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Analysis
They don't know, you know
There's one thing labs, journals and all the impressive apparatus of
scientific advance
cannot give the public, Tim Radford says, and it's something the public
keeps asking
for. It's certainty.
Tuesday February 23, 1999
The Guardian
Science can deliver the moon, Neil Armstrong's small step and all, but the
moon it cannot promise. The chain of
cold logic and hot ambition that led from Isaac Newton's garden to the Sea
of Tranquillity in 1969, paradoxically
cannot guarantee that genetically modified tomatoes will be absolutely
safe to eat - nor that the moon will hang
there in the earth's sky tonight.
'You can't say anything is completely safe,' Sir Robert May says. He's a
mathematician who became a biologist,
and then the Government's chief scientific adviser. 'You can say two and
two is always four, because that sort of
definition is built into the structure and nature of the system but you
can't say, with 100 per cent confidence, that
the sun will rise tomorrow. It is a pretty good working hypothesis... and
at some slightly lower epistemological
level, you can estimate the probability that an aeroplane will fall on
either you or me while we are having this
conversation.'
He was speaking, having just had a week of things falling in on him: angry
campaigners, anxious ministers,
puzzled journalists and alarmed voters. The genetically modified organism
(GMO) debate is also a debate
about science, and within science. Campaigners and voters keep asking
scientists to promise something that
nobody can promise, a certain future. All scientists can say is that some
GM foods seem to be safe; the ones
that are not won't be used; and, sorry, there are no simple answers.
And there are no risk-free foods anyway. John Beringer, the biologist who
chairs Acre, the Government's
advisory committee on releases into the environment, says that even
traditional crops have their risks (1). 'Few,
if any, of these crops would survive the stringent tests recommended for
GM crops.' He would say that,
opponents reply: he's involved. Maarten Chrispeels of the University of
California at San Diego is also involved,
on both sides. He is one of 20 scientists working here in Britain and
overseas who were named in that
now-famous memorandum defending Dr Arpad Pusztai, dropped by the Rowett
Research Institute in Aberdeen.
Last August Dr Pusztai had said that potatoes genetically modified to make
a natural insect poison called a
lectin, borrowed from the common snowdrop, had, when fed to rats, made
their organs grow somewhat more
slowly and depressed their immune systems. A team of auditors from the
Rowett then looked at Dr Pusztai's
research and reported that his data did not support his argument. The
68-year-old scientist was left out in the
cold. So far, so simple: a martyr, and fellow scientists prepared to speak
up for him. It isn't that simple.
'The scientists who signed this memorandum are basically saying Pusztai
got shafted. Please reinstate him so
that he can carry on his experiments. They are not saying GMOs should be
banned,' Professor Chrispeels says.
'The auditors looked at some of the experiments and said: he is out of
line, he should have waited till he had all
the data. And Pusztai says look, I have 20 years of experience in lectins,
I have some data that say perhaps we
should proceed with caution. So both interpretations are possible on the
basis of the data that the auditors and
we have been allowed to examine. I want to stress that we have not seen
all the data that Pusztai has.'
But - he makes this point again and again - the data from the experiments
so far raise more questions than they
can answer. 'These experiments could be interpreted in different ways, as
is always the case when you are in
the preliminary stages of an investigation.' Professor Chrispeels
says:'Scientists gather a body of evidence,
submit it to their peers, and then publish it. It is possible that Pusztai
has this evidence but I have not seen it.' In
fact, he says, he would need a mountain of scientific evidence to convince
him that the act of creating a GM
organism was itself unsafe. Scientists have been altering plant genes for
a long time. He is a molecular biologist
who began in agriculture. He helped create the first insect-resistant
transgenic seeds in collaboration with
Australian scientists. 'I am not in favour of banning either GMOs or the
use of GMOs in food, certainly not, unless
there is evidence. But no evidence has been forthcoming. As a matter of
fact, 20 million hectares of GMOs are
being grown in the United States and nobody is turning into a turnip.'
In the rest of the world, according to Sir Robert May, an area 1.5 times
the size of the United Kingdom is already
planted with commercial GM crops of soya beans, oilseed rape, maize,
cotton, potatoes and tobacco. 'I'm just
waiting for the protest about the safety of GM tobacco,' Sir Robert says.
He sees it as yet another case of a
technology very much devised in Britain, but mostly exploited abroad. For
scientists, the GM food furore shows
the gap between what people expect of science and what science can
deliver.
