseparably wedded to one particular trajectory, particularly when that trajectory is Fedoroff’s favourite topic of GM crops, debate becomes impossible. I know dozens of scientists who are anti-GM, or anti- a particular sort of GM. Are they anti-science?

I find it worrying that, at a time when science enjoys astonishing privileges, political support and stable funding when so many other areas are in turmoil, scientists talk, as Fedoroff did, about it being ‘under attack’. Paul Nurse was guilty of this in his recent Horizon programme and John Beddington provided some thoughtless remarks about intolerance (see this post). Both men have said sensible things about science and policy, but their reasoned arguments are undone by the Manichean retreat to us-vs-them. In democratic societies, science is part of the conversation. Dissent, challenge and scepticism are inevitable. Science has to learn to talk about alternatives, to talk about possibilities, to talk about diverse, desirable and undesirable futures. As Andy Stirling has described, calling someone ‘anti-science’ is as dumb as calling someone ‘anti-education’ if they want to talk about the best way to run our children’s schools (see this piece for a recent version of his argument).

Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun
A man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience
Call him a Nazi, he won’t even frown
“Ha, Nazi schmazi,” says Wernher von Braun

Don’t say that he’s hypocritical
Say rather that he’s apolitical
“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down
That’s not my department,” says Wernher von Braun

Some have harsh words for this man of renown
But some think our attitude should be one of gratitude
Like the widows and cripples in old London town
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun

You too may be a big hero
Once you’ve learned to count backwards to zero
“In German oder English I know how to count down
Und I’m learning Chinese,” says Wernher von Braun

Serious point: given the ease with which responsibility can be disorganised – through malice or inaction – in science and innovation, the remarkable thing is that there are so many scientists who actively seek it out. For every Werner Von Braun there is, thankfully, a Joe Rotblat.

Daar and Singer’s target is the massive and growing divergence between the world’s problems and the science that we do. We know all too well what medicines and agricultural technologies people in developing countries need, and yet our systems of innovation remain skewed towards rich country illnesses and rich country agriculture. For policy wonks, this is only to be expected, given the resources at play, but science systematically kids itself that it is better than this. Claims are constantly made for the power of new technologies to help the poorest people, cure their diseases and feed the world. CP Snow, in a less well-remembered part of the Two Cultures thesis, was so entranced by this narrative that he predicted, of global poverty, that “whatever else in the world we know survives to the year 2000, that won’t.” He assumed, like a lot of people following World War 2, that the power of science was so great that it could close the gap between rich and poor.

I agree wholeheartedly with Singer and Daar that this is our grandest challenge. The Big Question of science policy is how to focus scientific attention of real human needs. It is not hard to get consensus between scientists, policymakers and NGOs on this point. But the scientific community can be infuriatingly unreflexive about how we might do this. Senior scientists may point to the Green Revolution – which, even if you acknowledge its rather pernicious side effects, had massive benefits for developing countries in the second half of the 20th Century – and tell a story about the personal ingenuity of Normal Borlaug. They are less likely to talk about the institutions and policy initiatives that turned science into globally-important innovation.

UK and EU science policy institutions, keen to tell a good story about their IMPACT ™, talk a good game. They come up with lists of Grand Challenges and try to break up funding siloes. But there is very little consideration of what it would take to retune science such that it, first, improved its understandings of these problems and, second, targeted them. The voice of Michael Polanyi, arguing that “you can kill or mutilate the advance of science, [but] you cannot shape it”, echoes through science policy, interrupting any questions that seem too disruptive. There is no shortage of thinking, especially at places like the STEPS centre in Sussex, and plenty of activity from which to learn, involving groups like Practical Action. But as the recent UK policy documents reveal, there is a massive hole where policy action should be. I remain optimistic that scientists themselves can lead the necessary changes, which is why I wrote a thing about Citizen Scientists a few years ago, but they will need support in doing so.

