- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday October 31 2000 01.48 GMT
Despite the naming and shaming of nearly 30 senior civil servants and eight former Tory ministers in last week's report by Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers over their refusal to recognise the BSE problem, Britain's scientists have largely escaped his censure. For over a decade, it has been a matter of record within the academic community that much of the research on which the government based its pronouncements on the safety of British beef was either wilfully suppressed or misinterpreted by the government, but almost to a man and woman they acquiesced in the perversion. Those who didn't, such as Richard Lacey, were so few in number they could be picked off with ease by government spin doctors as troublemakers.
This is the latest example of a more general failure among academics to speak out on important issues, identified by Greg Philo and David Miller in a new book Market Killing. Their main targets are social scientists, but they believe the charge sticks more widely. Many academics must have had more than an inkling that something was amiss with the publication of Professor Sir Richard Southwood's report in 1989. This was the report that set the agenda for the government to declare that BSE was an animal, not human, health problem and all but closed the door on scientific research into the human health risks of infected beef.
Sir Richard told one newspaper last week that he was urged to keep his investigation into BSE's impact on the food chain quiet and not to make any recommendations that would involve the government in too much expense. In 1990 he advised the government that further research into "the remote possibility that humans could be infected" was necessary. He admitted: "I did stop eating brain tissue following my research."
And yet academics knew that Southwood's committee contained no experts on scrapie or transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, nor were the available experts in Britain and the US called to give evidence.
As Miller, research manager at the Stirling Media Research Institute, wrote in a paper for Social Science and Medicine, "of those who were called, Hugh Frazer of the Institute for Animal Health is reported to be amazed that he was only asked 'a few simplistic questions' and not for his opinion on other pertinent areas of science". Back in 1990, Miller conducted his own research into food scandals and was amazed at the duplicity of some of the scientists who were actively engaged in government research in BSE: "Even though the government was telling the public that British beef was safe to eat, I came across quite a few academics who told me that, based on the scientific evidence, they had concluded beef was unsafe and had stopped eating it," he says. "More worrying still, one very senior scientist, who made a great show of supporting the government line by stating in public that he was happy to carry on eating beef, had actually stopped eating it on health safety grounds."
Dr Peter Cotgreave, director of the Save British Science Society, claims that the Phillips report highlights the fact that there will have to be changes in the way government deals with scientific advice - and that "scientific experts have not been given the independence to state their views".
But he concedes: "When the government was standing up saying there was no risk from BSE, the scientific community should have been standing up and saying that this was not what the scientific evidence actually pointed to," he says. "The advice was that there might be a risk, but we just didn't know for sure."
Cotgreave says that there are many more strings attached to all kinds of government research grants than in the past. The £775m of new infrastructure funds announced in the government spending review, for example, come with a caveat that academics must attract 25% of the money from industry. "That is going to affect the questions they ask," he says.
A review of physics research in the UK earlier in the year by a group of international experts suggested that UK academics are more willing to just do what the government asks. Similar pressure abroad would start riots in universities.
Former government chief scientific adviser Sir Bob May agreed that scientific experts should be more vocal. "I can see the reasons why people do not get involved. They have given willingly of their time, and then have not been altogether happy with what happened, and are reluctant to give yet more time to make themselves unpopular," he said. "But at the same time I think it is something they should do." But Sir Bob says that he is unaware of evidence that academics or scientists withhold results or that research is getting less fundamental: "If you actually assess the distribution of research council money for fundamental versus applied work, it has moved into the direction of more fundamental work. If you actually count the fraction of papers that are in high-quality, rigorously refereed journals the British share has gone up not down."
Tim Lang, professor of food policy at Thames Valley University, agrees with Miller that academics did abdicate their responsibilities over the BSE crisis and subjects unpopular with ministers. In an email to Miller he wrote: "As you know, in the 1980s and 1990s the number of academics who participated in the food-scandals debate was pitifully few. I have been clearing out my archives for the last week and have got all angry again about how few were prepared to research food poverty. Those who did so were giants."
Academics are ultimately funded by the taxpayer, but are not always the fearless guardians of truth and objectivity they may sometimes claim to be; rather, they are men and women with families and a mortgage who are loath to rock boats for fear of damaging their career prospects. The public interest gets lost.
This is perhaps understandable, if not exactly noble. Miller reports on the reaction he got when he announced he was planning to undertake some unpopular research into the effect of the broadcast ban on the IRA in Northern Ireland. "You could hear the sound of doors shutting," he says.
The other aspect of this silencing of the lambs is the commercialisation of academic research. In the early 1980s many research bodies were publicly funded; now they are virtual plcs. The effect of this is that most research is either driven by commercial gain - hence the huge amount of money and time spent on finding a cure for hair loss - or by a government agenda, for which money is made available. There is very little independent research taking place and almost nothing to rock the status quo. "Most academics have effectively given up their role as a critical voice of public policy," says Greg Philo, director of the Glasgow Media Group. "Increasingly it is being left to journalists to ask the difficult questions. Instead, academics are happy either to take the cash from commercial sponsors or to engage in oceans and oceans of non-empirical, intellectually bankrupt, office-based post-modern research where there is no such thing as truth and anything can mean anything.
"Film studies academics have been pursuing inaccurate and pointless research for years, but because they are all doing it, no one challenges them. What's more they all award themselves top ratings at peer review for the Research Assessment Exercise."
Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at Massachussets Institute of Technology, goes along with this. Berating the post-modern trend, he says: "People are being deprived of valuable modes of understanding and insight they badly need, and crucial questions about how the world works and how it might be changed are avoided, even ridiculed."
The point about this postmodern research, of course, is that it is cheap and non-controversial - exactly the sort of thing that cash-strapped universities are looking for to boost their research ratings. "Who is doing the research into the dumbing down of the media," asks Greg Philo, "and the destruction of current affairs programming, the effects of violence in the media and the effects of huge corporations taking over the media?
"There's a similar silence in other areas of public policy. Take the drugs debate. Academics spend years researching into ecstasy because the government decides it's a popular area, yet virtually ignore the legal drugs, such as alcohol, that kill thousand and thousands of people each year. It's madness. When the Tories reopened the cannabis debate, the academic world was silent because it had nothing to say; it was left to the police to voice the arguments."
It's not all bad news, though, as Philo admits. "There are some organisations, such as the Rowntree Foundation, Nuffield and the trade unions sponsoring independent research," he says, "and very good work is coming out of it. For instance the trade union-sponsored research into stress and bullying in the workplace has made an impact. However, such studies are few and far between. I know that many academics are overworked and demoralised but they must be prepared to stand up and be counted in the public forum."
But Cotgreave is pessimistic in the light of further research cuts at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. "The ministry has got to stop cutting its research budget," he said. "Ministers have said that they are preserving their BSE budget, but this means they are cutting other areas that might be important next year or the year after. If another BSE comes along we would be even worse off than this one."
• Market Killing: what the free market does and what social scientists can do about it (Longman, £16.99) is by Greg Philo, David Miller et al.
• BSE report: www.bseinquiry.gov.uk
