A chief scientific adviser faces the unenviable task of having to strike a fine balance between “being challenging and being cooperative”, according to Sir Ian Boyd, who held the role in the UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs between 2012 and 2019.
“You need to be around the table to have any influence, but you won’t get invited unless you are a trusted participant,” said the zoologist, now Bishop Wardlaw professor of biology at the University of St Andrews and chair of the UK Research Integrity Office.
Although he described the position as “the best job I ever had, because I genuinely felt I was doing something useful”, his new book – Science and Politics – makes very clear that challenges and frustrations are par for the course.
He recalls having to warn Cabinet ministers about “the folly of creating policies which tried to defy the laws of thermodynamics” and the horror on the face of one when he “tried explaining something in theoretical terms”. Research reports were commissioned as “a tactical way of buying off criticism” – and then left unread. There were even times when Sir Ian’s job “felt a bit like being an acute trauma physician at an asylum for people who self-harm”.
The central issue, he told Times Higher Education, is “the intractability of the system. Government isn’t really in control of itself a lot of the time. The beast just keeps on rolling on. And it tends to channel people into its own way of doing things.”
As an example of why it is so difficult for scientists to influence governments to act rationally, he cited the case of bovine tuberculosis. As the name suggests, he explained, “it is a disease of cattle, and cattle are bred, husbanded, moved, traded, looked after by people”. (Science and Politics calls it “a social disease, like a sexually transmitted disease is a social disease, spread as a result of human behavioural choices”.) Yet the influence of a powerful farming lobby, Sir Ian continued, meant that it was “misdefined as an epidemiological problem”.
Rather than getting farmers to change their practices, much government time and effort was spent on the marginal “displacement activity” of culling badgers, so as to “keep an industry going which is probably not fit for purpose anyway, because it’s very environmentally damaging and some of its products are not very good for us”. At the same time, there were significant opportunity costs as ministers failed to tackle issues such as air quality, which were killing far more people.
So how can scientists try to make the system slightly less dysfunctional? One of their crucial roles, Sir Ian said, was to get politicians to think beyond short-term fixes and dare to address the underlying problems. It was easy to waste time tinkering with methods to manage fish populations, when the trends are “being driven by climate change and we need to address that”.
In other cases, what was required was “policies to reduce demand for basic resources. You are never going to deal with waste problems unless you reduce the amount of material which is going into the economy. That’s pointing the way to very different kinds of policy structure than those we have at the moment, which are designed to drive consumerism up and up and up forever.”
Another useful approach was to try to make government decision-making itself more “experimental” and scientific.
During the pandemic, Sir Ian added, “we started in a position of very high uncertainty. We didn’t know how the virus was transmitted between people. As one collects information and gets more and more knowledge, one is able to refine policies associated with managing a disease like Covid-19. We were iteratively working towards a better and better solution.” He would now like to see such “adaptive policy testing” applied “much more explicitly to many if not all policy areas”.
What advice would Sir Ian now give to scientists brought into government like him to offer guidance?
“Make sure you remain rational but sceptical throughout,” he responded. “Pick the battles you think you can win and, however important they seem, don’t spend too much time on those you can’t.”
He also urged scientists to be far more transparent about whether they were seeking to promote public or private goods. With genetically modified foods, he pointed out, “it was not at all clear what was motivating scientists: creating nutritious food for more people or selling their ideas to big companies so they could make a lot of money. People did not fundamentally trust what the scientific community was saying.”
