20110530_GN

Source: The Guardian

URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/audio/2011/may/30/science-weekly-podcast-sir-paul-nurse

Date: 30/05/2011

Event: Alok Jha interviews Sir Paul Nurse on FOI

People:

• Alok Jha: Science and environment correspondent at the Guardian
• Sir Paul Nurse: Geneticist and President of the Royal Society

Alok Jha: On the show this week -

Paul Nurse : Freedom of Information is good if it generates information that's been kept secret, but it really isn't good if it's going to disrupt science and scientists.

Alok Jha: The President of the Royal Society, Sir Paul Nurse, launches a staunch defence of scientists. He tells us why Freedom of Information laws are causing havoc in some fields of research.

[Alok Jha then mentions other items.]

Alok Jha: Now a normal morning in the office, for me, involves wading through e-mails, queuing for coffee and watching small mountains of paper on my desk shift ever more precariously towards complete collapse. But last Wednesday, I was doing all that when I bumped into this man.

Paul Nurse: My name is Paul Nurse, I’m a biological researcher who works in cell biology and genetics with a particular interest in cancer.

Alok Jha: Of course, important people do come and visit me all the time, but Sir Paul is especially important, for a fan of science like me.

Paul Nurse: I have three jobs; I’m still an active research scientist myself, running a laboratory. I'm setting up a new research institute in central London called the Francis Crick Institute after one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA. That’s going to be located next to St Pancras Station behind the British Library, and I’m also president of the Royal Society, which is the UK’s national academy of science.

Alok Jha: Oh, and by the way, he’s also won a Nobel Prize. Given that he’d wandered in, I managed to lure Sir Paul into one of our studios here at the Guardian and ask him about some of the things dearest to his heart. I started off with transparency and trust in science. The Royal Society has recently launched a new investigation into some of these questions. So I asked Sir Paul why openness was back on the agenda.

Paul Nurse: This is a really important issue. We’re calling it science as a public enterprise, because science interacts a lot, of course, with society and the public, and we have to, in this changing environment of how we communicate, with web-based methods, for example, and much more data being available across the world, we have to think of the best way we can manage that, so that scientists themselves can get access to data between themselves in the most effective way, and that scientists can also interact with the scientifically literate public, and for that matter the public generally. So it’s a question of communication, of openness with data, and how we can best deal with the changing ways of communication.

Alok Jha: So when that doesn't happen properly, and it hasn't happened properly in many significant examples in the past decade, obviously there can be implications for society. There are things like the MMR vaccine debâcle, there’s been GM crops, there’s been a better result with stem cells when scientists actually worked with politicians to get decent legislation. Let’s talk a bit about Climategate. It’s something that many of our listeners will have heard of, the situation where climate sceptics - by that which I mean people who don’t think that anthropogenic climate change is actually happening - were hassling scientists at the University of East Anglia, and probably everyone knows what happened next, but is this a problem? There are laws to make scientists more open, perhaps in that case they weren’t as open as they could have been - what’s your reading of that situation? Were the scientists to blame for being secretive? Were there other factors at play?

Paul Nurse: Well, I think that science should be as open as possible. We have to have a culture where that is seen as very important. And quite often I think that is the case. I think a really good exemplary example is, has been, over genomes, the human genome and other genomes, where the publicly obtained data was put on the public databases very very quickly, and access was open, and that worked very well. I do think that the climate scientists could learn something from that. I think they weren’t used to intense public interest in their data, and so they weren’t simply, they didn’t have a culture to think about it, and I think part of the problem of UEA was that they were a little too secretive, they didn’t release the data quickly enough.

But having said that, I think a much more significant problem is the potential to use mechanisms such as the Freedom of Information as an aggressive tool, and in the conversations I've had - I’m not a climate scientist myself but in the conversations I’ve had with those working there at the coalface - is that that is being used in exactly that way. There are many ways in which those who would like to upset the process or disturb people or make them feel uncomfortable - that the FOI - Freedom of Information - can be used in an aggressive way, for example making repeated requests for lots and lots of information that may be of actually very limited use, or maybe for drafts of papers that led up to final submissions. I’m hearing all sorts of things that I think we need to try and get to the bottom of. Because the Freedom of Information is good if it’s being used to generate information that’s being kept secret, but it really isn’t good if it’s going to disrupt science and scientists, and perhaps even worse, intimidate them, and I think there’s a real risk and possibility of that.

