Occupy RCUK! Or why science funding matters

This first appeared on the Greenpeace EnergyDesk.

Compared to Canada and Australia, Brits might be forgiven for feeling a bit relaxed about the relatively pro-science stance our government seems to take (the odd “flat earth love-in” notwithstanding).

But beware politicians who come baring science scented rhetoric, or at least be ready to ask which bits of science they are so keen on, put to what ends. Because it’s not just the size of the science budget that matters, it’s what you do with it.

See, for example, yesterday’s report from Scientists for Global Responsibility; on how research is being directed towards developing aggressive weapons rather than talking the roots of conflict. Or the University of Manchester’s £64 million deal with BP last year, to explore “Advanced Materials.” Advanced materials which are especially useful for squeezing those hard-to-extract fossil fuels out the ground. Or the big smiles from Cameron and Cable at the Big Bang Fair last spring, as they ushered our nation’s youth towards careers with Shell and BAE Systems, Or when the Natural Environment Research Council, our official body for environmental science, decided to celebrate its ability to help “de-risk”  the activities of oil companies in the polar regions. Whose hopes for our collective future do those bits of science serve? Whose pockets?

Many important debates about how we might best apply scientific energies get obscured by arguments about the need for “pure” research. But put down the spherical physicist (imaginary ideal case that doesn’t exist in real world) because large chunks of science are already being directed. And so they should be.

The idea that at least some scientific work should be focused towards key social challenges informs how we organise science the world over, and has done for as long as we’ve been doing science on a large scale. This doesn’t mean we tell scientists what to find. It just means that, because we believe in science’s power as an engine for change, we think about which direction we point in in. The idea that science should be directed really isn’t – on a policy level – controversial at all. The question is who gets to direct it.

For example, the environmental sciences body NERC has, as its number one strategic goal, “enabling society to respond urgently to global climate change and the increasing pressures on natural resources”. Dealing with climate change is their moonshot; NERC are our people who keep an eye on these things. I for one am glad we invest in some brains on that issue.

Considering this expressed goal, we might be a bit taken aback by a call for expressions of interest to run a new Centre for Doctoral Training in Oil and Gas research which was quietly offered with a very short deadline a few weeks back. A cynic might argue they wanted it to slip out reasonably unnoticed over the summer. We might even possibly wonder if it was delayed so as not to coincide with the Balcolme protests. Because it is a bit suspicious.

Before you get too angry, there is also a DTC in wind funded through the EPSRC (engineering council). But this new centre does seem a bit odd, especially coming from NERC. It’d perhaps be simplistic to say they are using public money to run PhDs in fracking. But they are kind of using public money to do PhDs in fracking. When the BP materials centre was announced last year, the Nature news blog mused that that, as corporate labs wither, industries were looking to campuses to fill their research needs. Similarly, this new centre from NERC does feel a bit like someone, somewhere is taking the piss.

PhDs are important. That’s why research councils are strategising at the level of organising doctorial training centres. DTCs are controversial across academia for this reason – strategy is easily a code for cuts – and there was some fuss when NERC said they’d bring them in. PhDs are a key part of scientific labour in that they do a lot of the actual research, but they also train and make new scientists, so a centre for training like this is designed help encourage more work in an area and strengthen it as a long-term academic field. They are a way to plan the future of science, and with it a way to plan the future of our planet.

It would be understandable if other NERC funded scientists, not to mention the British public at large, asked questions. Who decided this was a good idea? As I’ve argued before, the governance of the research councils are far from open, and that’s a failing in terms of both doing good science and democratic accountability. It’ll be interesting to see the results of the Platform/ People and Planet work on the fossil fuel industry’s involvement in UK universities, but I suspect one of the most interesting results will be what they haven’t been able to find out about.

Unpicking the politics of science funding gets harder still as public research does more and more work with industry (see George Monbiot’s “monstrous proposal”). This issue of collaboration connects to another issue in the structure of science funding we should all be paying a lot more attention to; the move to collaborative funding where it is easier to access public funds if you can also bring some resources from industry. There are lots of advantages to this, but if over-applied, it limits us to research which serves the status quo rather than disrupts it.

