Martin Robbins and Phil Plait have already written excellently about this, so I don’t have to at length. But I thought I’d add a few thoughts on the saga from my own experience as a science journalist.

When I worked at The Times, I used to judge myself as much by what I kept out of the paper as by what I got into it. This would have been one I would have been proud to see land on the spike.

Andrew Wakefield attempting to justify himself and blame the Government for the outcome of his own scaremongering is not news. The content of a Wakefield press release is about as illuminating as the things people shout at cars. It is ok to ignore him. That is what he is desperate for you not to do.

That said, I can see how it might be tempting to write this one up — Wakefield’s claim is pretty brazen, and that does have a certain news value. But if you absolutely must write up his press release, here are five things you would certainly want to avoid:

1. Don’t splash on it. Or put it on the front page for that matter. Prominence matters, and rather suggests that you, the editor, think that the person you’re writing about is making a point that deserves to be heard, even if you disagree with it. The proper place for a story like this is inside the book.

2. Don’t pick the headline he’d have picked. “MMR scare doctor Andrew Wakefield breaks his silence: Measles outbreak in Wales proves I was right” doesn’t cut it. “Outrage over struck-off MMR scare doctor’s latest bizarre and dangerous claim” just might.

3. Don’t wait until paragraph 15 — paragraph 15! — before introducing a critic who can explain why Wakefield is wrong. Yes, the quotes to that effect are there. But most readers won’t get to them, and for those who do, the placement suggests a lack of importance.

4. Don’t run the whole Wakefield press release as if it were a commissioned op-ed. How to give the guy’s scaremongering the imprimatur of a respectable newspaper.

5. Don’t forget that the story is about the chutzpah of the man, not about the substance of his claim. Write the whole thing as a critique. This has to start in the intro, and continue to thread through the piece. Don’t even allow the slightest possibility that the odd paragraph could be quoted out of context. If you do, it will be.

The Indy usually covers health and science very well, and wasn’t one of the offenders during the original media debacle over MMR. It’s a shame that it managed to score 0 out of 5 this time.

Others have written eloquently about this, and often with more personal reasons than me to be upset. But I was especially struck by a post by Kathleen Raven, in which she listed her own journalistic mistakes. Her point was to show how every one should be a learning experience, “seared into memory” — not something to be brushed aside as colour to support a career in professional redemption.

I made plenty of mistakes in my career as a science journalist at The Times, many more than I’d have liked to. There is one, though, that particularly sticks in my mind, for the incredibly constructive way in which a scientist who was justifiably irritated by it complained. Tony Weidberg, a particle physicist, approached me so constructively that I think it provides a great example of how to engage with the media to achieve better coverage of science.

I’m reproducing the passage of The Geek Manifesto in which I describe the story, and what I learned from it, here. Unfortunately, I can’t find the offending article on the web — it doesn’t seem to have been archived, though if anyone can find it I’ll gladly link to it.

Constructive Complaints

Adversarial approaches to bad science reporting are important weapons in the geek arsenal. But they shouldn’t always be the first ones we deploy. Start by attacking a journalist in abrasive fashion and he is as likely to become defensive and deaf to criticism as he is to take it on board and change his approach. Plenty of science reporters are broadly sympathetic to the aims of [Ben] Goldacre and his allies, but nonetheless brush off their views because they consider them relentlessly negative. Complain constructively, couching criticism as helpful advice, and a surprising number of hacks will listen.

Media professionals are as prone as anybody else to ‘cognitive dissonance’. This term from psychology describes the difficulty of holding two pieces of mutually incompatible information in your mind at the same time, and it is easily activated by our own errors. Most journalists like to think they are covering their beat responsibly, thoroughly and accurately. If they are then confronted with a serious error, that information can be difficult to take on board – especially if it’s implied that they have made the error because they are slipshod, conniving, venal or stupid. And dissonance is often more easily resolved by rejecting inconvenient facts than by acknowledging them.

To achieve a culture change in media attitudes to science, we must work with the grain of cognitive dissonance, rather than against it. As Abraham Lincoln said, ‘If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.’

I can vouch for the value of Lincoln’s aphorism. Soon after I began covering science for The Times in 2001, I picked up on a story in New Scientist about the forthcoming shutdown of the Large Electron-Positron Collider at the CERN particle physics lab near Geneva. The piece suggested that the Higgs boson – the so-called ‘God particle’ that is supposed to give matter its mass, and for which the accelerator was searching – was unlikely actually to exist. My story strongly implied that the search for it had been a waste of money. ‘The results of these recent experiments have convinced many of the 5,000 scientists working in the field that the whole investigation has been a wild goose chase.’

My interpretation was pretty absurd. While there were indeed physicists who thought the LEP results made it unlikely that the Higgs would be found, that hardly meant that looking for it was a waste of time and money. If anything, the non-discovery of the Higgs would be still more exciting, as it would suggest that an entirely new model of physics is required. Sometimes the null result in science is the most valuable that there is. The existence of the Higgs was in any case far from settled: the view that it doesn’t exist was, even in 2001, very much a minority one, and most physicists expect the Large Hadron Collider to find it.