Much of the rhetoric of the scientific community has been about protecting its short-term health when public funding is under attack on all fronts. This was the correct tactic, but there has been little strategy. The promise offered by National Academies, by Universities, by research funders and by scientists themselves in groups like Science is Vital was that science would deliver long-term prosperity at a time when other sources looked bankrupt. But the assumptions about how science would deliver for the economy have not really changed since the 1940s. Science, the argument goes, works best when it is unfettered, so politicians should invest in serendipity.

Governments around the world have tried to squeeze more impact from scientific research (see this nice piece by @stephen_curry). Scientists have proven stubbornly resistant even to these rather marginal initiatives at a time when they should have been seized the agenda for their own. But even these moves have left the science itself largely unquestioned. Now, surely, is the time to ask the science policy questions that are so important but rarely get asked – What science do we need and why? Who should benefit? Who should decide? – and leave open the possibility that the answers might call for a radical redesign of the scientific enterprise. Perhaps we must rely on the arrival of new scientific powers to shake the incumbents into something new. Macilwain quotes Princess Sumaya of Jordan, gloriously unencumbered by democracy, but utterly correct: “We must ask ourselves why so much scientific research is driven by the consumer needs of a tiny elite… We’re being naive if we envisage business-as-usual for science in the new century.”

On that note, the ICSU initiative that Macilwain points to sounds interesting. I can’t find much info about it online, though.

The often-heard criticism of social scientists is that they say ‘it’s complicated’. Decisions need to made by scientists and policy makers and social scientists tend to be better at defining problems than at providing solutions. But in this area, questions are more important than answers, especially if we think that we are in a period where, like in the 17^th century, there is an opportunity to reshape the scientific enterprise.

We heard from Steve Yearley, in his exegesis of Steve Shapin and Simon Schaffer, that the scientific revolution of the 17^th century involved a renegotiation of what is and isn’t appropriately public. Science was inherently public – its openness to challenge from all sides gave it public authority. But it was also closed in the sense of being undemocratic. The construction of this regime required a good deal of social work, most of which was undertaken within the scientific community. The norms of science, described (or prescribed depending on who you believe) by Robert Merton, were a product of such efforts. But we now see that one of these, the norm of organised scepticism, is becoming increasingly disorganised.

The Royal Society has taken on the job of trying to understand the new dimensions of openness for science, and the new questions that are being asked of it. This should be music to the ears of social scientists, but we have heard from Steve that scientists’ invoking of ‘the public’ and ‘public interest’ as acts of boundary work – clarifying what is and isn’t science, what is and isn’t legitimate – are themselves likely to provoke public suspicion.

So is science a public good? Well yes, but maybe not in a simple sense. Michel Callon asks this question and concludes that it didn’t really make sense. He uses the example of a gangster holding up a high energy physics laboratory. The knowledge that he is aiming to steal is clearly valuable, but it is not stealable for two reasons. First, it is already public, and second, it is unintelligible without a good deal of tacit knowledge that surrounds it. But science is a public good in the sense that it is a source of diversity, a source of new possibilities and options. This takes us to Andy Stirling ‘s presentation.

Andy described for us the politics of progress, the choices that we face for the future, but which we often deny ourselves. He demolishes the idea of a single public good, objectively describable, for which we can optimise our approach. Instead, we are faced with choices and constraints – commitments, lock-ins and path dependencies. To realise these, we must resist the temptation to reduce discussions of innovation to discussions of risk. And we must realise that public concerns might legitimately be about the processes and purposes of science in addition to its products – whether these are technologies, data, publications or whatever.

So the idea of science as a public good doesn’t get us anywhere useful. One way through this might be to emphasise the idea of a collective project. I like the phrase ‘public value’, which suggests first that science is valuable in all sorts of ways – economic, social etc – but also that we might work to enhance its value.

Let’s turn to the Royal Society’s study. I think it is clear from this mornings conversation that it would be a mistake to think that transparency and openness of scientific data will satisfy the critics. We know that the politics run deeper. And we know from the climate debate that this is a political discussion masquerading as science.