Science is one of the places we can find hope when it comes to dealing with climate change. But it’s also, potentially a source of a lot of damage too. Protest camps at sites for possible exploration – as we saw at Balcombe – perhaps show activism moving further upstream than equivalent targets at power stations or airports. But a really forward-thinking protester might want to consider occupying Research Councils UK.

Vannevar Bush, science, the world’s brain and inventing the web

This was first published in the July edition of Popular Science UK. Subscribe to read August’s piece on health data. See their new rates for educational subs (for .sch or .ac email addresses).

The web’s origin story generally goes something like this: Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at CERN in the late 1990s, wanted to find a way to deal with increasing desire to share information across the intricate global network of scientists working on the project, and found a way to connect an earlier idea of his, for a hypertext database system, to the Internet.

There’s a lovely – though somewhat Romanticised – story of Berners-Lee being inspired the culture of the CERN canteen: All these clever people from all the world and different disciplines sitting together, exchanging their cleverness, the web was just a way of sharing that experience with everyone.

A bit of science funding PR often gets spun out of this. All that money on physics research at CERN? Don’t worry, because, aside from the fact that studying the universe is a fine aim for humanity in itself, we got the web out of it. OK. But we could have got the web from lots of scientists being brought together on another ambitious problem. And that’s where an earlier character in this origin story comes in: Vannevar Bush.

Bush is often credited in the history of the web in terms of his influence on the idea of hypertext via something called the Memex (more on this later). But he played a key role in creating the social context that CERN emerged from too, and I think he should get some of the credit for that too.

Vannevar Bush was an American engineer, inventor, public intellectual and, perhaps most importantly, administrator of mid 20^th century America. Born in 1890, after studying science at university he worked for General Electric for a few years before moving to MIT to do a PhD in electrical engineering. Work in industry, academia and the military followed, and he eventually became Vice President and Dean of engineering at MIT in 1938.

He’d been aware of a lack of connection between science and the military during World War One so, as the US entered World War Two, worked hard to set up official federal systems for more strategic coordination of scientific energies. He became director of the newly established Office of Scientific Research and Development in 1941, which included the initiation and administration of the Manhattan Project. The Manhattan Project is significant not just in terms of the outcome of the Atomic bomb, but the way it brought together a large number of scientists from around the world and a range of subjects, to work on a strategic goal with an enormous budget, left a mark on the way we subsequently organised science.

The Manhattan Project wasn’t unprecedented, but it was a step in a set of changes to the way we organised science which led up to much more peace-time orientated projects such as CERN. The Manhattan Project did not cause some singular radical change in the development of science, but arguably it did accelerate shifts that were already taking place. Big Science is not simply a 20^th century phenomenon any more than “scientists” only arrived in 1833 when William Whewell coined that term. Darwin’s correspondence (which you can read if you fancy getting lost down the rabbit hole of Victorian natural history) shows the degrees to which even seemingly “gentleman” individual science was highlight networked. Astronomy also offers case studies of multi-national networks of astronomers utilising large telescopes and in pay of industry and military stretching centuries. There’s a reason Brecht uses an astronomer to talk about the morality of 20^th century science in his play A Life of Galileo. But there was something about the particular scale of the Manhattan Project and subsequent work. A physicist in early 20^th C would know the handful of experts in their field, working directly with a few and corresponding with others, easily catching up with developments. In the early 21^st, and I have a physicist friend who uses Ctrl Alt F to locate his name on papers.

Not everyone loved this change. The term Big Science was popularised by Alvin Weinberg, writing in the journal Science in 1961, complaining it was somewhat of a corruption of what science should and can be for society: “We build our monuments in the name of scientific truth, they built theirs in the name of religious truth; we use our Big Science to add to our country’s prestige, they used their churches for their cities’ prestige” he mourned.

That “Memex” thing is also part of the tensions surrounding this shift in how we made and connected expertise. Writing in The Atlantic in 1945, Bush reflected on the sheer quantity of information he came across on any day, and the diversity of ways in which this information might link to one another. He felt the “growing mountain of research” quite acutely, and felt quite bogged down by all the multitude of findings of various specialised branches of research:

The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.

This is something many will identify with today. But it’s no surprise that someone coming out of Manhattan Project strategy felt it so acutely. As a way of dealing with this, Bush imagined a machine which allowed for the non-linear filing and retrieval of information. This is Bush’s idea:

[the reader] finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him. And his trails do not fade.

