Paris

Declan Butler is European correspondent for Nature, and has been based in Paris since 1993.

“I must reveal that in an earlier incarnation many years ago, I earned my living by writing for Nature, the world's most venerable scientific journal”, wrote the anonymous columnist ‘Bagehot’ in May. He was delivering a typically provocative and pertinent analysis in The Economist on the British government's regulation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

The experience, he continued, “gave me a damaging regard for scientists”, and he concluded that “simply quoting scientific authority is no answer to the conundrum of public trust”. Rather, this could only be achieved by transparent, impartial decision making based on wide consultation.

After eight years of writing for this venerable journal, I do not have a damaging regard for scientists, far from it. But a recurring theme of my experience of reporting on issues such as France's blood scandals, human cloning, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), xenotransplantation and GMOs, is that the role of science — with all its attendant uncertainties — must be to illuminate political choices, not enforce them.

The risk of over-dependence on experts has been illustrated ad nauseam in our news pages. An epidemic of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease of unknown proportions is hanging over the United Kingdom and the many other countries whose citizens ate British beef contaminated with the agent that causes BSE.

People throughout the world have been infected with HIV by transfusions of contaminated blood in the mid-1980s. In both cases, experts were not only fallible, but were all too often swayed by economic and political considerations.

Backlash

Up in flames: the BSE crisis illustrated the risk of over-dependence on experts. The public's trust in science and scientists, in Britain and elsewhere, has suffered as a consequence. Credit: GREG WILLIAMS/REX FEATURES

The backlash against experts has been most dramatic in France, where several individuals have been sent to prison in connection with contaminated blood supplies. Britain has taken a more dispassionate stance on its BSE crisis, convening a long and thorough £16 million (US$26 million) inquiry to determine eventual responsibility. The inquiry's conclusions are likely to reinforce Winston Churchill's maxim that “scientists should be on tap, not on top”.

But these backlashes are part of a wider change. We are in the middle of a profound and irreversible restructuring in the contract between scientists and society that has been in place since the Second World War (see Nature 402 supp, C81; 1999). That is why it is telling that even The Economist, the most influential mouthpiece for free trade and technological progress, acknowledges the need for a redefinition of the limits of scientific authority.

For one thing, under international trade law, any country refusing to import a product on safety grounds must justify its action. But a compromise now seems inevitable between free trade and demands to refuse imports on the basis of scientific uncertainty — such as the European Union's rejection of US hormone-treated beef, or France's refusal to respect the lifting of the European embargo on British beef.

Yet the phenomenon of ‘globalization’ has been ignored too long in such debates. Classical risk-assessment procedures, for example, largely fail to take into account the speed and scale with which new technologies are introduced worldwide — the relatively new risk is that if something goes wrong, it will go wrong in a big way.

Debates over GMOs and xenotransplantation show that, ultimately, the public's acceptance of new technology has less to do with science than with an assessment of the global balance of power among the major players in the debate, and its implications for the legitimacy of the scientific arguments being put forward.

The estimated $6 billion market for xenotransplants, for example, and the huge public demand for organs, have been intelligently interpreted by many as considerations that could influence assessment of the real risk that the technology could create pandemics (see Nature 391, 320–325; 1998).

It has been of little help that the most outspoken scientists on the matter tend to be those with interests in seeing the technology progress. The delays to introducing the technology may not have pleased private investors. But they have forced a broader discussion of the issues.

As for GMOs, a massive campaign by Monsanto to educate the public only reinforced perceptions that the company was unhealthily powerful and keen to flatten debate. The public needs to be reassured that the balance of power on such issues — long dominated by powerful multinationals and the scientific community — has become more even and trustworthy.

A new contract is evolving, in which scientists, like other ‘experts’, will be forced to redefine their roles in shaping public policy. The violent backlash against experts, and current resistance to GMOs, can be seen as an inevitable part of a transitional period from the old order — where scientific authority prevailed — to a more sophisticated approach to managing scientific and technological change.

Some common threads are already emerging, such as the need to broaden the expertise of advisory committees to include consumer and other organizations, complete transparency in decision-making procedures, and not allowing wolves (such as agricultural ministries) to guard sheep (such as public health). In this new order, scientists and their professional societies will need to be more active in carving out a role as honest brokers who can help clarify the issues and ensure impartial information.

But this rethink could not have come at a better time. Over the next few decades, the human and environmental consequences of scientific research will become much broader, and the lessons of the last decade will need to be taken on board if the full promise of biology is to be realized.

This may require scientists taking more of a back seat. Human genetics is leading to a worrying rise in many scientific quarters of insidious and naive genetic determinism, which, if allowed to dominate public policy, could ultimately discriminate, ostracize or even eliminate those not meeting some genetic norm.

Thomas Jefferson did not need genetics to know that humans are not born equal, and that constitutions should compensate for these inequalities. Many of the ethical issues raised by genetics are human rights issues. Scientists are not experts in this area — and thus have little to say.