That I recognized my error was largely down to an Oxford University physicist called Tony Weidberg. He would have been well within his rights to rant and rave at my sensationalist misinterpretation, but he took a different tack. In a calm and friendly fashion, he told me that I’d made some mistakes in my copy, but that wasn’t altogether rare or surprising in such a difficult and technical field. Perhaps I’d like to come up to Oxford to meet him and his colleagues, to learn a bit more about particle physics and make a few expert contacts I’d be able to call on when I next turned to the subject? It was a textbook example of how to turn media misreporting to your advantage. I don’t pretend for a moment that I’ve never made an error about particle physics since visiting Weidberg’s team. But his approach gave me a way of learning from my mistakes for which I remain very grateful.

Acknowledging an error so that it can be learned from becomes much more probable if it’s presented as the sort of mistake that a reasonable person could reasonably have made. That applies even when you don’t think the error reasonable. Had Weidberg shouted down the phone that my piece on the LEP was crap, I’d like to think that I’d have thought about his criticism and eventually accepted it, but I’m realistic enough to know that I’d probably have reacted defensively and sought to justify myself. We’d both have been worse off as a result.

Criticism is most likely to make a difference if it is framed as friendly advice – at least at first. If a journalist makes a bad mistake, you should tell them about it, but politely. If they react badly – or if they’ve a track record of misrepresentation – by all means step it up a notch. Write that vituperative blogpost. Complain. Hold them up to ridicule. But it’s worth exhausting softer tactics before taking a tougher stance.

These different responses to the media’s output, proportionately deployed, could work in concert to create a kind of informal peer-review. Once journalists begin to realize that much of what they publish will be scrutinized in public for errors of fact or interpretation, more of them can be expected to ask themselves tough questions before they write. They can learn from the methods of science: that by treating your story as a hypothesis that you must test yourself, you reduce the risk that someone else will do that for you, with potentially embarrassing consequences.

Better journalists, and more responsible media organizations, will realize that all this works ultimately to their benefit, allowing them to produce more informative and trustworthy work that remains interesting and immediate for the present readership, while potentially even attracting new audiences. Even those who take a more cynical approach, calculating that sensation sells while accuracy is of secondary importance, will know that this puts them at risk of ridicule and complaint.

Most science writers, and indeed most journalists of all types, would usually prefer to get things right. Few reporters went into journalism to systematically distort the truth: they want their work to be as accurate as the relevant format can possibly allow. To do that, journalists need the help and cooperation of scientists. Not even specialist writers can be expert in everything: they’re as good as their sources. Many welcome constructive criticism. And most would welcome a stronger culture of engagement with the media and the public at large among scientists.

Tredinnick is one of the stars of the Geek Manifesto — and not in a good way. I’ve thus posted the section about him here.

What is sad about this is not so much Tredinnick’s views — there are always likely to be eccentric MPs like this. It is that he has been elected by his Tory colleagues to represent them on the main parliamentary scrutiny committee for science. I’m sure few of his MPs agree with him on astrology and alternative medicine. Yet they’ve betrayed a worrying indifference to science in supporting his candidacy.

It’s this indifference to science, not Tredinnick’s (rare) hostility to science, that is the chief cause of disconnects between science and public policy. The Geek Manifesto has plenty of ideas about how we might attempt to change it.

Anyway, here’s the extract:

On the evening of 14 October 2009, David Tredinnick got to his feet in the House of Commons to open a debate. The Conservative MP for Bosworth, in Leicestershire, was desperately worried that the Health Minister, Gillian Merron, had overlooked a grave threat to the wellbeing of the public. The object of his concern wasn’t pandemic flu, or air pollution, or childhood obesity. It was the moon.

‘At certain phases of the moon there are more accidents,’ he gravely informed the House. ‘Surgeons will not operate because blood clotting is not effective, and the police have to put more people on the streets.’ It wasn’t the first time he had raised the subject in Parliament. Back in 2001, Tredinnick told the Commons that ‘science has worked out that pregnancy, hangovers and visits to one’s GP may be affected by the awesome power of the moon,’ and quoted a newspaper report suggesting that arson attacks double when the moon is full.

He stopped short of mentioning werewolves, but you probably don’t need to be told that their existence is about as well supported by science as his other claims.