Recognise it? Ted Nelson, who coined the term hypertext, and the Wikimedia Foundation both credit this idea. HG Wells had a similar idea with the “World Brain” in the late 1930s, though you can maybe see Wells’ socialism driving a slightly different concept and arguably it’s Bush’s Memex which had the most resonance.

Vannevar Bush lived through and was shaped by big science, but he also helped bolster its rise through the key role he played in the way 20^th century science was run. We usually credit Tim Berners-Lee with the invention of the web. And so we should. But when people use the web as some sort of spin-off of the science done at CERN they are only telling half the story. If anything, the administration of science gave us the web, not science itself. We’d do well to recognise the impact the work such administrations have.

Disinvesting unis: Tip of the speedily-melting iceberg

A new form of climate change activism has been speedily flying through American Universities the last year. And it’s coming to Europe. It’s interesting partly just to see people caring about climate change again, but whether this fits your own political interests or not, it’s also because of the particular approach it takes – disinvestment – which suggests some new public interest in the way we plan and organise science.

Disinvestment is, quite simply, the opposite of investment. The campaign invites students to think about their universities as financial institutions – not just sites for learning, research or socialising – and ask questions about where their universities invest their large endowments. There is some history of this with respect to South Africa under apartheid and the tobacco industry, and focusing on pension funds rather than money held by universities, but this quantity of activity on fossil fuel disinvestment is reasonably new.

Seeded in universities, it has broadened to the financial clout of cities and religious institutions too, even (slightly embarrassingly) the endowments of green NGOs. Last July, American environmentalist Bill McKibben published a long, thorough and impassioned article in Rolling Stone entitled Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math outlining what was described as “three simple numbers that add up to global catastrophe”. This was followed by a Rolling Stone sponsored tour of campuses across the states entitled “Do the Math”.

The focus of the rhetoric has very much been the idea that this is all simply a matter of the logical application of a few numbers; the maths of how climate change is happening (scientific) and the maths of how it might be solved (economic). This is somewhat of an illusion, as the bulk of this work is politics. The tour might have featured “after-math” parties (yeah, really) but this was a space for local groups could organise, not a chance to get your squared paper out. The tour bus itself contained what McKibben calls, in a follow up Rolling Stone piece in February, “a bevy of progressive heroes” author Naomi Klein, indigenous activist Winona LaDuke, filmmaker Josh Fox, Hip Hop Caucus founder Lennox Yearwood. McKibben also argued that universities were the places to start such activity because they were where we found out about global warming, and that the contain communities who understand the maths. He’s forgetting that they are social spaces where, unusually people of different countries and different generations come together. That’s important for climate change, which is an issue with unusually large global and temporal reach.

When I was first told about plans to move this campaign to the Europe, I was sceptical it’d work. It’s not that people aren’t interested, just that our universities are just funded differently, without quite the same endowments. So I was impressed with the way the idea has been redeveloped and extended by People and Planet. They start with a sort of “Move your money” approach of demanding universities screen for and exclude the fossil fuel industry from their investment portfolio (or perhaps move “our” money, which is why the campaigns have traction). However, they go on to focus on the other forms of capital universities hold. There is the symbolic cultural and social capital such institutions can offer through honorary degrees or sponsorship of events and student societies. Perhaps most importantly is the way in which certain industries (not just energy) have been able to capture the energies of our scientists and engineers. So People and Planet are also asking UK higher education to work harder at offering students with more diverse careers advice, refocus research to climate solutions rather than fossil fuel research and, perhaps most importantly of all, demand more research funding for renewables.

They started with a protest for the opening of the University of Oxford’s “Shell Geoscience Laboratory” along with a letter in the Guardian from angry graduates (alumni being a useful form of political pressure as universities increasingly try to fundraise and market themselves through them).

This new Shell laboratory is just tip of the speedily-melting iceberg though, and whatever your own views on fossil fuels, this protest draws attention to the ways in which collaborations like this are commonplace. The People and Planet campaign invites us to at least notice such use of universities, and have a think about whether it’s pulling our public resources in the directions we want.

