There has been much discussion in science circles – both in
New Zealand and internationally
– around the line between science advice (which is described as neutral or objective)
and science advocacy (which is described as subjective).
While there are clear protections for the subjective advocacy
role of university-based scientists in New Zealand, via the definition of a
University in the Education Act (1989) which requires a university to “accept a
role as critic and conscience of society,”[1]
the roles and responsibilities of scientists in other kinds of institutions are
increasingly being questioned.
What colours this conversation is a number of salient facts:
1. The context of the words advice and advocacy is present
but unstated. This context is a framework in which advice has the connotations
of objectivity and fact, whereas advocacy has the connotative meanings of subjectivity
and opinion. This framework is linked to the Cartesian
‘Order of Things’ – an ingrained and unconscious way of dividing the world
into either/or: object/subject, reason/passion, male/female, public sphere/private
sphere … advice/advocacy.
2. The re-emergence of this conversation is happening at a
time that the research community in New Zealand is grappling with new ethical
and moral issues – especially pertaining to “Big Data”. The New Zealand Data
Futures Forum has been set up, in large part, to start the process of thinking
about questions like “what will be the social contract for a data-driven future
in New Zealand?” “When do your interests in privacy outweigh other people’s
interest or the collective interest?”[2]
3. An increasing sense within the New Zealand science system
that ‘something is not right.’
The National Science Challenges, in particular, have led to
a lot of commentary on the opaque nature of the processes used.
So where do these salient facts lead us? Those with the
political/public power – the Prime Minister’s Science Advisor, for example, use
language to differentiate between different kinds of public statements by
scientists that is heavily weighted in favour of an assumption of reason,
objectivity, and fact. In downplaying both the subjectivity of science and the subjectivity
of scientists, this constructs an easy out for anyone who wishes to
ignore or dismiss the advice of a scientist. Always going on about climate
change? You’re not providing advice, that’s advocacy.
As Shaun Hendy suggested on twitter Wednesday night: there
is an important distinction between value-free science, and value-free
scientists.
While I know many scientists would argue that the former is
possible, the latter – scientists without subjective values and ways of
understanding and viewing the world – well, it’s a) not possible, and b) the
idea that it might be, that science operates within its own code, separate from
the world within which it works – let me show you where that leads.
I can offer up Oppenheimer,
surveying the works his hands had made.
There’s Henrietta Lacks, whose immortal
life should be compulsory reading for any young scientist. This is not just history - only last year, scientists sequenced and then released the sequencing of the genome of the HeLa cells.
As Rebecca Skloot states in her New York Times article about the incident: "the publication of the HeLa genome without consent isn't an example of a few researchers making a mistake. The whole system allowed it. Everyone involved followed standard practices. They presented their research at conference and in a peer-reviewed journal. No-one raised questions about consent."
Science is defined, by that venerable friend of mine, the OED, as "the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment." That intellectual and practical activity is undertaken, however, by people, whose brains, science tells us, operate within a context of unconscious bias.
Advice, advocacy - both science and the people who conduct it are more complicated than that. Ernest Rutherford had to be persuaded to serve as the first president of the Academic Assistance Council- he wasn't initially convinced that it was the role of scientists to band together to oppose fascism and provide support to fellow scientists whose academic freedom was being threatened by the Nazi regime.
“To defend what they believed were fundamental principles of academic freedom, British scientists set out to help their colleagues escape to Britain and other countries in the West. Their programme soon enlisted scholars of very different political persuasions, who came together to act in concert and to make the public more aware of the fascist threat to human rights.”[3]
But in 1936, in a letter that was published simultaneously in Science, Nature, and the British Medical Journal he stated:
"[we are] now convinced that there is need for a permanent body to assist scholars who are victims of political and religious persecutions. The devastation of the German universities still continues; not only university teachers of Jewish descent, but many others who are regarded as 'politically unreliable' are being prevented from making their contribution to the common cause of scholarship."
Looking at who was helped, I'm glad that William Beveridge persuaded Rutherford that it was the role of the most well-known and eminent scientist in Britain to speak out.
Advice or advocacy? Or Rutherford's common cause of scholarship?
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