So convinced is Tredinnick of the political significance of the movements of the heavens that he charged the taxpayer £755.33 for astrology software and consultancy services (which he later repaid when his expense claim became public). His commitment to the lunatic fringe of science does not end there: he is an assiduous promoter of just about every alternative medicine on the market, and recently asked the Health Secretary to congratulate homeopathic chemists on their contribution to containing swine flu.
​
It’s tempting to think of Tredinnick as little more than a harmless eccentric, with opinions so far outside the mainstream that they carry very little influence. Would that this were so. In the summer of 2010, his fellow Conservative MPs elected him to a seat on the House of Commons Health Select Committee. Yes, a man who genuinely appears to believe that surgeons prefer not to operate when the moon is full, and who has called on the Department of Health to be ‘very open to the idea of energy transfers and the people who work in that sphere’, is now among the eleven politicians tasked with holding that department to account.

He isn’t alone. Serving alongside Tredinnick on the health committee we find Nadine Dorries, a Tory MP who likes to promote an urban myth about a twenty-one-week foetus grasping a surgeon’s finger – repeatedly denied by the surgeon – to support her demand for restricting abortion.

Neither is a fondness for pseudoscience confined to the backbenches. Peter Hain, a long-serving minister in the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, convinced himself that homeopathy cured his son’s eczema, and promoted alternative medicine from a position of power. Anne Milton, a current Conservative Health Minister, cites her grandmother’s experience as a homeopathic nurse in support of NHS funding of alternative medicine.

In the United States, weird views about the findings and importance of science straddle party boundaries in similar fashion. At a House of Representatives hearing in 2007 on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent report, Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican congressman from California, took issue with conventional explanations for sharp global warming in prehistoric times. ‘We don’t know what these other cycles were caused by in the past,’ he said. ‘Could be dinosaur flatulence, you know, or who knows?’ When Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma senator and medical doctor, asserted that ‘condoms do not prevent most STDs’, his reward was to be appointed by President Bush to the chairmanship of an HIV advisory group.

Tom Harkin, the influential Democratic senator for Iowa, convinced that his allergies were cured by a supplement known as bee pollen, secured the creation of the US National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, which wastes about $130million a year on studies of what you might call bogus therapies. Gary Goodyear, Canada’s Science Minister, is a chiropractor who in 2009 refused to say whether he believed in evolution, telling a journalist from Toronto’s Globe and Mail: ‘I’m not going to answer that question. I am a Christian, and I don’t think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate.’

We’ll meet many of these characters again later, in Chapters 8 and 9. But, thankfully, they’re not all that typical of politicians. The level of scientific misunderstanding they show, which sometimes borders on outright hostility to science and its methods, lies at the extreme end of the spectrum. Yet the very fact that they have been able to succeed in politics despite such views, and to rise to positions of considerable power and influence, is indicative of the value that politics places on science. Too few politicians even recognize the absurdity of their views. Tredinnick and Dorries aren’t figures of fun who lack the respect of their colleagues: they were elected to the select committee where their unscientific views have the potential to do most damage.

If mercifully few politicians are actively anti-science, many are indifferent to it.
They often lack an understanding and appreciation both of basic scientific concepts and language and, more importantly, of its robust approach to developing reliable knowledge. Many are simply uninterested. In the last House of Commons the Conservatives regularly failed to fill all their allocated seats on the Science and Technology Committee and at the time of writing two of Labour’s seats stand vacant. One has remained unfilled for more than a year.

I’m in the running for the Polemic of the Year prize, against a fine shortlist. I’m honoured to make the same list as such thought-provoking figures as Andrew Adonis, Nick Cohen, Daniel Hannan and David Nutt.

The awards are next Wednesday evening, February 6. Many thanks to the judges for shortlisting me!

It turned out to be so good that we decided to include it in the UK paperback edition too — this time as an afterword, a DVD extra, if you like. That’s out tomorrow, and David and I have agreed to post it on our blogs as well.

A Geek Manifesto for America

Foreword to the US edition by David Dobbs

Nothing illuminates like a close analogue.

So I found during a recent year in London, as I watched scientists and science-writing colleagues there, including Mark Henderson, the author of this book, wrestle with translated forms of the threats that haunt those of us in America who would like to see our country run according to honest airing of fact and principle rather than lies and fear. In the US, we deal with virulent creationism, medicine-by-advertising, and deeply institutionalized resistance to the reality of climate change; in the UK, the assault on empirical thinking ranges from ridiculous prescriptions for colonic irrigation to the sublimely sad savaging of researchers by those who would have us ignore drought, fire and the melting of the ice caps. In noisy pubs and cafés, on the slightly less noisy sidewalks outside pubs and cafés, and in quieter halls of inquiry such as universities and the Royal Society, Henderson, colleagues and I talked and ranted and laughed about these things and, comparing notes, saw how alike the battles raged in Old England and New America.

Alike – but with instructive differences. The Brits’ climate-change battles may lack the vitriol of ours, but they lost early fights over genetically modified foods that we have won (so far), and the UK faces an even stiffer challenge than we do in calming fears about vaccines and autism. We Yanks must endure legislators trying to ban the use of temperature-change data in laws about climate change (thanks, North Carolina), but Henderson must listen to arguments in Parliament that the government should bloody well do something, my Lord, and right away, please, to counter ‘the awesome power of the moon’, because the full moon, astrologists tell us, makes bad people act worse and also endangers innocents: it makes their blood run thin, so surgeons can’t save them when the moon-maddened bad people cut them up  (see Chapter 2). We Yanks hardly hold the market on irrationality.