Last summer, BP announced it would invest £64 million to set up an International Centre for Advanced Materials (BP-ICAM) based at the University of Manchester. The Telegraph had a lovely headline with “BP invests in UK research to help it drill deeper” but Nature News was perhaps slightly more astutely on the money with their observation that as corporate research-and-development labs wither, many are turning to campuses to fill their research needs. Universities seem quite happy for their spaces to be used in such ways. Indeed, they are being encouraged to as our funding system is increasingly being pushed to favour matched funding (for example). This gets played as a mix of “but we need our limited funds to be topped up” and “collaboration is good” but it limits you to only asking questions that serve interests of those who have money.

Academics like to kick up a fuss about need to stand up for “blue skies” research in the face of corrupting directional research, but this is of the most pernicious red herrings in science policy. Because it’s good to direct bits of research – and we’ve been routinely doing it for years – the question is how and where.

As well as funding policies, there are corporate members of the research council peer review colleges (i.e. people who get to decided what research gets funded by public money). This is a good thing. BAE, Shell, Pfizer et al contain some great expertise worth tapping into. They also help the academy lift ideas out of itself a bit, stop it being too closed minded. But if we’re drawing on industry, there are other external experts we could draw on too. To put this in some context, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s peer review college (pdf) contains thirty members from BAE systems (in comparison, there are eighteen from the University of Sussex).

We should also remember softer influences, like the ability of larger companies to buy space at careers fairs (and this runs right down to the careers advice we give primary schoolchildren). There’s also the sponsorship of events for senior academics and policy makers and it’s increasingly common to find universities have devoted offices to corporate partnership (e.g. Imperial’s members and UCL’s).

Whatever your personal view on whether we should keep fossil fuels in the ground or not, we should welcome any greater interest in the politics and ethics of what we do with the resources held by our universities; their people, their ideas, their hard work, their money, their histories and social credibility.

If you believe that science and technology has power to change the world (I do) it’s worth keeping an eye on which particular visions of the future it’s structured by.

 

This was first published in the June edition of Popular Science UK. Subscribe to read the August edition’s piece on health data. See their new educational subs (for .sch or .ac email addresses).

How science works: follow the money

I’m mainly blogging at the Guardian at the moment. Today I posted a piece on the fossil fuel disinvestment campaign, which has been rolling through  US universities for a while.

In essence, disinvestment is the opposite of investment, inviting people to think about how their money’s being used when they’re not using it themselves. There’s a good Rolling Stone piece from last February if you want a catch-up on how the campaign has taken off in the US, or see the 350 website for more.

As I wrote on the Guardian piece, I suspect UK universities will take broader approach to the ways in which their campus might become “fossil free”, largely because they don’t tend to have such large endowments to invest.

The People and Planet site already has a reasonably impressive list of demands under simply “move their money” including changes in careers advice, a phase-out of fossil fuel research and to demand more research funding on renewables. Recent years have seen growing campaigns to “disarm” universities – e.g. Leeds – not only in terms of shares in arms manufactures, but careers fairs and the money they take for research, which is substantial, as funding from the oil industry can be too.

In some respects, this is less about universities disinvesting, and more the other way around. It’s about preventing particular industries from being able to profit from the resources universities hold; the people we train, the cultural authority we hold and, perhaps above all, the focus of the research we do.

I suspect we’ll see more of these campaigns in the future. In fact, the University of Oxford will see on Thursday. Its Earth Sciences department is launching a new partnership with Shell. Ed Davey, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, will be there. And activists are planning to meet him.

 

“I’m a scientist. I shall be my own Minister for Science”

Via a mate who’s just read the new Thatcher biography by Charles Moore. On Thatcher, scientific advice and “the weather”:

“Dr John Ashworth, the Chief Scientist, who worked within the Central Policy Review Staff, asked to see Mrs Thatcher shortly after she had arrived at No. 10. As he entered, the Prime Minister said: ‘Who are you?’ ‘I am your Chief  Scientist,’ Ashworth replied. ‘Oh,’ said Mrs Thatcher, ‘do I want one of those?’ He explained his work, mentioning that he was completing a report about the then almost unstudied subject of climate change. Mrs Thatcher stared at him: ‘Are you standing there and seriously telling me that my government should worry about the weather?’ She told Ashworth that she was not going to have a minister of science at all: ‘I’m a scientist. I shall be my own Minister for Science.'” (p426; CM’s source = interview with Ashworth).