We have heard from Iain about the arguments for open, networked science. Most of these are presented in terms of efficiency. It is about speeding up science, realising economic and public benefits. We need to think hard about what improved sharing means, and not just sharing within conventional disciplines. We need to think about sharing between disciplines, between sectors, between cultures and languages and between generations through archiving and curation. What would it take to make the new scientific information shareable and is this a price we are willing to pay at the moment? There are other pragmatic questions – how to deal with recalcitrant publishers, funders, universities and most tellingly, scientists themselves, whose individual interests might run counter to public value. And there are questions of risk and ethics. Iain gave us the example of the publication of the genome of the 1918 Spanish Flu vaccine. There will be winners and losers from openness, and we need a hard-nosed political economic analysis of this.

But I think the big lesson has been that openness goes wider than pragmatics. Opening up scientific information will open up a set of political discussions, for which science needs to be prepared. I and I think most of the others in this discussion would argue that these urgently need to be had. These are the discussions about the trustworthiness and the governance of science. It is telling that, as scientific data grows exponentially, we still have extraordinarily little data about science – what is getting funded, by whom and to what ends? This would appear to be something that is clearly in the public interest, and relatively easy to resolve.

So perhaps the constructive role of constructivist social science is to reveal the size of the question. When we ask it, we shouldn’t kid ourselves that there won’t be opposition. Andy was gracious in suggesting that the motto of the Royal Society (nullius in verba: “don’t take anyone’s word for it”), which presupposes a particular, and rather outdated model of authority, was being downplayed in recent years. I would love that to be the case. But we know that conflicting ideas about expertise and authority can run alongside one another and only rarely recognise their tensions. There will be plenty of scientists who react against what they see as an attempt to undermine their expertise. They would dearly love to retreat to a model of authority in which the authority of science came from its detachment from society rather than from engaging with the society in which it is so deeply entangled.

For drummers, the technological unemployment identified by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee happened in the 1980s. Echo and the Bunnymen had a drum machine as a frontman. Kraftwerk were all electronics, ties and standing still. People flailing about were surplus to requirements. The Jesus and Mary Chain sacked him from Primal Scream as their drummer and got in a machine instead. As modernism rationalised music, even those who stuck with drummers asked them to become more robotic. David Bowie led the charge, as ever. The gated snare drum sound on Low has dated almost as quickly as the Chariots of Fire theme. Bowie’s drummer was the excellent Dennis Davis, but it might as well have been Johnny 5. Nuances and dynamics were compressed out of existence.

Thankfully, we are rediscovering the value of real drums and drummers. So let’s take a moment to, as James Brown urged us, give the drummer some. First, Clyde Stubblefield, one of James Brown’s many, many drummers, proving that subtlety is the key to funk:

Elvin Jones, taking jazz to its zenith by playing everything except the beat:

Joe Morello, with almost the only drum solo in history that makes any sense:

Steve Gadd, the session drummers’ session drummer:

Keith Moon being, well, Keith Moon

The prodigious Tony Williams, here aged 19, breaking the cardinal rule of drumming by speeding up:

And finally Animal from the Muppets, in what I consider to be the funniest sketch of all time.

Samples such as the funky drummer have become the raw material for future generations. But we should not see them in isolation. The genius of these players was in their interaction with others. When big bands were first recorded, the rudimentary microphones could barely detect the drums. The whisper of Jo Jones’s hi-hats is only faintly audible. But you can hear the effect he has on Count Basie’s band. He is unquestionably in the driving seat:

Even electroholics now appreciate the tedium of rigidly sequenced beats. They are finding new ways to scuff the edges of their drum patterns to give them a more interesting feel. Might this be another nail in the drummer’s drum case? A new study suggests not. Science appears to be rushing to the defence of luddite drummers everywhere.

