Whither the revered scientist?

Of greater interest now that
Nature magazine has sounded off
on Canada's science agenda in
the federal Conservative government.

No one reads science daily do they?
Nor visits Cisti once a week down
Montreal Road for a quick read and
some chatter with the free services?

Sad, really.

[ And I wonder how Calami could stand
sitting so long on a panel with those
new hips. ]

X-URL: http://www.thestar.com/News/article/273340

Sunday, November 04, 2007 | Toronto Star
SOCIETY
TheStar.com | News | Whither the revered scientist?

Down the tubes, the public seems to think, in the face of market
pressures, bungled crises, ethical lapses

Nov 04, 2007 04:30 AM Peter Calamai Science Writer

After two days of provocative ideas and spirited exchanges at an
international gathering recently in Toronto, British museum curator
Robert Bud neatly summed up the collective wisdom.

"The scientists are terrified."

This widespread angst among scientists has been sparked by evidence
that the traditional social compact between science and the public has
been irrevocably sundered. Put bluntly, much of the public no longer
implicitly trusts either scientists or their pronouncements about
everything from climate change to the safety of children's vaccines.

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And that matters, not just because of the call on taxpayers to fund
increasingly costly research, but also because the impact of science
and technology on our lives seems to mount by the minute.

"It is difficult to think of anything we do in public life that
doesn't pass through the window of science and technology," observed
Sheila Jasanoff, a professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of
Government who delivered one of two evening public lectures at the
CBC's Glenn Gould Studio.

Yet judging from the tenor of the meeting, restoring some measure of
the lost trust will require scientists to rethink the basic tenets of
their calling and to fundamentally renegotiate their relationships
with the public.

The public, too, will need to accept a more active role, examining
critically issues such as who benefits from advances in science and
technology, who owns the intellectual property, and how it will be
applied.

"Being better informed is not enough, the public must also be
empowered," said Peter Broks, author of Understanding Popular Science.

Public unease and outright mistrust concerning science has repeatedly
cropped up in opinion polling in recent years::

Almost one in four of 1,000 adults surveyed for the British Royal
Society in 2002 didn't trust scientists in general to tell the truth.

A 2004 survey of 2,000 adult Canadians for federal science departments
found almost 30 per cent expressing concern that science is "going too
far and is hurting society rather than helping it."

The largest ever survey of public values and attitudes toward science
and technology involved face-to-face interviews in 2005 with almost
33,000 adults in 32 European countries. Four in five said that the
authorities should formally oblige scientists to respect ethical
standards, a result widely interpreted as indicating a lack of trust
in scientists to police themselves.

Reasons put forward for this unease are many and varied, including the
blurring of the lines between science, business and government, the
increasing complexity of questions that science is called upon to
answer and a general societal mistrust of institutions.

As further evidence of how seriously this angst is being taken, the
Toronto meeting came on the heels of publication of a seven-point
ethics code for research scientists portrayed as the counterpart of
the Hippocratic Oath for physicians.

This new code already binds all government scientists in Britain,
where it was developed, and is being promoted worldwide by Sir David
King, the U.K. government chief scientific advisor.

"We want to get the idea across to the public that scientists can be
trusted," King told an interviewer, "if they live by the code."

It's unlikely to be that simple, judging by the September "Trust in
Science" workshop here, which drew more than 60 participants from
Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. The driving force behind it was
something called the Cluster for the Humanistic and Social Studies of
Science, just launched with $2 million in federal funding.

The participants were overwhelmingly academics from the humanities and
social sciences who examine the history, philosophy and impact of
technology, as opposed to researchers from the natural sciences,
medicine and life sciences. Indeed, knowledge among the participants
about those other sciences was highly variable.

In their own fields, however, the participants have carried out
pioneering work into public trust in science, with case studies
covering such widely varied topics as Toronto's SARS outbreak and the
deadly levee breach in New Orleans.

A repeated theme among workshop participants was that many scientists
still act as if they possess the "facts," while the public merely has
"opinions."

In reality, however, scientists are increasingly expressing opinions,
and laypersons sometimes possess greater expertise than the
scientists, especially in the case of rare medical afflictions.

Philip Mirowski of the University of Notre Dame laid a large part of
the blame for a loss of public trust in science on three factors.
First, the withdrawal of governments from even attempting to manage
science, thus ceding priorities to the whims of the marketplace;
second, outsourcing of research and development by corporations,
meaning the demise of anything that could be called national science
strengths; and third, the transformation of scientific research into a
"fungible" commodity, so it is essentially interchangeable.

"If you buy your science and I buy my science, then how can it act as
an arbiter of anything?" Mirowski asked.

Trust in science also suffers when scientists can't come up with
definitive answers quickly enough to respond to public concerns, as
illustrated by analysis of the 2003 SARS outbreak in Toronto and the
continuing controversy over vaccination and autism in children.

Alan Richardson, a philosophy professor at the University of British
Columbia, reached his conclusions after studying reports from the two
major SARS inquiries. He noted unfounded advice from experts for the
public to stay away from Chinatown.

"All decisions were decisions under ignorance, because there was no
reliable data during the outbreak," he said. "It didn't exist."

But the greatest damage may have been inflicted by the observation in
the reports from both Dr. Andrew Naylor and Ontario Justice Archie
Campbell: that the public health system failed in the SARS outbreak

"The public health system can only work in a structure of public
trust," Richardson said. "Saying it failed probably means that public
compliance will be harder to achieve in any future outbreak."

Jennifer Keelan, a University of Toronto professor of public health
sciences, has been studying the clash between scientists and activists
who blame their children's autism on low levels of mercury
preservative used to avoid contamination in multi-dose vaccines.

"Mistrust is an understatement to describe the level of vitriol in the
debate," she said.

In effect, a scientific stalemate exists. Some research is said to
show an "association" between the mercury preservative and autism in
lab animals. Yet epidemiologists don't have large enough population
surveys to rule out such long-shot adverse reactions.

Keelan said the activists aren't anti-science, like many
anti-vaccination groups. Nor do they promote "junk" science. They
simply want the scientists to investigate different avenues.

"Will the outputs of science be markedly different if the opportunity
exists for citizens to pose questions?" asked Keelan.

Scientists might ask themselves about the erosion of the traditional
trust relationships among researchers, who once readily exchanged
things like specialized strains of mice or reagents, custom chemicals
used in experiments.

Increasingly such exchanges are now circumscribed by material transfer
agreements, complex legal documents that spell out details like
liability and indemnification, due diligence and standards for care.
Some even feature "reach-through" clauses, guaranteeing the supplier
of the materials a share in any subsequent commercialization because
of subsequent research done elsewhere.

Use of these agreements is exploding. In 1998, the University of
Toronto handled about 30. This year, +*officials have reviewed 170.

Similar growth at U.S. universities prompted this wry workshop comment
from Notre Dame's Mirowski:

"Why should the public trust science when it is becoming apparent that
scientists less and less trust each other?"
_______________________________________________________________

Star science writer Peter Calamai, based in Ottawa, was a panellist at
the Trust in Science workshop, which paid his travel expenses to
attend.
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