“But… Mrs T quickly realized that… she needed experts” and Moore says in a footnote she was “much later… the first head of government to make a major speech on the subject of climate change”. So that is OK then.

Related: Margaret Thatcher, science advice and climate change (by me, earlier this month)

Troll Below? Science policy below the line.

Some streetart on a bridge in Dublin

I have an essay in James Wilsdon and Rob Doubleday’s collection: “Future directions for scientific advice in Whitehall” (downloadable for free). It’s an invitation for the various greats and goods of science policy to not only use social media to promote their ideas but to “go below the line” and listen to the public there too. I know such listening is problematic – I’m not about to try to rehearse all the problems here, they exist and are generally very specific to the people and cases involved – but that doesn’t mean you can’t try.

There’s a shorter version on our Guardian blog, or here’s a preview of the full thing:

We should ask what we want openness to mean online, what forms we want to invest in, and how this should be organised. There is a lot more to open science than simply open access. Indeed, a preoccupation with the latter as a solution to social ills may well be a way of avoiding dealing with the former. Further, how we choose to finance and manage forms of open access is far from straightforward. Whilst politicians, scientists, publishers and learned societies argue it out, the #icanhazpdf hashtag is gradually whittling away at current publishing models (used so people looking for paywalled papers can find those with institutional log-ins who are willing to be generous on their library’s behalf). Scientists may feel persecuted by activists, especially if they engage in debates over climate change, alternative medicine or animal rights. They may also feel that when work flows into ‘social media’, even more of their private lives are being taken over by work. Online interaction can be tiring.

A related issue is whether the public can be trusted with science in the open. One might, for example, feel pleased when the Science Media Centre manages to keep a story out of the press (as when I heard senior scientists cheer in the case of a story about GMO food last year). Alternatively, one could follow the lead of the Cancer Research UK news blog which accepts that stories they don’t agree with will get published, but uses the more open spaces of the web to put extra context out there, hoping those who care will find it. One recent piece of research argues that the ‘incivil’ tone of web comments can derail evidence-based public debate on science, technology and especially environmental and health issues. For all that I can personally relate to this (having uncomfortably found myself being incivil myself, as well as at the receiving end of incivility), such calls for polite behavior online leave me uneasy. Complaints about ‘tone’ are too easily used to quell dissent. Words like ‘troll’ can become a proxy for what is, at best, disagreement, and worst, class hatred.

It is now 18 years since Bruce Lewenstein suggested a ‘web model’ as an alternative to top-down ideas of science communication in his study of the cold fusion controversy. This networked view seems almost too obvious today, as gross a simplification as the deficit model. But it contains an important message that is increasingly hard to ignore: the simple messiness of scientific discourse. Although neater debate has its uses, especially in policymaking, that doesn’t mean we should aim to tidy it all up. This mess is how we build capacity for more coherent exchanges, build trust, learn and digest. It is also where people can show dissent and support for science, both of which are important. We should be wary of being too spooked by the incivility or apparent lack of expertise online. As science policy debate bleeds onto social media, we shouldn’t be scared to take a dip below the line, and take some time to look and listen. You never know what we might find.

For personal reasons – and partly to make a slightly tongue in cheek point – comments are closed for this entry.

Science policy and social media

ANNOUNCEMENT: I’m part of a new blog network at the Guardian, “Political Science“. I’ll keep this for more personal/ niche content though. My first post there considers the way the public (or forms of publicity) are used to help reform science in the All Trails campaign. It’s based on a short talk I gave at the STEPS conference at Sussex this week, the full text of which follows.

The Royal Institution is up for sale. There are many interesting things about the fuss this has caused. One of which is that Harry Kroto has taken to twitter. It seems like that’s what happens when scientists get angry these days.

Social media is increasingly playing a role in science policy campaigns: All Trials Registered, All Results Reported (or the more 140c friendly alltrails), the anti-anti-GM “Don’t Destroy Research” and Science is Vital being just a few notable examples.