To these battles Henderson brings deep knowledge, steady determination and good humour. Despite the head-banging idiocy of many of the problems he writes about, he amiably outlines how any democratic nation can bring more evidence-based thinking into every realm of public life – government, education, healthcare, the economy, the environment, even politics. He wields lightly his wonk, and tells vividly his tales of hope and woe. American parents and teenagers will cheer, for instance, at Henderson’s accounts of how teaching self-control to children early on can boost them all their lives, and how one British high school raised its grades simply by starting classes at 10 a.m., the better to suit adolescent diurnal rhythms. And anyone will be engrossed and then disturbed by his account of how Britain’s Forensic Science Service cracked a gruesome murder case – but faces closure, because forensics, incredibly enough, cost money.

Henderson has made a real mark in England with this book, managing to get copies to every single member of Parliament (including the astrology-crazed) and shaping debate and policy. His book can help in the US and elsewhere, too. We Americans have won some great victories in pushing policy along empirical lines. We have prevented millions of deaths because our laws heed evidence that seat belts save lives and that secondhand smoke, smog and polluted water take them. We have fended off most efforts to ban perfectly healthy genetically modified foods, allowing us to benefit from better nutrition. And the healthcare reforms in the recently passed Affordable Care Act will save lives, grief and money by designing healthcare policy according to what treatments actually work best.

But we’ve far to go. Too many policies fly in the face of facts or empirical principle. Medicine remains driven far more by business concerns than by data. We still forbid needle exchanges for addicts despite overwhelming evidence that we should do otherwise. We let pharmaceutical companies push new, more expensive drugs, even though they work no better than cheaper drugs we already have. We dally on climate change. We base education policy on what’s convenient or traditional, rather than what’s effective. And we often starve science budgets, even though science drives the economy.

We should do better. The London libraries, universities and noisy pubs in which Henderson, his British mates and I exchanged war stories, lamented denial and laughed about quackery were kin to – and sometimes were – the venues in which the compatriots of John Locke, Francis Bacon and the two Charlies, Darwin and Lyell, forged the principles of empiricism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The fight for empiricism was then, and is now, more than a fight for science. It is a fight for a society based on defensible argument and a fair exchange of views – a fight for democracy.

Henderson articulates with bracing clarity how science’s central principle – that evidence should trump authority, and reason trump rumour – can help improve the clumsy, cranking machinery that produces law, policy and other frameworks of public life. This is the real value of science in the public realm: in its elevation of evidence over authority, science is insistently democratic. It steers authority not to those who hold more power, but to those who hold better evidence. Like democracy, science sometimes gets messy – but it’s a productive mess that is ultimately liberating. Like the principle of liberty, the principle of empiricism moves us always towards a better, freer, healthier world.

And a more enjoyable world: Henderson is a warm and funny man with a lively mind. His book goes down like a good British ale: reassuringly familiar – the stuff is quite clearly beer – but different enough from one’s home brew to spark new interest and perspective. You’ll emerge from The Geek Manifesto as I did from talking science with Henderson over pints of Bishops Finger and London Pride: refreshed, stimulated, and embracing with new energy the problem of how to give empirical thinking a bigger place in public life.

The paperback edition of The Geek Manifesto is out on Thursday, January 3, and all the usual outlets are already taking orders. You can find it on Amazon here, and if you’re avoiding Amazon for tax reasons, you can get it from Waterstones too.

I’m delighted to report, too, that the paperback comes with an afterword by the fabulous American science writer, David Dobbs. It’s a piece he wrote as a foreword to the US edition — also now available — which was so good and apposite that my publisher decided to add it to the UK paperback as well.

David and I will both be posting his piece on our blogs very shortly.

The new edition also comes with some nice words about the book from Professor Brian Cox:

“Powerful and important, The Geek Manifesto eloquently lays out a programme to make the UK a more rational and therefore prosperous and successful country. And it’s not that hard to do! Base policy decisions on evidence, invest in our knowledge-based economy by supporting education and research, and above all promote reason above opinion. Everyone interested in importing the scientific method into public life should read this book, and then lobby their MP!”

I’m also delighted by another knighthood, for Simon Wessely, Professor of Psychiatry at King’s College London. Simon is a compassionate and open-minded scientist who has had to put up with some remarkable poison and smears because of his work on ME/CFS and Gulf War syndrome. He’s also done some remarkable research on military psychiatric medicine. The reasons he deserves his honour are well summed up in the citation for the inaugural John Maddox Prize, which he won earlier this year. In short, he stands up for his science — in just the way I advocate in the book.