A paper in PlosONE claims that listeners prefer what the researchers poetically call ‘long-range correlated fluctuations’ in music. In the Herbie Hancock tune above, Tony Williams takes about six minutes to increase the tempo, building the intensity of the tune as he does so. No contemporary producer would have let him get away with it. But it’s great. And we like it because it’s human. It is very easy to replace a bad drummer with a machine. It’s almost impossible to replace a good one. At its best, drumming is as close as music comes to dance. It is about feel, touch, dynamics and movement. It resists automation and thankfully it will carry on doing so.

Sing with me…

“To feel The Rhythm Of Life,

To feel the powerful beat,

To feel the tingle in your fingers,

To feel the tingle in your feet”

PS: I love how abstract concepts are scientised in journal papers. The PlosONE paper has, in its methodology section, this description: “Each of the different drummers performed simultaneously with their feet (for bass drum and hi-hat) and hands”. Yup.

PPS: Don’t get me started on autotune…

I come from the field of Science and Technology Studies, as does Sarewitz. We are used to taking chunks of science to bits to see how they really work and sometimes, for the more policy-oriented of us, trying to put them back together. The more policy-focussed end of STS has historically strong connections with environmental movements. For this reason, and because of the rather complicated and polarised political debate about climate change, climate science has tended in the past not to have not been given the same amount of scrutiny as other areas. Deconstructing climate science doesn’t seem helpful at a time when so many others, for very different reasons, are trying to do the same.

In the last few years, however, we’ve seen the climate science debate become more nuanced. We have managed to move beyond the Manichean view that anyone who asks questions about global warming is somehow ‘anti-science’. We have had interesting contributions from Sarewitz, Roger Pielke, the Hartwell Group and Mike Hulme, whose book, Why We Disagree About Climate Change, I would recommend to anyone. These analysts and others have argued for the need to talk openly about uncertainty, the need to engage with sceptics and the need to disconnect the scientific consensus from a single policy prescription.

Many climate scientists present their project as purely epistemological. They are interested in identifying and filling gaps in knowledge, increasing the resolution of our climate picture and narrowing our uncertainties. They demand more research, more thermometers, bigger computers, better satellites. When we look at the politics of climate science, however, we can see how doomed these efforts are. The climate debate is a political tussle masquerading as science. A central lesson of STS is that science does not solve political problems. For climate deniers whose minds are already made up, more science is just more evidence of a conspiracy. An early lesson from sociologists of scientific knowledge like Harry Collins was that experiments will convince only those who are bought into the idea of the experiment.

Climate change denial, like creationism, should be seen more as a moral project than an epistemological one. Indeed the great victory of both climate- and evolution-deniers is to tempt scientists into their spurious scientific discussions.

That said, another lesson of STS is that science is itself political, in all sorts of ways. And climate scientists no doubt appreciate this, if not before Climategate then certainly after. The process of discovery matters, the facts do not speak for themselves and the truth will not out without a lot of work.

No doubt this is why the Berkeley group decided to do their work as transparently as possible, bringing in scientists untainted by association. The study also enrolled the deniers: the Koch brothers contributed funding for the study. The explicit recognition was that the way climate models were being built and communicated, as revealed by the Climategate controversy, was no longer sufficient given how high the political stakes had become. Scientists often believe that problems are like empty vessels, to be filled with knowledge. Climate change increasingly looks like the trial of the Danaids, forced to spend eternity in Hades filling a perforated barrel using water carried in sieves.

The Berkeley project looks politically sophisticated. It should help advance the debate. And yet their efforts are being reported in a rather depressing way. Science journalists are calling this ‘the definitive answer’. My guess is that James Delingpole, Nigel Lawson and friends will be unconvinced. Earlier this year, the Guardian reported the launch of the study with the journalistic trope of question-to-which-the-answer-is-very-definitely-no: “Can a group of scientists in California end the war on climate change?”

No.

GM remains for me the most interesting contemporary story of governance, public engagement and innovation, but it is by no means complete, nor is the retelling of the story uncontested. While I work out what I really think, which may take some time, here’s an interview I did for Sciencewise…

Jack Stilgoe is a member of the Sciencewise-ERC Steering Group and Chair of the sub-group on genetic modification dialogue. Here, he discusses findings from the group’s report, ‘Talking about GM: Approaches to Public and Stakeholder Engagement’ and some of the questions it raises.

Can you give a quick bit of background on the report and the reasons for conducting it?

Partly in response to challenges around the FSA public dialogue about ‘Food: The use of genetic modification’, David Willetts suggested that we should review when, where and how governments should engage the public in dialogue. Sciencewise were tasked with this review. The work itself was undertaken by three Sciencewise Dialogue and Engagement Specialists, Andrew Acland, Suzannah Lansdell and Diane Warburton who looked back over all GM public dialogues going back as far as 1994. We, as a sub-group, discussed what these meant in the light of the current political context for GM crops. The report doesn’t make any big arguments for what should be done, but we do outline new opportunities, a few things to avoid and a number of steps that need to be taken before policymakers undertake something similar. GM is one of the hardest cases for public dialogue, with such an entrenched political debate. The message is: don’t enter into it lightly, and make sure that dialogue takes place in the light of this history.

There is a lot of focus in science dialogue about the importance of upstream engagement. This is no longer possible for GM which has quite a high level of public awareness and is as you say, highly politicised. How does that change the type of dialogue which is appropriate?

You’re right that it needs to be treated differently. This is also true for issues such as climate change or nuclear power, where there is already a degree of background knowledge and opinions within the public.

One of the key lessons from the history of GM is that you can’t just transpose the rather polite, structured, citizen’s jury type dialogue onto an already highly politicised issue and expect the same sorts of polite outcomes that you can when you talk about something upstream like nanotechnology. One of the recommendations of the report is that there is still an opportunity to have an upstream dialogue around the funding of agricultural research, especially with the Research Councils’ new Global Food Security programme. Here you could have a more constructive conversation that included but wasn’t constrained by the specifics of GM.

In terms of an appropriate strategy for GM moving forward, the answer isn’t to have more of the same dialogue, but rather to come up with a coherent strategic approach which is about political leadership, good policy making and joined up governance. Some form of public engagement should be a part of that, but I don’t think we should expect public engagement to be the only answer.

The report speaks of engagement with both stakeholders and the public. In the case of GM, what do you perceive to be the difference, and do we need a different approach for each?

Absolutely we need a different approach for each. When you are engaging upstream, everyone is a potential stakeholder; yet at the same time there are no obvious direct stakeholders because there isn’t anything yet for people to have a stake in, except researchers and the people who govern that research. In a downstream discussion like GM, there are clearly established stakeholders: farmers, regulators, politicians, interest groups, supermarkets, and animal feed companies who all need to find a way to thrash things out in a fairly old fashioned way. I think that confusing this activity with public engagement is unhelpful and puts far too large a burden on public engagement.

I think there’s another important set of lessons that need to be learnt which we didn’t cover in the report, particularly about how to engage with stakeholders. These more controversial issues involve direct action, lobbying and engagement in ‘uninvited spaces’ that government is not controlling and is less comfortable with. With an issue such as GM, working out mechanisms for this form of engagement may be more important than convening a formal public dialogue.

Your report identified that dealing with uncertainty and risk with the public is challenging. How could it have been dealt with differently?

When GM was the big news issue, it was characterised as being a debate about risk: ‘is this food safe?’ However, one of the headline findings of the report is that food safety is in fact a bit of a sideshow. More important are the huge technical and social uncertainties about the implications of the technology for the environment, for societies and economies. Those aren’t resolvable by science, they are often poorly defined and are contested. But it’s those issues we should be focusing on.