It’s an interesting development which as scholars of the field we should look at in more detail. From a more normative point of view, we might also welcome it as a sign of a greater openness in lobbying around science; making it more scrutinizable, more accountable and possibly more able to learn from a broader, more diverse, set of perspectives. Still, there are questions to ask and criticisms to make. Just because there are small moments of openness doesn’t mean that the majority of power brokering in science is still, if not outright secret, rather esoteric. Openness can be rhetorically applied and we need to think about that. Moreover, hashtags have histories and hierarchies as much as anything else; there are cultures and contingencies to consider here, as any campaign located in a specific social context. (Arguably, one of the reasons we’ve seen it in the UK is the relatively grassroots structure of our sceptics movement, and the experience of Libel Reform is important too.) It’s also worth reflecting on the ways in which ideas of the public and publicity are being used here and how this is similar and different from the rhetorical use of, for example, public polling data or protests putting bodies out in the street.

It’s not exactly new. I dug out my notes for a talk I gave on the topic at 2010  Science Online London conference (read text version and comment thread on blogpost I wrote at the time). There had been a lot of social media activity around the election, largely coalescing around the twitter hashtag “scivote”. I stressed that, as a hashtag, offered a connection; a folksonomical collective and dynamic socially constructed way of classifying. It connected people to events, information, ideas, debates and, quite simply, other people. It let individuals develop knowledge and interest and fostered community. You weren’t just the one person in the lab who was feeling a bit grumpy about the government, you were part of something larger. You didn’t have to feel weird about being a bit political. Still, none these connections happened entirely online and we  have to remember how much of a role much less public work happens around these online campaigns. The Science is Vital campaign, for example, gradually gathered expertise and steam from a few tweets and blogpost, but it also built on the infrastructure, contacts, profile and expertise of the Campaign for Science and Engineering (amongst others). That’s not to say Science Is Vital had no impact, it arguably let the more traditional lobbyists express a constituency that cared about these issues. That’s powerful political rhetoric.

It’s striking that although many of the online science policy campaigns have a grassroots-y feel to the, they are promoting rather traditional top-down expressions of scientific expertise and reflecting, if not emphasizing preexisting power networks. In one of the various obits of the Rio +20 talks this summer, John Vidal claimed the end fossil fuel subsidies and save the Arctic campaigns were “eye-catching global bottom-up initiatives”. They weren’t.

(When someone says “bottom up” always ask “whose bottom?”)

These campaigns were more about enumerating the actors of public relations than diffusing political power. They expressed a public, they didn’t try to involve them. And I think that’s how we can the recent scientific community based campaigns too; they don’t seem to have any particular interest in finding new opinions, just show there are people who have the same opinion as them. They didn’t want new questions, just more people to sign up to their answers. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – we can have public campaigns as well as public debate – as long as we recognise what we are looking at.

That said, I think it’s fair to say that both Libel reform and Science is Vital picked up a lot of expertise along with the more passive clickativist support: Lawyers, lobbyists, designers, programmers. In that respect it’s a different from the slicker professionalised projects we’ve seen from environmental campaigners.

It also strikes me that All Trials is especially interesting because it’s about publicizing absence of evidence and saying a bit of the medical science is broken. It’s being open about problems, albeit in a rather tightly framed way. And I think there’s a lot of potential there. I’m just not sure I’ve seen it realised yet.

Big Pharma: Small Science?

I recently read a paper by some colleagues at SPRU on the publication patterns of the pharmaceutical industry. I thought I’d share a short write up of my notes. A version of the paper is here (pdf) or full citation:

• Rafols, Ismael, Hopkins, Michael M, Hoekman, Jarno, Siepel, Josh, O’Hare, Alice, Perianes-Rodríguez, Antonio and Nightingale, Paul (2012) Big pharma, little science? A bibliometric perspective on big pharma’s R&D decline. Technological Forecasting and Social Change.

You might be forgiven for thinking the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t publish research. It does. Quite a bit. “Big Pharma” (the world’s 15 largest firms) have around 10,000 publications. It’s still only about 4% of total publications in the field (and to put that 4% in some context, Big Pharma firms invested £46 billion per year in research and development between 2004-07, compared to the National Institute of Health’s £15.25b). But looking at some of the whats, whens and wheres of Big Pharma publishing can be interesting. They seem to be publishing around 9% less than they did 15 years ago, in slightly different areas, with evidence of different collaborations in ways which suggest they are a bit more of a follower than a leader when it comes to science. Although the issue is very complex, as the paper notes in its conclusion, is Big Pharma is not doing the research itself, will they be able to continue to be able to justify their large profits?

The researchers used Web of Science to download publications – “article” “letter” “note” “proceeding paper” and ”review” – from the largest 15 European and American pharmaceutical firms, amounting to a total of 160,841 records for the 1995-2009 period. Note: Here “European” meant they had an affiliation to at least one European Free Trade Association country (EU + Switzerland, Norway, Lichtenstein and Iceland). Though I’m personally taken by the idea of applying a Eurovision view of “European” in research policy data collection, I guess the politics of Israeli publishing might be a complicating factor. Also it’d just lead to really bad null points jokes in seminars. The data was then analysed with VantagePoint software, and they used Pajek and VOSviewer to create visualisations.

There are different motivations to publish in the drug discovery and drug development stages. In the discovery phase, publications can signal to investors but participating in the more traditional exchanges of “open science” (open in that they are published, even if there’s a paywall) also allows industrially based scientists access to the resources of the scientific community. In drug development, a degree of openness is often required due to the need for clinical evidence for the uptake of innovations. The authors argue that the evidence-based medicine paradigm has encouraged this (though some might argue not enough). They also suggest that scientific publications are sometimes written to diffuse information about the effectiveness and safety of pharmaceuticals; acting as a marketing tool, to win support in regulatory/ policy areas.

So, what’s Big Pharma publishing? More in rheumatology and ophthalmology (up 190% and 122% respectively), perhaps reflecting areas of increased therapeutic interest. Interestingly, also up was health policy and services (151%) reflecting greater role in fields closer to patient (or perhaps closer to the market) such as health services and clinical research. The industry’s shift away from agrichemicals and materials explains drop in plant (down 62%) and polymer science (down 71%). Chemistry, in comparison, was relaivly stable, but biomedicine was down 40% and cell biology down 46.5%. Put this data through visualization, and you get a pretty map of threads and bubbles lets you see a larger picture of a diversification of research interests. Also, the drop in biomed sciences can be seen in context of increase in peripheral areas related to new techniques (e.g. computation bio) and a marked shift towards disciplines more orientated to clinical applications. As the conclusion put it; we can see an apparent shift from bench to bedside.

There also seems to be some evidence of the organisational shifts many others have noted of Big Pharma in recent years. E.g. there’s a lot of talk of a shift to “team science” of collaboration, especially in biological sciences, medicine and neuroscience. This data suggests it’s even stronger in big pharma. However, interestingly it seems to be external partners which seem to be taking the intellectual lead: there’s a distinctive decrease in the number of big pharma first authors in collaborative publications (from 43% to 35%). The researchers conclude that the picture of Big Pharma their data presents is that of an intellectual follower, not leader.

We should be careful of drawing conclusions on this data as a simple proxy for what’s happen in Big Pharma. For example, there was no obvious sign of off-shoring of research to countries outside US and Europe (e.g. Singapore, India and China). However, the researchers suggest that due to division of labour in this particular collaborations and which part of that labor gets author credit, this is one of the areas where publication data underestimates actual activity. Also interestingly, although the oncology publishing increase is consistent with other data on pharmaceutical projects, there was increase in cardiovascular publishing despite decrease in number of projects. As Brian Balmer’s book on secrecy in science tells us, there are complex, often inter-mingling reasons for opening and closing scientific research. Similarly, there are a complex of reasons for publishing and not publishing. Still, it tells us something things and suggests others and if you’re interested it’s worth having a look at the full paper, including appendix.

Animal testing, activism around science, and brown dogs

Stuffed fox in Oxford Museum of Natural History. I don’t know how it died. 

My January column for Popular Science UK is now online. This one’s on the public debate about animals in research. 

I was interested in some debate surrounding some slightly dodgy reporting of a poll on animal testing. Except, considering the paucity of the debate on this topic – with many scientists arguably scared to speak about it – I really don’t think anyone can claim to have public opinion with them. It almost doesn’t matter how it’s spun. An Ipsos MORI poll on behalf of the Department of Business, Industry and Skills last October suggested two-thirds (66%) of UK adults support the use of animals in research as long as it is for medical research purposes. Except it also reported that 64% of the British public felt uninformed about science. I don’t think we’re doing a good enough job of building an informed debate here.

