EXTRACT: The real threat to "our progress and our prosperity", and the real threat to science, is the dogmatic support for any new technology which comes along that companies hope to make money from. Nothing reduces trust in scientists, and by extension, science, more effectively.

Those of us involved in the debate about GM crops over the last two decades have watched with disgust this abuse by Blair (and a succession of government scientists) of the good name of science - in the interests of corporate profits at the behest of a genuinely anti-science US Government. Sadly, for those who care about science, its degradation is Blair's legacy.
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Blinded by the light
The prime minister sees himself as a champion of science and technology but all too often his government acts as a servant of corporate interest
Peter Melchett
The Guardian, November 7 2006
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/peter_melchett/2006/11/blairs_brilliant_light_of_scie_1.html

Last week, the prime minister made one of the speeches that he hopes will leave a clear description of his legacy for future generations to marvel at. He said that New Labour has laid the basis for "world-class science", scientific ideas are "moving better" from the laboratory to the marketplace, and the "standard account of British scientific history" (of being unable to derive economic benefit from our scientific discoveries) is being "confounded".

But what the speech actually set out with depressing clarity was the views of a politician ignorant of the politics of science, confused and misled about public perceptions of science, and hopelessly muddled about the difference between science and technology. For example, when Tony Blair lists the scientific discoveries that "have transformed our lives" over the last century, he bizarrely finds room for the mass fluoridation of water - a highly controversial, and for that reason only partially implemented, mass medication, which few think has played a significant role in the recent improvement in dental health.

Blair's approach seems to me more unquestioning, simplistic and ignorant even than Harold Wilson's embrace of the "white heat of technology" during the old Labour government in which I was a minister 30 years ago. The legacy bequeathed us by Wilson's enthusiasm for white-hot technology was Concorde (defunct) and nuclear fusion (still just a vague promise). Blair seems determined to embrace aspects of two equally ill-thought-through technologies: biotech and nanotech.

But after all his years in office, and the total rejection of GM crops, the prime minister is at least aware that he is not living in the era of Raymond Baxter and Tomorrow's World. Nowadays, we do not necessarily believe someone in a white coat promising us the equivalent of the 60s predictions that by now we would all be zooming around with an individual hover pack rather than driving old-fashioned cars, or that we would be swallowing different coloured pills three times a day instead of eating food. In the face of endless failed predictions by scientists, from nuclear power too cheap to meter to the more recent GM "golden rice" that should have cured blindness by now, people are rightly sceptical.

This rational, evidence-based distrust of wild promises from scientists, governments or corporations about jam tomorrow is not seen quite like that by the prime minister. According to Tony Blair, there are indeed threats to his happy nuclear, nanotech and genetically-engineered future, and the most difficult of these is what he calls the "irrational public debate" around science. In Blair's world, the government "must show leadership and courage in standing up for science" in the face of powerful and vocal lobbies, even in areas where there are "genuine areas of intellectual controversy". He claims that an "anti-science brigade threatens our progress and prosperity". Not, presumably, the sort of progress and prosperity delivered by the now defunct Concorde and non-existent fusion reactors.

What the prime minister and his scientific advisors have still failed to grasp is that public opposition to some technologies, like GM food, is neither irrational nor anti-science. It must depress social scientists, and it certainly should depress anyone interested in the future of science in this country, that we have a prime minister who so horrendously misreads public opinion about science and technology. If a politician has anything to contribute to this debate, it should be accurately to interpret public views to scientists, not to pander to the most ill-informed prejudices of the scientific, and indeed corporate extremists. While we need more public understanding of science, what we need much more urgently is more scientists who understand the public.

When individuals can make their own choices about whether to use a new technology or not, they are happy to weigh the risks and benefits themselves. That is why, as the prime minister notes, there is no opposition to GM drugs and very little to properly regulated stem cell research, at least in the UK. Mobile phone use is the other often-quoted example. But where the risks are run by all of us, and often future generations too, without any of us having a say in the matter, and where the benefits accrue to multinational companies, it is good sense - not anti-science prejudice - that drives public opposition. And the same is true where governments and companies have shown themselves unable to control technologies, and have been guilty repeatedly of putting the public at risk, as with nuclear power and, indeed, GM crops.

The real threat to "our progress and our prosperity", and the real threat to science, is the dogmatic support for any new technology which comes along that companies hope to make money from. Nothing reduces trust in scientists, and by extension, science, more effectively.

Those of us involved in the debate about GM crops over the last two decades have watched with disgust this abuse by Blair (and a succession of government scientists) of the good name of science - in the interests of corporate profits at the behest of a genuinely anti-science US Government. Sadly, for those who care about science, its degradation is Blair's legacy.

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