-
- The Observer,
- Sunday May 26, 2002
Perhaps Archimedes offers a better classical tie-in to the mission. Give Mr Blair the fulcrum of a science seminar and he will move the earth, or at least shuffle public opinion along a bit. Except that the leverage hasn't worked. The latest speech, although broadly welcomed by scientists, elicited the predictable media bag of articles denouncing GM crops and a row about experiments on marmosets at a Cambridge laboratory. Why, in three years of startling advances, has the debate moved on so little?
The first reason is that the Prime Minister misreads his audience. Far from being anti-science, the general public is enthralled. Stephen Hawking, despite a prose style denser than a black hole, turned particle physics into box-office. The neo-Darwinians' impact allowed even science dropouts to offer master-classes on the selfish gene. Stephen Jay Gould, the American palaentologist who died last week, became a superstar and, almost, a household name. If anyone is lagging behind on evolutionary theory, it is Mr Blair with his plugs for teaching creationism in schools.
As for animal rights activists, the Prime Minister must take a little blame for their unpleasantness. In accepting £1 million from the Political Animal Rights Lobby in 1996, Labour may inadvertently have encouraged the hope that it would supply some favours in return.
On GM crops, Mr Blair might well be right in finding 'no serious evidence of health risks'. One hopes so, since the worldwide acreage is now 14 times the size of the UK. But the public is mistrustful. It may accept that Lord Sainsbury has no input into biotech policy, but it still regards him less as a Science Minister and more as a genetically modified £9m party donor.
Nor do voters like the multinationals, which were stupid enough to launch herbicide-resistant crops, instead of promoting those whose increased yields and tolerance of hostile environments might offer real hope to the world. People have been stung before. This time they want clear evidence of safety, and they are right. It is no good, as Mr Blair does, to blame bad application rather than bad science. The BSE débcle was down to both.
Academics have different quibbles. If Britain is truly to lead the world on nano-science and e-science, then where's the money coming from? The disgraceful lack of funding for higher education doesn't help, nor does the fact that graduates, mired in debt, can't afford to do PhDs. In schools, a third of physics teachers don't have the relevant degree. In industry, engineers are seen as people who fix washing machines.
On much of this, Mr Blair is silent. Nor does he seem to understand that most people aren't Luddites; they're puzzled. Technology offers a rush of progress, demonstrating both the power of science and its vanity. Last week marked the twin advent of the GM mosquito, designed to help avert three million deaths from malaria, and the GM featherless chicken, which can't stand sunlight but won't need plucking.
You can get a Botox treatment in Boots for £200 after buying your dental floss, potentially more costly since it became the new ammunition of the paternity case. A used floss strand has just been stolen from the American businessman Steve Bing's dustbin by those seeking a DNA sample to show whether he is the biological father of a billionaire movie mogul's daughter.
And yet, bald chickens and genetic trespass apart, the real pace of scientific change is frustratingly slow. In a century focused on quasi-eternal life, hundreds of British children die unnecessarily of epilepsy every year. Human cognitive limits, or the sheer difficulty of some science, stall progress. Mr Blair's speech paid polite tribute to the British project on controlled fusion, the holy grail of energy researchers, but more than half a century of work on fusing hydrogen nuclei has produced no obvious results. Optimists might argue that even fax machines, first patented in 1843, didn't take off until the 1960s.
Despite sclerotic advance, the popular emphasis is on a hurtling, unthinking lurch into a cold tomorrow. The latest Jeremiah is Francis Fukuyama, whose book, Our Posthuman Future , posits a world in which genetic tinkering threatens liberal democracy. Like the Catholic Church, Fukuyama buys the C.S. Lewis line that the road to hell is an apparently attractive and a gentle slope. Dope your naughty children with Ritalin, swallow your Prozac, adjust the germ-line to ensure, through all future generations, blond hair or blue eyes, an aptitude for cello-playing or simply an end to an inherited disease. And then watch the dystopia that unfolds.
There is a lot wrong with Fukuyama's thesis, but a central flaw is that the 'human nature' he prizes is far more robust than he imagines. People don't want to drug their children, or themselves, just because a medicalised society says they can. They don't, by and large, want to know the sex of an unborn child, let alone commission couture babies. People are more fearful, conservative and wise than Fukuyama ever allows, and so are scientists.
Sir Brian Heap, Master of St Edmund's College, Cambridge, speaks for most colleagues in calling for a moratorium on human cloning for five years. According to Heap: 'Scientists aren't on a free run, and neither do they wish to be.' Mr Blair has forged a framework for such sensible progress. He has, gratifyingly, faced down animal rights protesters and infuriated the pro-life lobby by promising to lead the field in therapeutic cloning using human embryos.
Britain already boasts the best regulation system and the most liberal laws on stem cell research, while George Bush's America has an alarming hybrid, under which work on therapeutic and reproductive cloning is outlawed federally but may be permitted if privately funded. In Italy, Professor Severino Antinori breathes the oxygen of publicity and boasts of forthcoming Identikit humans, but it is America's cowboy cloners who most alarm sane scientists here.
Mr Blair, an echoing voice of reason, can be pleased with the speech he hatched in Bangalore, apart from one section. 'The answer is not to disinvent nuclear fusion,' he told the Royal Society, proposing the damp palliatives of 'greater moral fibre' and 'better judgment'. In 1944, another Prime Minister was inspired by India to say where science might lead. It had, Winston Churchill told his New Delhi audience, 'given this generation the means of unlimited disaster or unlimited progress'.
Today, India stands on the brink of nuclear war, and we shall soon see which way Churchill's dice rolls. Whatever the outcome, Mr Blair should learn to fear science as much as he professes to revere it. When debate gets stifled and anxiety goes unacknowledged, then thugs and false prophets are guaranteed to thrive.
