Response to the Failure of Science

Bonnie P. at Ethicurian wrote a great post on a set of new articles which take to task the conduct of academic science and the ways in which it has become intertwined with the interests of companies such as Monsanto, ADM, etc. It’s an important topic and I’m glad Ethicurian, which is one of my favorite blogs, is tackling this issue. However I have a few issues with the logic of the argument particularly the way in which science, as a collective endeavor, is connected to democratic governance and society in both the original articles and Bonnie’s commentary. I wrote a response over at Ethicurian but I thought I would replicate it here:

Hello Bonnie, Thanks for posting this summary and the links to the papers. I’ve taken a quick glance at both articles and I just wanted to offer a few comments and a few additional reading suggestions.

 

First, I agree with calls for a massive change in the way that research on transgenic organisms is conducted and regulated, particularly when it comes to food and fiber crops. The current model is not working well. At the same time there is a lot about the way that Lotter frames his argument and how you reproduce it that I feel is problematic. Let me explain.

 

First is the call for a return to a type of science ruled by Mertonian principles. This sounds great. Science as objective. Science as responsive to `society’, particularly a democratic one, etc. However, this is a pipe dream. Not because we’ve gone so far that we can’t go back, but because Merton was putting for an abstract set of principles that never really were very accurate in the first place. 

 

Second, Lotter claims that many countries have modeled their regulatory approach to GMOs and transgenics after the US. Which countries? Shelia Jasanoff has an excellent book, Designs on Nature, which details how the emergence of GMOs in the 1980s and 1990s was dealt with in the US, Germany and the UK. While she concedes that effort have been made to harmonize regulatory frameworks each of the three countries framed the issues around GMOs very differently with science being evaluated in very different ways. In fact the precautionary principle in European science policy pre-dates mad-cow, but only barely (it was an event which settled some debates over various options).

 

I find it interesting that on the one hand Lotter, and by proxy you, declare that the science apparatus is broken with corruption and other ills plaguing the emerging sphere of academic capitalism, yet you tout Lotter’s academic credentials. I’m not necessarily contesting either of these two claims. Yes, academic science is highly conditioned by funding streams, publication protocols, and a whole lot of other “social” factors that seemingly have no place in Merton’s framework. Yet, as you seem to suggest Lotter is `qualified’ to speak on these issues because he went through the same hoops to get credentialed (although unfortunately this has not led to the tenure track for him). 

 

This reminds me a lot of the debate that circulated following the McWilliams op-ed a few months back. Science was questioned for its ties to Big Pork but this time McWilliams was critiqued for being a PhD but in the wrong discipline, history. Comments were made that as a historian how was he `qualified’ to talk about science. In both cases we have claims being made about what constitutes appropriate expertise in judging science. Is the problem with GMOs that the science is bad or that the science has been tied into a system of funding and IP law that almost necessarily leads to outcomes that `we’ don’t like. It could be both, but it could also be that the issue is not with the science per se, but with the culture that surounds the evaluation of science. I would argue that as long as we make arguments where we take certain types of academic endeavors to task (genetic science here, history in the McWilliams case) while propping up other types of science we aren’t going to make a lot of progress in terms of devising cultural and political framework to adequately deal with a world that now offers the possibility to intervene in life at previously unknown levels. I’m not sure what adequate is in this case, but it is just as important as anything else.

 

I should confess that I myself am a graduate student (in social geography) at a university that has had as much to do with big ag as any in this country (we have a library lecture hall called the Monsanto Lecture Hall, woohoo!). But I think that this gives me a slightly different perspective on these debates. On the one hand I feel that academic training is incredibly limited and thus we are 100% justified in saying that certain people are more or less qualified to speak on particular topics. But I’m also wary of approaches which prop up certain types of expertise over others depending on the circumstances. In other words, the letters PhD don’t mean that you are somehow expert in all things. Nor do they mean that your expertise in a particular area means you are somehow the person to be most qualified to make a decision. Appeals to Mertonian ideals actually reinforce a model of science and policy that is highly technocratic and thus authoritarian in many ways. We need to recognize that ultimately knowledge is a collective endeavor constituted by people acting in ways that are contingent, situated and uncertain. That we’ve reached a point where science is being uniquely harnessed to serve particular interests is less a failure of science or a breakdown in scientific norms than it is a failure of the collective project of generating knowledge which falls on the shoulders of policy makers, business people, media, and everyone else that constitutes our society. And this includes activists who offer highly specific representations of the problem and the solution in order to advance their own agendas and to shift the framing of the debate. So to conclude I agree with you that we need to take some responsibility to learn about what is going on, but we can’t appeal to nostalgia about life pre-GMO to get that to happen. Pandora’s box is open and we need to rethink the problem of governing in a world with transgenic potentialities.

I just realized that I never actually offered my reading suggestions. Here are only a few: