Launch of new scientific committee on drugs, Media Show, the Met Office and Simon Jenkins

When Professor David Nutt called to ask if we would host the media launch of his new independent scientific committee on drugs, my reply was "Is the Pope a Catholic?". David Nutt’s sacking from his position as Chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs by the Home Secretary was one of the biggest science stories of last year and led to a huge debate about the role of independent scientific advisers. Needless to say there was huge media interest in this latest twist and if, as some suspected, the Home Secretary announced the new Chair of the ACMD the day before our briefing to distract attention, it had the opposite effect. David has amassed an incredibly impressive list of scientists for his new Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ISCD) and three of them joined him on the panel, including a leading chemist, psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist. They all spoke incredibly well and convinced me that they will do important scientific work that can only help inform the debate on drugs. David explained that his new group would differ from ACMD because it will focus exclusively on the science and be geared toward informing public debate rather than government. It will of course also be independent and there was a fascinating moment where David and other former ACMD members on the panel described how liberated they felt working outside of government. The SMC strives to be as impartial as possible on issues like this, and we have in the past also run briefings for ACMD and with Professor Robin Murray at the Institute of Psychiatry, whose research focuses on the association between cannabis use and psychosis. But I do think Nutt’s committee is going to be an incredibly interesting experiment in truly independent scientific advice. While the government will want to ignore it I wonder if they really can. If, as seems likely, the new committee attracts lots of media attention, it’s likely to have a significant impact on the public debate. How ironic it would be if it ended up having more influence on government policy as a truly independent body than it did as an official one. We look forward to having these excellent scientists back in the Centre to report on their evidence gathering in future.

IFR/John Innes Centre
I had a great day at the Institute of Food Research and John Innes Centre last week. Zoe Dunford is one of the SMC’s favorite science press officers and each time I visit I am struck by how well she knows her scientists and her zeal for their research. As well as doing a talk about science in the media for a packed lecture theatre of researchers, I also met groups working on developing exciting new antibiotics and using the waste from biomass to create petrol. I finished meeting the new Director of IFR, David Boxer, who is an expert on the gut and he told me fascinating things about just how important this organ is and his plans to make IFR a centre of excellence in promoting our understanding of all things gut-related. I’m pretty sure each of these will make great SMC briefings and know I can rely on Zoe to keep an eye out for the right pegs to make them happen.

The Media Show
On the train on the way home I got a call from the producer of The Media Show on BBC Radio 4 to remind me about my interview the next day and talk me through the content. She explained that the interview would use the impartiality review on science announced by the BBC Trust as a peg to discuss science on the BBC, and that I should think of what the BBC does well and what it does badly and said examples would be useful. I spent the rest of the train journey texting friends in and out of the BBC to ask their views leading to some fascinating insights into which programmes people have loved and hated. In the event, the entire interview actually focused exclusively on climate change at the BBC and in particular their coverage of the UEA email-hacking scandal and the latest controversy involving the IPCC's predictions about glacier melting rates. So there I was live on air, with notes in front of me that bore no resemblance to the subject I was supposed to be talking about, and at that stage blissfully unaware of what ‘glacier-gate’ actually was (a useful reminder that even the best of us can get hijacked on air). Steve Hewlett, the show’s feisty presenter, asked us to answer the charge that the BBC is soft on mainstream science and on climate change, and slow to cover stories that expose its flaws. The other guest, Mary Hockaday from the BBC, put up a robust defense of the Beeb and I at least got to argue something I believe in passionately – that climate change research must be subject to the same kind of journalistic scrutiny as any other area of science and politics. I believe that the science of climate change is rigorous and robust enough to stand up to journalistic scrutiny, and if and when it does fall down – as I now realise it did in 'glacier-gate' – then that must be exposed. Any other approach simply plays into the sceptics’ hands and does science no favours.