Oh, and the paperback of The Geek Manifesto is out on January 3. Amazon seems to be selling it already. So if you didn’t get it for Christmas, now’s the time to order!

Anyway, here’s the Payne extract — it’s from the Geekonomics chapter, in a section headed “The serendipity of science”. Together with other examples of how science has driven innovation, but not necessarily in a predictable way, Payne’s story is worth remembering as George Osborne sets out priorities for UK science spending.

When Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a CERN computer scientist, developed the hypertext transfer protocol – the ‘http’ of web addresses – he wasn’t trying to invent a revolutionary form of mass communication that would transform countless businesses and enable the creation of entirely new ones. He was seeking a better way for particle physicists to share data, and his elegant solution happened to give birth to the World Wide Web.

David Payne is not as well known as Berners-Lee, yet the Professor of Photonics at the University of Southampton can be just as fairly called a father of the modern internet. Every time you download a track to your iPod or watch a video on YouTube you are probably making use of his research, which laid the foundations of the fibre-optic cable technology that made broadband possible and brought significant economic benefits in its wake.

In the mid-1980s, Payne’s team designed an amplifier to send signals over long distances down fibre-optic cables. It was to have an unexpected extra benefit. ‘It turned out you could put multiple “colours” through the fibres, perhaps 1,000 different wavelengths,’ he says. ‘The upshot was, you could have fibres not only 1,000 times longer, but carrying 1,000 times more information. It’s where broadband comes from.’

A critical foundation for a new industry worth many billions had been laid: there are now enough fibre-optic cables to circle the globe 30,000 times. It did not come about because Payne was trying to invent it, nor because he was backed by a big corporation that saw his potential. It happened because the British taxpayer gave his team the time and space it needed by funding excellent scientists to follow their curiosity over many years.

When Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) made its critical breakthrough in 1987, it had a ten-year grant worth £16 million from the government funding body now known as theEngineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). It gave Payne and his colleagues latitude to take on long-term projects and to explore exciting new directions as they became clear. Some lines of inquiry went nowhere. Others opened serendipitous techno- logical possibilities and business opportunities that could never have been predicted in advance. Broadband was far from the only economic spin-off: ten companies in the Southampton area, employ- ing a total of 600 people, owe their origins to the ORC. ‘We’ve established their collective turnover at around £200 million a year,’ Payne says. ‘Our research has more than paid for itself.’

Shankar Balasubramanian has a similar story to tell. When the Cambridge University chemical biologist was growing up as a Merseyside teenager, his ambition was to become a professional footballer and play for Liverpool. While his ultimate career path lacked glamour by comparison, it had far more striking economic consequences. As he played around with nucleic acids in the late 1990s, following his curiosity, Balasubramanian and his colleague David Klenerman hit upon a new method of reading DNA that dramatically speeded up the process. The pair hadn’t set out to make a fortune, or even to develop a useful new technology, yet their find- ings were to prove both important and lucrative.

Solexa, the company they founded to take forward their research, rapidly became one of the success stories of British biotechnology. Solexa sequencing machines are used today by most of the world’s leading genetics labs, contributing to a gathering revolution in per- sonalized medicine. In November 2006, Solexa was acquired by Illumina, the world’s leading DNA-sequencing company, for $600 million – all money the British economy would never have seen had research councils lacked the resources to support fundamental chemistry research.

More recently, Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov won the 2010 Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery of graphene, a new form of carbon that is promising to transform electronics and many other industries. Like most great ideas that emerge from science to generate growth, it was rooted in serendipity, an unforeseen spin-off that emerged when important scientific questions are answered.

Carl Sagan, the master of communicating by thought experiment, encapsulated the theme with his tale of the ‘Westminster Project’:

‘Suppose: You are, by the Grace of God, Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and Defender of the Faith in the most prosperous and triumphant age of the British Empire,’ he wrote in The Demon-Haunted World. ‘Suppose, in the year 1860, you have a visionary idea, so daring it would have been rejected by Jules Verne’s publisher. You want a machine that will carry your voice, as well as moving pictures of the glory of the Empire, into every home in the kingdom. What’s more, the sounds and pictures must come not through conduits or wires, but somehow out of the air.’

To address this challenge, the Queen engages the Empire’s top scientists in the Westminster Project – a grand initiative to develop just such a revolution in communications. It would, of course, have failed. Yet at exactly the time Sagan asks us to consider, a Scottish geek, following his own curiosity, was drawing up a series of mathematical equations that described electromagnetism. His name was James Clerk Maxwell – and his work was ultimately to deliver television, radio and other aspects of modern telecommunications. It is just that nobody, not even Maxwell, could possibly have predicted this in advance.

With so few politicians having worked in research, few of them instinctively grasp the intricacies of the system’s reliance on this sort of serendipity. They are keen to praise Nobel prize-winners and extol the value of scientific solutions to climate change or serious disease. They are less comfortable with the need to support uncertain basic research – essential to the chance of Nobels and breakthroughs, but much of which will fail.