Alok Jha: I mean, there’s two ways to solve this, I guess. One is to employ more administrators at universities to deal with these sorts of things and help scientists deal with the number of requests and you just have to swallow it as a part of democracy; or you tweak Freedom of Information legislation to suggest anything that looks like harrassment should be stopped. Where do you sit in that spectrum?

Paul Nurse: Well, I’m certainly not an expert in this area and I’m hoping this study that we’re looking at will give illumination on that. I think I would probably look more at tweaking it so that we can ensure that these requests are legitimate rather than simply hiring more bureaucrats and administrators. My starting position is always to try and avoid that. So I think it would be better to tweak the FOI so that it would work effectively as to what it’s meant to do, which is not to be an aggressive act, but simply to get hold of information, and see whether we can make progress there.

Alok Jha: Now public engagement, of course, is also demonstrated by people - scientists - getting more into public life, being on television, in newspapers, talking about their work at festivals and things, and lots of this happens, of course. You obviously were on a Horizon documentary recently, talking about Climategate, amongst other things. This is not the kind of thing a normal President of the Royal Society does. What, sort of, drove you to do it?

Paul Nurse: Well, my predecessor Martin Rees was actually pretty strong on public communication, an excellent communicator. I'm not sure he was so keen on television and radio, and I'm sort of happy with both, but I think we do have a tradition of communication. Perhaps you're referring more to the fact that this was very much a sort of policy issue.

Alok Jha: A policy issue, and it had things to say to scientists as well as government, about why this is important.

Paul Nurse: And I think that is important, because, you know, we, science and scientists, work in a society. And policy, both policy which goes from science and how it can help public policy, and for that matter, public policy that has an impact on how science is done, is really critical. Firstly, to have a healthy scientific endeavour, and secondly for that endeavour to properly improve society, drive economic growth, improve health, all those issues are in the public policy arena. So we scientists, and for that matter the whole of society, has got to, sort of, work out a way of how we can manage these very, often very complicated arguments about what is a particular scientific outcome, what should we believe, how would it have impact on policy, and what is the evidence for and against. And all of these are, I would put it, strongly saying, are key for an effective democracy. And if we don't get it right, then our democracy will suffer, because we're increasing the influence by scientific issues, everything around us, I mean, here we're doing a recording, and everything we're talking to has come out of science. So we do need to do this well, and given that science is complicated, it's actually quite complicated to do it well. So, as President of the Royal Society, I see it as a responsibility to play whatever small amount I can to try and improve that debate.

Alok Jha: How do you go around the, sort of, apathy, or maybe even horror, that some senior scientists feel, when they see their, sort of, post docs or members of their lab on TV, or writing newspaper articles, or doing things that are not slavishly, you know, dripping things into test tubes or checking mathematical models, because that still exists.

Paul Nurse: Well, I think there is a need for some cultural shift there. I can sum up my position in the phrase: we scientists have got to learn - earn our licence to operate. And that's part of what we have to do, because the public funds us, generously, and they expect some societal benefit, and we have to argue our case for society. It's my view that every person trained to be a scientist at senior level - graduate student and post doc - should be aware of this and should be encouraged if they have some flair for it, which only some will. But if they have some flair for it, to actually get engaged with that, I think their senior colleagues should be helping them and encouraging them in doing that. I think the problem we have, as scientists, is that when we go on the media, we think we're talking to other scientists, and so if you don't get every subtlety and every condition and every other possibility that could be perhaps operating, you've failed. And of course you're not talking to other scientists at all, you talk to them in another medium altogether, you talk through a scientific publication, you can have all the caveats you like, you can make the arguments you like. When you are there in the mass media, either in the broadsheets or the radio or television, you're talking to the public. And I think sometimes, some scientists don't fully appreciate that, and when they hear a scientist who's a good communicator, they think: well, they didn't indicate that subtlety there, they didn't make that point there. And that isn't helpful. And I think some people have worried about their reputation, with getting on the media, and we just have to get over that. Actually, they're doing a great service for us, when we have great communicators of science who are scientists. We should really encourage them, because they're doing a great service to science and for society.

Alok Jha: Many thanks to Sir Paul Nurse, or Paul, as he likes to be called, for being so acquiescent in the face of a doe-eyed science journalist - me. And on the subject of openness. For more information on the work of the Royal Society in this area, go to their website royalsociety.org.