In praise of…the Met Office
The other nice thing about getting out of the office (and the reason I have not yet gone down the Blackberry route) is that I get to reach all the way to the Comment section of the Guardian. And on the way to Norwich I read Michael Fish’s spirited defence of the Met Office, currently under fire from all sections of the media for apparently wrongly predicting both a barbeque summer and a mild winter. I am absolutely with Michael and the Met office on this one. Because they are based out in Exeter, the Met Office use the SMC for most of their science-related press briefings and I have sat through their summer and winter forecasting ones for several years now. Despite what appears in the headlines the next day these briefings often end up as mini seminars on communicating scientific uncertainty, the limits of short-term and long-term forecasting and current state of development of computer modelling. One of the briefings that stands out was one to mark the 20th anniversary of the Great Storm of 1987. Lewis Smith, then environment reporter at the Times, supposedly spoke for all the journalists when he said, "All any of us need to know is what day and what time the next one is coming". The good humoured Met Office scientists laughed and then punished Lewis with a painstaking explanation as to why science cannot deliver such certainty. Now, I’m a grown up and I accept that none of that nuance and uncertainty and caution makes the next day’s headlines – but I do think it’s a bit rich for the media who ignore all the stuff about uncertainty to attack the Met Office for getting it all wrong. Maybe the Met Office press officers will think twice about catchy sound-bites in future (though even here it seems a bit mean that scientists stand accused of failing to communicate in soundbites and then lambasted when they do!) but I think the media should come clean and admit that no-one would have booked a holiday in Skegness based entirely on the balanced, nuanced, cautious scientists that I heard in the SMC – the journalists did their bit too!

In praise of…Tom Sheldon
And talking of great articles in the Guardian, I hope some of you spotted my colleague Tom Sheldon's brilliant response to Simon Jenkins’ latest rant about the global conspiracy to sell us swine flu vaccines. I normally love Simon Jenkins, especially when he's writing about the UK’s foreign adventures, but when you really know what he’s talking about you realize just how lazy you can be when you’re a columnist. In fact when I die I want to come back as one – then I can write anything I like irrespective of whether it’s true and the more people I annoy the more chance of keeping my column. Anyway – thanks to Tom he didn’t get away with it entirely, and judging by the number of emails we've had praising Tom’s piece, he was talking for a lot more people than Mr Jenkins was.

Fiona discusses science and politics on Radio 4's Leading Edge

The Home Secretary publically demanded and received an apology from Professor David Nutt, Chair of the independent Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, for saying what he believes about the relative risks of ecstasy and horse riding. A few days later Professor Adrian Smith, who has recently moved from academia into government, was also forced to apologise to Secretary of State John Denham for saying what he believes, in a speech about the poor quality of science exams. Unlike Nutt, Smith is now a paid up civil servant as the Director General of Science and Research at the Department for Innovation Universities and Skills and as such not free to speak his mind. However, like Nutt, he was appointed to his post because of a long and distinguished career as a mathematician and academic. What they also have in common is that these retractions were not for racist gaffes or plunging the country into financial chaos – they are apologies demanded by government quite simply because what these experts believe conflicts with government policy.

This is a worrying trend and one that anyone interested in evidence based policy should care about. Surely the whole point of appointing leading scientists to advise or join the government is to access their expertise not stifle it. In her very public castigation of David Nutt Jacqui Smith insisted that his comments (published in a peer reviewed academic journal) were incompatible with his role as an adviser to government. But this is crazy – are scientists to stop publishing in their own field because they are chairing one committee advising government?

This is not to argue that government must always follow the advice of its scientific advisers. Politicians rightly base their decisions on many factors and I have no doubt that when rejecting the ACMD’s advice on the grading of cannabis and ecstasy the Home Secretary had to measure the strong views of police chiefs and the public against the recommendations of her own advisers. I have no objection to that – it’s called democracy and we have the option of voting Jacqui out if we don’t like her decisions. However that does not and should not translate into stopping us hearing what these scientists have to say in the first place.

As someone who cares passionately about the quality of public debate on science what worries me most is that society may lose out on the views and expertise of some of the UK’s leading academics on some of the most important issues of our time. Adrian Smith has promised not to repeat his concerns about the state of science education and it’s hard to see how David Nutt can keep hold of his job if he repeats his comments about the relative risks of ecstasy. At his valedictory lecture the wonderful former Chief Scientific Adviser and acclaimed chemist Professor Sir David King reflected on the trouble he got in with ministers after saying in the US that climate change was a bigger threat than terrorism. His message to all the Scientific Advisers brought in to work for government was to think long and hard before making statements publically that might undermine government policy

Ever since Galileo, scientists have been testing established theories and challenging orthodoxies. A grown up, self confident government would have the courage to let our modern day Galileos do just that...from both inside and outside government. And guess what: we might even get more grown up and informed debates!