As Simon Frantz, of the Nobel Foundation, puts it: ‘When ministers talk about science funding, they almost always announce with pride that the UK has overachieved in the number of Nobel Laureates as a prelude to discussing measures that will ensure that we will never come close to this figure again.’

A common temptation is to insist that funding should be directed so that it supports work that will generate the returns that everyonewould like science to have. In 2009, Lord Drayson, then the UK Science Minister, called for funding to be focused on areas of science in which Britain has a ‘strategic advantage’. His government also introduced a new funding system for university research, which marks researchers according to the economic or social benefits of their work. Such ideas are well intentioned: it is important that scientists have every incentive to exploit results that have commercial or social potential. But it is simply impossible to predict the impact of scientific research before it is done: if it were known, there would be no need to do the experiments.
It is simply impossible to predict the impact of scientific research before it is done: if it were known, there would be no need to do the experiments.

More state support for translating good ideas into business oppor- tunities would certainly be welcome. But this cannot be done at the expense of basic research, and the constraints politicians place on science funding makes it something of a zero-sum game. Throw out too much curiosity-led science in favour of applied work and you risk being left with nothing to apply.

Britain had no strategic advantage in opto-electronics when David Payne began his career: the field had yet to be developed. Shankar Balasubramanian and David Klenerman had no track record of impact when they started the research that founded a multi-million pound company. Berners-Lee would have struggled to show his work had social significance, let alone economic importance. All would have struggled to attract funding in the modern era.

Few researchers are better qualified to boast about impact than Robert Langer, a biological engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: he holds more than 600 patents and has founded a clutch of successful companies. Yet he is wary of efforts to guide research this way. ‘You don’t know when you’re starting wherethings are going to lead,’ he says. ‘I think making things too directed would be concerning. In fact, I would say that generally you get more bang for your buck by funding basic research.’

There are just 48 hours left to respond to rather a significant one.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority is currently consulting over whether new IVF techniques for preventing a group of severe disorders known as mitochondrial diseases should be permitted for clinical use. These involve replacing defective mitochondria — the “power plants” of the cell — in eggs or embryos, so that any children born as a result are free from the disease.

Here’s a great feature explaining the work, the diseases, and their impact on families.

I think it’s important that this should be permitted (disclosure: I work for the Wellcome Trust, which funds this research).

My response to the consultation is here. Please submit yours — the consultation closes on Friday.

HFEA Consultation: Medical Frontiers

HFEA

Name of participant: Mr Mark Henderson
These are the recorded submissions for Session 1. Only sections to which responses have been recorded are listed below.

Permissibility of new techniques

Q1: Having read the information on this website about the two mitochondria replacement techniques – maternal spindle transfer and pro-nuclear transfer, what are your views on offering (one or both of) these techniques to people at risk of passing on mitochondrial disease to their child? You may wish to address the two techniques separately.
Your response:
Both techniques are ethical and should be approved for clinical use, subject to award of relevant licences. As we do not currently know which of the two techniques is likely to be safer or more effective, it would be foolish to favour one over the other at this point. Comparisons between the two techniques can be expected to yield useful scientific and clinical information that could ultimately benefit patients. It is also possible that one technique may be suitable for some patients, and the other for others. It would thus be very unwise to throw one out.

The Nuffield Council on Bioethics noted that there were no good ethical reasons for preferring one technique over the other. I concur with this view.
Changing the germ line

Q2: Do you think there are social and ethical implications to changing the germ line in the way the techniques do? If so, what are they?
Your response:
I do not consider that altering the germline in this way raises significant ethical or social concerns. Indeed, altering the germline so that disease is not passed to future generations is a positive benefit of these technologies, and makes them more ethically acceptable, not less.

It is worth remembering that these techniques alter only the mitochondrial genome, and not the nuclear genome. Approval would thus set no precedent for manipulation of the nuclear genome in germline fashion, which may raise different ethical questions.

The benefits of this technology clearly outweigh any risks that are posed by germline manipulation. This is because the alternative is the near-certainty that abnormal mitochondrial DNA that causes severe disease will be passed on through the germline.

There need be no slippery slope here. It is perfectly possible for society to decide that a germline manipulation may be appropriate for one purpose, such as preventing mitochondrial disease, and not for another, such as altering characteristics such as eye colour.
Implications for identity

Q3: Considering the possible impact of mitochondria replacement on a person’s sense of identity, do you think there are social and ethical implications? If so, what are they?
Your response:
I think it highly unlikely that mitochondrial replacement will significantly impact anybody’s sense of identity. It is already established that many people can contribute to a child’s genetic, gestational or social parentage, through techniques such as gamete donation, surrogacy and adoption. In many of these instances, a third party to the social parents makes a much greater biological contribution to that individual than would be the case with mitochondrial donation.