Where government is a sponsor of a public engagement process, the report highlights an interesting challenge.  Government has to try to balance the need to ensure stakeholder confidence in it as an independent convenor with the need for decision makers to participate in the process.  What’s your personal view on this?

I suppose I would emphasise the importance of the latter, the need for government to openly join the discussion. This is simply because I think the problem with public engagement in the past is that government has been outsourcing discussion rather than seeing itself as the other half of the dialogue. I think that should really be the proper role of government in dialogue, to say to the public, “this is an issue that we want to talk to you about because we’re thinking of taking these actions and we want your thoughts.”

With things like GM, if they want to have a public dialogue they have to be very clear about their own commitments in advance. That’s a different sort of discussion, and though it’s important it can also be difficult. In the case of nuclear power, the government were clear when opening a dialogue that they were proponents of nuclear power and some people therefore felt their dialogue disingenuous. Managing those interests can put a lot of pressure on a public dialogue exercise. In the end there’s a limit to how much government can be an apolitical broker of conversations; at some point it needs to throw itself into a conversation in the realisation that it is a political conversation.
This might be slightly different for more upstream engagement. Government can come to an issue like nanotechnology and say with an open conscience, “We don’t know what to do about this, help us navigate a way through it.” The convenor role is then much more natural.

The development of GM is one of those events in public policy which is held up as a moment of change for science dialogue. Do you see scientists, policy makers or others engaging with the public differently around issues such as synthetic biology or nanotech as a result of GM?

Certainly GM is always raised as an issue. Often you’ll hear scientists and innovators saying about an emerging technology, “we don’t want to do a GM.” I think GM was undoubtedly an important moment of realisation for a lot of people; scientists realised that their relationship with society and politics was perhaps more complicated than had previously been envisaged. But you can also say that GM was just one visible punctuation in a trend that’s been going back over a few years; BSE was also a real light bulb moment for many. The same is true with examples where things were done well such as in vitro fertilisation or stem cells, when a lot of scientists involved really learnt the value of doing public engagement properly.

If you had to pick two or three headline recommendations about how we should move forward, what would they be?

The first thing that needs to be established is democratic, adaptive governance. This must involve a new mode of engagement with the public, but public engagement can’t be a substitute for good governance, it should be a part of it. There’s still a lot to learn about how to do this effectively and Sciencewise has another project at the moment.

Secondly, it needs to be clear that dialogue about GM is a dialogue about uncertainty. Thirdly, that policy makers and government need to be the other half of the dialogue about GM. As I’ve said, they need to do this clearly indicating the purpose of the dialogue, the commitments they have already made and what decisions dialogue will inform.

…that this is one of the increasingly frequent instances when the Nobel Committee is damagingly constrained by its tradition that a prize can’t be shared between more than three individuals. The key papers recognised by this award were authored by two groups, each containing a dozen or so scientists. It would have been fairer, and would send a less distorted message about how this kind of science is actually done, if the award had been made collectively to all members of the two groups.

This question will carry on increasing in volume. A few months back, I was at a conference on Big Biology. Big Science has, since the war, largely been a physics thing. But biology has more recently got in on the act. The Human genome project is the most conspicuous effort by biologists to accelerate science with economies of scale. There will be many more. As James Gleick and others have described (my review here), science is generating vast amounts of data, and big data is becoming its own big science. But, as science embiggens, what does success look like? And how should we reward it?

Big science is a long way away from the lightbulbs-and-breakthroughs story of science that emphasises individual genius. It is as much about organisation, engineering and relatively mundane scientific work. I am conscious that I don’t know nearly enough abou this, but my suggestion at the conference was that, in a world in which National Academies and Nobels still reward individual excellence, big science projects sit as a monument to this model. I would suggest that The Human Genome Project cemented the ideas of Crick, Watson, Franklin, Sulston and others. But it is not clear how it would produce another one of them. Maybe big science is something that scientists do once they have made a name for themselves? This is not necessarily good or bad. We just need to find new ways to recognise and reward achievements.