I was also interested to find that one of the recent polls asks about public attitudes to activism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the UK public seem most happy with handing out of leaflets (69%), organising petitions (68%) or writing letters (65%), but less comfortable with the idea of destroying/ damaging property (just 2%), “sending hate mail” (2%), using physical violence against those involved in animal research (1%) and “using terrorist methods e.g. car bombs, mail bombs” (1%). The cynic in me wonders if BIS asks these questions because they’d like to close down debate with stats to back up a view that activists do not speak for the public, but perhaps it’s useful to know.

There’s some interesting history to activism around animal testing. It’s not just people who are against it who violently take to the streets. If you’ve never heard about the “Brown Dog Affair”, it’s fascinating stuff. This started in February 1903, when UCL physiologist William Bayliss performed a dissection of a brown terrier in front of sixty or so medical students. Anti-vivisection activists condemned it as cruel and unlawful. Bayliss successfully sued for libel, but the anti-vivisectionists commissioned a small bronze statue of the dog as a memorial, unveiled in Battersea in 1906. Local medical students were angered at this, and their frequent attempts to deface the memorial led to a 24-hour police guard against what become known as the “anti-doggers”.

In December 1907, a thousand students – largely from London and Oxbridge medical and veterinary schools – marched through central London, clashing with a rather unlikely collaboration of suffragettes, trade unionists and police officers in what later became known as the “Brown Dog Riots”, many some brandishing effigies of the dog. In March 1910, fed up with dealing with this fuss, the local council removed the statue under cover of darkness. In 1985, the earlier skirmishes largely forgotten, a replacement was commissioned; a rather more placid looking statue (cuter, even), nestled in the park’s “Old English Garden” by the cricket pavilion, a shadow of its controversial ancestor.

Considering the lack of debate on the topic, sadly, that brown dog statue – stripped of much of his context, placidly hiding in Battersea Park – remains a good icon of where we are on this issue.

As ever, read the full piece on Popular Science UK’s archive page. And if you want to read February’s piece – on being able to admit fault in or about science, Margaret Thatcher, Mark Lynas and the overly honest methods hashtag – you’ll have to subscribe (or wait till next month).

Academic freedom: bullshit?

“They’ve got more choice”. Street art in Deptford, East London.

Freedom is one of those words – like fairness, science, truth, beauty – which is so complex and/ or relative in its application any straightforward articulation of it really should be avoided. And yet it is – like fairness, science, truth, beauty – all too often dimly bandied about as if it was universally discernible, if only we had the chance to see it.

Without getting lost in reams of social theory, what at first may look like freedom often masks intricate systems of control and the freedom of one often curtails that of others. We live in societies, on a finite planet, all subject to the laws of physics. The trick is keeping an eye on the uneven distribution of the various freedoms available.

So it was fun to hear the following at the SciFoo camp last weekend, in the context of discussing public accountability and science funding: “Scientists bristle at attacks on their academic freedom, but the whole idea of academic freedom is bullshit” (Chatham House rule, so I’m not free to let you know who said this, appropriately enough).

The freedom for scientists to do what they want is routinely curtailed through social norms within what is, let’s face it, a rather stuffy community as well as formal systems like peer review. Science doesn’t let itself be free, so why does it moan at others? Often this is for the best. If all scientists were free to do whatever they wanted all sorts of time would be wasted. It’s not so much the idea of scary Frankenstein-style uncontrollable monsters spinning out of labs everywhere I’m worried about as much as people pissing about trying to make perceptual motion machines. Science checks itself; quite right too.

To bring this back to science policy, seeing as scientists’ freedoms are so routinely curtailed, why not extend who gets control it, at least to include those who fund it? (i.e. the public for publicly funded research). There is a separate question about who is best placed to judge any particular aspect of control in science, but that is separate issue: some judges of some aspects of scientific work may well sit outside the scientific community.

Importantly, this doesn’t necessarily mean science would become even more controlled than it already is. Indeed, scientists who are annoyed by the various limitations placed upon them might find allies outside their community: PhD students fed up by working conditions, postdocs annoyed at lack of job security, junior lecturers who wished they had more time to do engagment work, etc. The involvement of the public in building a case for libel reform in the UK is a nice example (the limitation they are fighting doesn’t come from inside science, but the model is a good one).

Go on, call bullshit on the idea of academic freedom. You might even find it liberating.