If we think it acceptable that a person can be conceived using donated eggs or sperm that contribute half of their DNA, we should also accept donations of the tiny proportion of DNA contained in the mitochondria.
The status of the mitochondria donor

Q4 (a) In your view how does the donation of mitochondria compare to existing types of donation? Please specify what you think this means for the status of a mitochondria donor.
Your response:
Please see my response to question 3. I think this technique raises fewer issues than gamete donation, which I consider wholly acceptable.

Q4 (b): Thinking about your response to 4 (a), what information about the mitochondria donor do you think a child should have? (Choose one response only)
Your response:
Option3
Please explain your choice
Your response:
I do not have a strong view. I think it likely that in practice, most mitochondrial donors are likely to be known to patient families.
Regulation of mitochondria replacement

Q5: If the law changed to allow mitochondria replacement to take place in a specialist clinic regulated by the HFEA, how should decisions be made on who can access this treatment? (Choose one response only)
Your response:
Option1
Please explain your choice
Your response:
The most appropriate people to decide whether these techniques are ethically appropriate for individual families are those families themselves: they are the ones who are best placed to understand the impact of mitochondrial disease. They should he advised by clinicians, who can judge whether these techniques are technically appropriate in particular cases.

The role of parliament is to set the general direction of travel, then it is for the regulator to decide whether the techniques are safe and effective enough to be tried in patients. Clinical decisions should then be taken by patients and doctors.
Should the law be changed?

Q6: In Question 1, we asked for your views on the mitochondria replacement techniques MST and PNT. Please could you now tell us if you think the law should be changed to allow (one or both of) these techniques to be made available to people who are at risk of passing on mitochondrial disease to their child?
Your response:
The 2008 HFE Act provides for regulations to be passed to permit clinical use of these techniques. These regulations should be passed without delay to enable clinical use, subject to licensing by the HFEA or its successor.

It is important that the law is changed before research shows safety and effectiveness, so that this research can proceed in parallel with the legal processes required. Waiting for this evidence to be available would lead to significant delays before patient can be treated. The law should permit clinical use in principle, and leave the HFEA to decide whether there is sufficient safety and effectiveness data to warrant awarding licences.

So maths works. Who knew? For weeks, the statisticians Nate Silver and Sam Wang have been predicting an Obama victory, on the strength of proper statistical models that include all relevant state polls. This morning, they’ve been utterly vindicated.

Assuming Florida indeed breaks for Obama, as returns indicate right now, Silver will have called all 50 states correctly. Wang will have 49 out of 50. Both have effectively gone 100 per cent — they each pinned Florida as a coin toss, but one took heads and the other tails.

As the US election drew nearer, Silver, in particular, has had to contend with some frankly awful political punditry that betrayed dreadful statistical innumeracy. Right up until yesterday, most of the mainstream media was still declaring the race too close to call. It wasn’t. Mitt Romney still had a chance of winning, particularly if the Silver/Wang assumption that all the polls were not systematically underestimating his support was incorrect. But Obama was overwhelmingly likely to win.

I think the hostility of many media pundits to Silver and Wang, and the way so much of the media essentially ignored their predictions and stuck with the “too close to call” narrative, says something interesting and important about political commentary. It’s a theme that plays a significant part in the Geek Manifesto’s chapter on the media. And it’s that the media is systematically unwilling to grant mathematics, statistics and science a significant role in politics.

Hardly anyone in frontline politics, or in the upper echelons of the media, has a background in mathematics or the natural sciences. Editors and newspaper columnists, on both sides of the Atlantic, tend to be graduates in politics and the humanities. They think instinctively that political commentary should mostly be done on feel. Hard numbers and evidence don’t generally come into it. A more scientific approach to political questions is somewhat alien.*

You can see this in the way Silver was derided by many pundits who simply didn’t understand the predictions he was making. And you can see it, too, in the choices that TV and newspaper editors make about their political commentators. Scientists are hardly ever asked for their perspective on political events: while cultural figures such as Will Self and Bonnie Greer are regular guests on Question Time, scientists, mathematicians and statisticians hardly ever feature.

In the past two years, Melanie Phillips has been on Question Time more often than all scientists put together. As far as I can make out, not a single scientist has appeared on the BBC’s flagship political discussion show this year. That says something.

The success of Silver and Wang shows that geeks have something rather important to contribute to political analysis, which is rather more valuable than much punditry. I hope editors take note.

*I’m generalising of course. There are political pundits who get this. My old Times colleague Danny Finkelstein, for example, is great on statistics and what they do and don’t mean.

Richard’s review made it clear that though it reads somewhat critically, he agreed with much of the book, and that he was pleased it has provoked so much discussion of the relationship between science and public policy. I’m grateful for these comments, and for the time he took to look at some of the areas where we disagree in such detail. I invariably find Richard’s writing interesting, and this piece was no exception.

Broadly, I think it’s fair to say that Richard’s criticisms of the book fall under three broad headings. I’ll share some thoughts provoked by each of them.