Broadcast on Leading Edge, BBC Radio 4, Thursday 5 March 2009

Where should politicians get their scientific advice?

Where should politicians get their scientific advice? Anywhere except the headlines!

God knows how, but I have managed to reach my 40s without ever having attended a party conference. However last year I managed to make it to Bournemouth to the Labour Party Conference after being asked by the Social Market Foundation (SMF) and the Food Standards Agency (FSA) to speak at their fringe meeting on how governments get their scientific advice. I did protest that I was the wrong person for the panel, but they were adamant that they wanted at least one person to address the role for the media in this area - this is what I said:

Well I’m the one person on this panel not qualified to talk about how the Government gets its advice on science so I shall restrict myself to saying this – wherever they do get it, they should NOT be getting it from the media.

In my five years at the Science Media Centre (SMC) I have organised hundreds of media briefings on complex and often controversial new science. I think the UK has some of the best science and health reporters in the world and almost all the coverage is accurate BUT at the same time as being accurate it almost always partial, simplified, de-nuanced, and ever so slightly exaggerated and as a result can be misleading - and I suspect that most journalists would be the first to acknowledge that.

A topical example of why politicians should not take their science from the media comes in the coverage of the recent FSA/University of Southampton study on the behavioural effects of artificial additives in food. We were getting calls from journalists reporting on this study, so I contacted several leading nutritionists and toxicologists to ask for their opinions. They all came back with strikingly similar answers:

1. It’s a good study but it does not give us definitive answers

2. It doesn’t say which additives are responsible for the effects or make a distinction whether the responsibility lay with the additives or with preservatives

3. The size of the effect was small – with an increase in hyperactivity of less than a tenth of that seen with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)

4. It shows an association – but does not prove a direct cause and effect

5. This hypothesis needs further investigation

So that’s what experts thought. Now let’s look at what headline writers thought:

New Link Between E Numbers And Hyperactivity (The Independent)

E numbers 'link' to manic kids (Daily Mirror)

Food Additives Make Children Behave Badly (The Times)

Parents warned over food additives (Daily Mail)

Now I am not even criticizing the media here, because there was enough in this study to give them these kind of headlines. But what I am saying is that no self respecting politician should base policy on the media coverage of this science. I gather Gordon Brown came out that day to say he favours the removal of these additives. If Brown favours a ban on taste grounds, or moral grounds or democratic grounds then that’s fine by me. However the timing of his comments suggests to me that his view is based on rather misleading media reports of this research and that, I would say, is a long way away from evidence-based policy.

There is other worrying evidence that politicians are too often basing their policies on the media reports rather than the actual science. On the question of biomedical research on human-animal hybrid embryos, it is widely believed that ministers proposal to ban this research last December was heavily influenced by 'Frankenbunny' headlines and pictures of humans with cows heads. Subsequently, when the scientists came out fighting and generated what I think were the 'right' kind of headlines, the Government relented and it now looks like the research will be allowed to continue. As my friend, Professor Chris Shaw, said "Scientists-1; Scaremongers–0". But my question is, why the Government considers bans or green lights on such hugely important areas of research on the basis of news headlines?

A couple of years ago, a group of conservationists from the University of Oxford had a paper published in the journal Nature which was a fascinating deconstruction of a news story 'gone wrong'. They discovered that because of the misunderstanding of a scientific term – 'committed to extinction' (which apparently means something very different to 'will be extinct'), the entire media ran a grossly inaccurate story about a million species being wiped out by climate change. But what really shocked the scientists was that politicians had repeated the inaccurate figures – Margot Wallström had raised it in the EU and Margaret Beckett in the House of Commons. You could say that the scientists' idea that Beckett would spend hours poring over impenetrable language in the original paper just reveals their naivety – but I suspect the public too would rather like to think that when politicians cite a scientific study in Parliament that they are citing it accurately and not repeating sensationalised headlines.

So while I spend my working life persuading more scientists to engage with the media and passionately believe that scientists ignore the media at their peril, the more I see the disjuncture between the detailed research and the story, the more I want to encourage both the public and the policy makers to take a closer look. The news media does many great things for science: getting us talking about science, raising the alarm, setting the agenda, offering us fresh hopes of new solutions. It is, and is likely to remain, a poor place for politicians to get their scientific advice.