Here are arguments about the nature of science itself. Lewis Wolpert, the
engineer who became an
embryologist, once argued that the practice of science was unnatural, that
scientific ideas often seemed to run
against common sense(2). Riding a bicycle was easy, but explaining why a
bicycle was stable at speed was
not. The naturalist and ideas-maker Edward O. Wilson recently described
the search for objective reality as
religion liberated and writ large (3). 'It is an endeavour almost as old
as civilisation and intertwined with
traditional religion , but it follows a very different course - a stoic's
creed, an acquired taste, a guidebook to
adventure plotted across rough terrain.'
Some sociologists argue that science is something humans invented and
therefore has no more validity than
any other cultural belief system. But for most professionals, science is a
method: a steady, piecemeal approach
to problems a piece at a time, conducted according to a set of
widely-agreed rules. For them, science is what
scientists do.
They take nothing for granted: they test everything, even the things that
seem stunningly obvious - is rat food
more nourishing for rats, for instance, than say, wood? - and then they
test again, in a different way, just to make
sure, and then again, in a third way, just to make absolutely sure. Then
they submit their results to a journal with a
reputation to maintain which then sends the findings out to a panel of
experienced fellow-scientists. They look at
the research and say: 'Hang on, did you use rats from the same family
line? Rats of the same age? Were you
using rats that were used to gnawing wood? Which wood did you use as food?
How much sawdust was in the
rat food as filler?This 'peer review group' then sends the research back
to the journal and then to the hapless
researcher, who goes on running experiments and rewriting his report until
everyone is satisfied. It gets
published. The journal circulates. Whereupon, in a distant laboratory
across the Atlantic, a scientist in the same
line of research shakes his head sadly, and begins his own experiments to
see how quickly he can demolish the
work of the pro-rat-food team. If he does, the score is one-all, and other
laboratories will start to get interested.
This is a process that everyone in science understands: somebody puts up a
hypothesis, and then devises a
proof, and then puts it out into the open. Everybody else tries to kick
the hypothesis to death. If other
experiments produce the same result, then the hypothesis is declared to be
a robust one - not right, just a good
working hypothesis for the time being - and the research goes on from
there. Karl Popper may have put this
proposition starkly but his understanding of science as a process of
disconfirmation rather than affirmation is
broadly right.
Within a few years, or a few decades, a completely new discovery may be
made - made possible by a new set
of questions, a new way of looking at things, or possibly just a new set
of techniques. As a result the hypothesis
has to change. The first hypothesis put the wrong question and got the
wrong answer. So the chase begins
again. All 'laws' within biology are in fact working propositions, under
continuous test: a journey towards
certainties, with no guarantee of an arrival.
Having got results, and persuaded peers that the scientist got them
honestly - some have been known to fake
their findings, and some show an all-too-human tendency to dismiss the bad
outcomes and highlight only the
good results - there remain big questions of interpretation. What is the
likelihood that such and such a result
came about because it reflected the way things are, rather than on the
basis of pure chance, or thanks to some
completely undiscovered bias? Scientists are humans: they make mistakes,
cling to favourite ideas, hold
loyalties and see what they want to see. So they put their results to
statistical analysis before they can convince
each other that say, a rat's organ change was a result of eating raw
potatoes modified with a gene to produce a
snowdrop lectin rather than a result of sheer chance. Coincidences are
uncannily common but they are still
co-incidences. Stage conjurors can and often do use probability games to
produce striking results: Richard
Dawkins, the zoologist who has turned to the problems of the public
understanding of science tells of an
experiment at the Royal Institution Christmas lectures in which he
'identified' the psychic in the audience who
had 'influenced' the fall of a coin successfully, eight times in a row(4).
Sir Robert May has seen it all before, at Princeton, in the United States
during the first alarms, when genetic
engineering first became possible. 'I remember the robustly commonsensical
people in the fire department
nevertheless wanting to be reassured that they were not going to be
subjected to a sort of Quatermass science
fiction movie if they had to come to a fire in the biochemistry
department,' he says. 'There was no corresponding
thing here. Now, we are replaying that drama with the roles reversed. In
the States, there has been no such
apprehension.'
Sources: (1) John Beringer, Keeping Watch Over Genetically Modified Foods
and Crops, The Lancet,
February 20; (2)Lewis Wolpert, The Unnatural Nature of Science, Faber,
1992; (3) Edward O. Wilson,
Consilience Little Brown, 1998; (4) Richard Dawkins, Unweaving The Rainbow
Penguin 1998.
Copyright Guardian Media Group plc. 1999
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On Tue, 23 Feb 1999, George Gale wrote:
> I don't suppose there's a _Guardian_ website where those of us in one
> of the Former Colonies might view the article on scientific truth? :-(
>
> Tnx1
> g
>
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