The first area of criticism surrounds the idea that there is value in geeks adopting a kind of identity politics:

“Why should we think that geeks really can form a single group, with a homogenous set of interests, from which one could build some kind of identity politics? And even if they do, doesn’t that contradict the broader aim of Henderson’s book, that public life in general ought to be more rational and sensible – surely rationality shouldn’t be restricted to a single interest group?”

There isn’t, he says, a single “geek belief package” to which he, or others who might fit the bill as geeks, can subscribe. Even an appreciation and understanding of the scientific method offers no unifying theme, because of the many varied methodologies that can contribute to scientific knowledge. He writes interestingly about how randomised controlled trials, for example, have little role in his own discipline of physics.

I accept much of this analysis. I did attempt to explain in the book that I don’t think geeks can form an interest group that will agree on everything, and I certainly don’t think that geeks are the only people capable of rationality. One of the goals of the book, indeed, is to encourage politicians without a background in science to engage more with what science might have to offer them. RCTs are, I think, an approach to revealing evidence that could play a much more significant role in policy-making than is currently the case. But I would never argue that they are the only, or always the best, way of deciding issues.

That said, I do think that there are common threads that run through the broad community of people who care about science. Scientists, and those who appreciate their approach to knowledge, are people, and thus not wholly rational by any means. Yet much of the value of science comes from the way the human susceptibility to confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance is actively acknowledged, and the way it tries, if imperfectly, to compensate for these traits. Knowledge is recognised as provisional, always open to revision in light of improved data. These are ideas that could use a greater airing in political discussion. I don’t think — and I say this explicitly in the book — that geeks will ever rally around a laundry list of policy prescriptions around which there is party-line agreement. But I do think many of us are united by a broad approach to public policy.

What’s more, it’s not my intention to argue that the majority of politicians are anti-science, or irrational. They’re not. Rather, there are too many who are indifferent to the way science works at generating reliable, if provisional, knowledge. They simply haven’t engaged. The movement I’m looking to encourage won’t often demand that politicians do this or that. It’ll challenge them to think about policy issues with a sharper eye for evidence, and to ask questions about policy that might otherwise have passed them by.

Richard’s second broad point — made particularly in relation to my chapter about the environment — is that I underplay the politics that are inherent in calling for a greater role for science. In arguing that technical solutions such as nuclear power and GM crops could play a greater role in allowing us to contain climate change without significant change to consumer behaviour or the capitalist system, I overlook that “wanting our current economic system to continue without change is not an apolitical position. On the contrary, it is a profoundly political position in itself, and there’s no reason to suppose it will command universal assent.”

To which I plead half-guilty. Political considerations are of course deeply embedded in wishing to continue with something approaching economic business as usual. I don’t deny that I am broadly comfortable with capitalism, though I wouldn’t go so far as saying I would like it to continue “without change”. I accept that this could and should have been properly acknowledged.

There are two things, though, to say to this. The first is that it wasn’t my intention to argue here in favour of a particular political and economic system, in this case capitalism. Rather, my intention was to suggest that winning popular support for efforts to contain climate change is likely to be more successful without demanding wholesale changes to a way of life, and without writing off entire approaches to energy generation as out the question. A more pragmatic approach, I think, is likely to be a more popular approach, and thus a more successful one. This matters, I think, if slowing or stopping climate change is our main goal. I suspect I didn’t make this point sufficiently clear, and I’m glad to clarify.

My second comment is related. It is that the goal of addressing climate change is very different from the goal of altering political and economic systems, the two can properly be separated. It is reasonable to ask deep greens to break down these goals, and to consider which is more important to them. Is the green movement principally environmental, or economic? It is a fair question to ask. If the two are inseparable, then it is incumbent on those who argue this to make and win their case. I do not believe they have done so.

A couple of further points. I accept Richard’s analysis of why nuclear power will be unable to meet the world’s energy needs alone. That, though, is not my argument: I think it can make a contribution to decarbonisation, which is a much more limited statement that I think stands scrutiny rather better.

And Richard argues that I do too little to assail conservative resistance to the science of climate change. I do go after this, but I accept that I could and probably should have done more.

The final broad area of criticism surrounds my analysis of science and economic growth, and here, I have to acknowledge that Richard makes many fair points. He is right that the relationship is complex — probably rather more complex than I allow — and that there are important factors involved that get little discussion in the book. I found his analysis of the role of the wider innovation ecosystem to be highly illuminating, and I rather regret not finding time to speak to him as I researched the book.

“Given current economic problems – in the wider world but in the UK especially – we urgently need a much better understanding of the link between science and prosperity,” he says. I agree, and while I did allude to the need for better evidence, I wish I had done so more strongly.

Overall, I’m really pleased Richard took the time to review The Geek Manifesto so thoughtfully and at such length. The goal of the book was much more to start discussion about these themes as it was to set a precise agenda. I’m glad to have provoked such an interesting response.