Friday, October 30, 2009
Scientific Advice? Keep your mouth shut, professor.
So, the government has sacked Professor David Nutt from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs for saying what he thinks - which is that the separation between illegal drugs like cannabis and (relatively) legal ones such as alcohol and tobacco was artificial, not based on actual differences in the risks they carry. He's previously compared the dangers of ecstasy to those of horse riding.
Home Secretary Alan Johnson wrote to him that "I cannot have public confusion between scientific advice and policy and have therefore lost confidence in your ability to advise me as chair of the ACMD."
Which is not entirely wrong. It's the job of scientific advisors to advise on the science, and the job of the government to make and apply policy. But really, whose fault is it that people are confused?
Take public health. Scientific advice on what we eat, drink and smoke is regularly handed down to us in a form the scientists might not recognise. How much alcohol is it safe to drink in pregnancy? None. or some. Depending on what they think will be most effective in getting us to change our wilful ways. When public health advice gets changed, it's rarely becuase research has made a breakthrough - not biomedical research, anyway. There may be new market research that means if they tell us not to do something at all, on average we'll do less of it and the NHS will hit more targets.
What's worse, even sociology and politics have to masquerade as science now. Matthew Taylor, formerly Tony Blair's advisor, now believes that choosing the next government for the UK should be a matter not of looking to the parties' policies or their visions for society, but of choosing the benevolent, interventionist authority that will give our poor, stressed, monkey-brains the best chance of recovery. Though elsewhere in his Times piece he calls on everyone to be more self-reliant, so I'm not sure why we need all this intervention in dysfunctional families, or training impetuous four-year-olds to hold out against the consumer marshmallow culture (if you think I'm rambling drunkenly, read the piece yourself here).
So, to return to the unfortunate Professor Nutt, it's right that scientific advisors should try to distinguish between the scientific evidence (cannabis is little worse than alcohol in terms of addiction, physical or social harm) and the politics (we can't be seen to encourage teenagers to go mad on reefers, especially when there's so many things their parents aren't allowed to do any more). But you can't blame the man for losing sight of that, when scientific advisors to other departments are so often wheeled out to tell the public what to do, while the supposed policy-makers waft their hands and say, "see? The science tells us so! It's the science! Quick, recycle your lightbulbs or the science will get you!"
Enough craven so-called politics. I'm off to the annual Battle of Ideas, to get more real political, scientific and cultural debate in two days than I get in the other 11 months of the year. If you're coming, hope to see you either at my Sunday event on Space, or on the Saturday evening balloon debate to decide, once and for all, which revolution has done the most to transform human life. Bet you it isn't the Blair revolution.
Home Secretary Alan Johnson wrote to him that "I cannot have public confusion between scientific advice and policy and have therefore lost confidence in your ability to advise me as chair of the ACMD."
Which is not entirely wrong. It's the job of scientific advisors to advise on the science, and the job of the government to make and apply policy. But really, whose fault is it that people are confused?
Take public health. Scientific advice on what we eat, drink and smoke is regularly handed down to us in a form the scientists might not recognise. How much alcohol is it safe to drink in pregnancy? None. or some. Depending on what they think will be most effective in getting us to change our wilful ways. When public health advice gets changed, it's rarely becuase research has made a breakthrough - not biomedical research, anyway. There may be new market research that means if they tell us not to do something at all, on average we'll do less of it and the NHS will hit more targets.
What's worse, even sociology and politics have to masquerade as science now. Matthew Taylor, formerly Tony Blair's advisor, now believes that choosing the next government for the UK should be a matter not of looking to the parties' policies or their visions for society, but of choosing the benevolent, interventionist authority that will give our poor, stressed, monkey-brains the best chance of recovery. Though elsewhere in his Times piece he calls on everyone to be more self-reliant, so I'm not sure why we need all this intervention in dysfunctional families, or training impetuous four-year-olds to hold out against the consumer marshmallow culture (if you think I'm rambling drunkenly, read the piece yourself here).
So, to return to the unfortunate Professor Nutt, it's right that scientific advisors should try to distinguish between the scientific evidence (cannabis is little worse than alcohol in terms of addiction, physical or social harm) and the politics (we can't be seen to encourage teenagers to go mad on reefers, especially when there's so many things their parents aren't allowed to do any more). But you can't blame the man for losing sight of that, when scientific advisors to other departments are so often wheeled out to tell the public what to do, while the supposed policy-makers waft their hands and say, "see? The science tells us so! It's the science! Quick, recycle your lightbulbs or the science will get you!"
Enough craven so-called politics. I'm off to the annual Battle of Ideas, to get more real political, scientific and cultural debate in two days than I get in the other 11 months of the year. If you're coming, hope to see you either at my Sunday event on Space, or on the Saturday evening balloon debate to decide, once and for all, which revolution has done the most to transform human life. Bet you it isn't the Blair revolution.
