A novel, five-month experiment in science and democracy has just ended in northern England. Since April, a group of twenty people from Halifax in west Yorkshire had been meeting regularly to discuss the social implications of nanotechnology. Drawn from all walks of life, they were selected at random to participate in the United Kingdoms first citizens jury on nanotechnology. Like a jury in a court, the NanoJury heard evidence from experts and debated the issues before reaching a verdict.
On 21 September, four of the jurors travelled to London to present their findings to a meeting of scientists, policymakers and journalists. Mohammed Alyas, a Halifax taxi-driver, explained the process. At first, when people said to us nano, it meant nothing. But when we got together, heard witnesses and had a chance to question them, we unpacked a lot of it.
The jurys conclusions were balanced and sensible. They made recommendations about the use of nanotechnologies in healthcare and renewable energy, where they saw potential benefits. But they also called for better labelling and safety testing of manufactured nanoparticles, which some scientists regard as potentially toxic. Above all, they wanted the public to have a greater say in the direction of research. Richard Jackson, a Halifax businessman and another of the jurors, explained why: I got the impression that even the scientists dont know where were going with this technology. This isnt necessarily a bad thing, but we should be having a public debate about some of these questions.
This article forms part of the Peer Power: Reinventing Accountability debate. AccountAbility, openDemocracys partner in this debate, will hold a major event, Accountability 21: Reinventing Accountability for the 21st Century on 3-5 October in London.
Also in this debate
Bill Thompson, The Democratic Republic of Cyberspace?
Simon Zadek, Reinventing Accountability for the 21st Century
John Lloyd, The responsibility of the harlot
Becky Hogge & Geoff Mulgan, Open source nation
Sarah Lindon, Talking Democratically
Ben Rogers, Courtroom shake-up
Chukwu-Emeka Chikezie, Accountability, Africa & her diaspora
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Paddling upstream
Such experiments reflect a wider shift in the culture and practice of science. After a decade punctuated by a series of controversies over BSE, genetically-modified (GM) crops, mobile phones and the MMR vaccine most scientists and engineers now recognise the need to become more open and accountable. There is particular interest in how public voices can be heard early, at a time when they can still influence scientific priorities. Indeed, as Demos argued in its 2004 report See-through Science (which I co-authored with Rebecca Willis), we may be at the start of a new phase in the evolution of modern debates over science, technology and society.
Phase 1: Public understanding of science (Pus)
The initial response of scientists to growing levels of public detachment and mistrust was to embark on a mission to inform. Attempts to gauge levels of public understanding date back to the early 1970s, when annual surveys carried out by the National Science Foundation in the United States regularly uncovered gaps in peoples knowledge of scientific facts. In the UK, Walter Bodmers influential 1985 report for the Royal Society, The Public Understanding of Science, argued that It is clearly a part of each scientists professional responsibility to promote the public understanding of science.
Phase 2: From deficit to dialogue
However, implicit in the language and methods of Pus was a flawed understanding of science, a flawed understanding of the public, and a flawed understanding of understanding. And it relied on a deficit model of the public, which assumed that if only people were told more about science, they would fall in line behind it.
In 2000, an influential House of Lords select committee report on Science and Society detected a new mood for dialogue. Out went Pus, which even the British governments then chief scientific adviser, Robert May, acknowledged was a rather backward-looking vision. In came the language of science and society and a fresh impetus towards accountability and engagement.
Phase 3: Upstream engagement
In the five years since, there has been a perceptible change. The science community has adopted a more conversational, less patronising tone in its dealings with the public if not always with enthusiasm, then at least with a recognition that GM and other high-profile controversies have made new forms of engagement a non-negotiable clause of its licence to operate.
Yet despite this progress, the link from public engagement back to the choices, priorities and everyday practices of science remains fuzzy and unclear. Dialogue tends to be restricted to particular questions, posed at particular stages in the cycle of research, development and exploitation. Possible risks are endlessly debated, while deeper questions about the values, visions, and vested interests that motivate scientific endeavour often remain unasked or unanswered. And as the GM case vividly demonstrates, when these larger issues force themselves onto the table, the public may discover that it is too late to alter the trajectories of a technology. Political, economic and organisational commitments may already be in place, narrowing the space for meaningful debate.
As a result, in the past two years, there has been a wave of interest in moving public engagement upstream to an earlier stage in processes of research and development. For example, the UK governments ten-year strategy for science and innovation, Science and innovation investment framework 2004-2014, includes a commitment to enable debate to take place upstream in the scientific and technological development process, and not downstream where technologies are waiting to be exploited but may be held back by public scepticism brought about through poor engagement and dialogue on issues of concern.
The next GM?
There is a sense that earlier controversies have created a window of opportunity, through which we can see more clearly how to reform and improve the governance of science and technology. Most immediately, policymakers and the science community are desperate to avoid nanotechnologies becoming the next GM. The wounds of that battle are still raw, and there is little appetite for a rerun.
Yet although upstream engagement has found favour in some parts of the scientific and policy community, the reality doesnt always live up to the rhetoric. It is sometimes portrayed as a way of addressing the impacts of technology be they health, social, environmental or ethical rather than an opportunity for the public to help shape the trajectory of technological development. The hope is that engagement can be used to head off controversy, no more than a prophylactic that we swallow early on and then stop worrying about. There is no recognition that the social intelligence which engagement generates might become outdated or irrelevant as technologies twist their way through the choices and commitments that make up the innovation process.
Scientism resurgent
Moreover, despite the progress in this agenda, some influential public voices still maintain that the public are too ignorant to contribute anything useful to scientific decision-making. One of the most vocal critics in Britain is the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Taverne, chair of the pressure group Sense about Science. In a letter published in Nature (November 2004), Taverne rejects the fashionable demand by a group of sociologists for more democratic science, including more upstream engagement of the public and its involvement in setting research priorities. He concludes: The fact is that science, like art, is not a democratic activity. You do not decide by referendum whether the Earth goes round the Sun.
But Taverne is setting up a straw man. Upstream engagement is not about members of the public standing over the shoulder of scientists in the laboratory, taking votes or holding referenda on what they should or should not be doing. It does not require the imposition of cumbersome bureaucratic structures on science, nor force lay people to be included on every research funding committee.
Questions about structures do need to be considered, but are a sideshow compared to the far more important, and exciting, challenge of building more reflective capacity into the practice of science. As well as bringing the public into new conversations with science, we need to bring out the public within the scientist by enabling scientists to reflect on the social and ethical dimensions of their work.
Until now, most attention has focused on the hardware of public engagement the focus groups and citizens juries that can give the public a voice in science policy and decision-making. In the next phase, this needs to be accompanied by a greater focus on the software the codes, values and norms that shape science, but which are far harder to access and change. Otherwise, the result will be little more than the scientific equivalent of corporate social responsibility (CSR): a well-meaning and busy field, propelled along by its own conferences and reports, but struggling to impinge on fundamental cultures and practices.
For example, it seems odd that most PhD scientists in many top universities receive compulsory courses on attracting venture capital, but are taught nothing about the history and philosophy of science, or the social impacts of technology. Similarly, the research assessment exercise (RAE), which ranks and determines funding to all university departments in the UK, creates no incentive for academic scientists to devote their time to public engagement or ethical reflection.
A growing number of scientists are attempting new forms of upstream public engagement. These are embryonic processes, and it is hard to predict what longer-term effects they might have. But like the NanoJury, such experiments provide a glimpse of a more accountable model of science and innovation. Developing a more authentic debate on these questions is in the best interests of science, and of an enlightened democracy.
