Unfortunately, too little science now works that way. Scientists have to cover their bills and unless they are very wealthy they have to work for someone who will pay their wages. As soon as that happens there is a risk that objectivity gets lost.
The things that get studied are often chosen because they are convenient for either a government or a private business. At its crudest this tends to mean that governments pay either directly or indirectly for a great deal of scientific study into the best way of killing people in wars. More subtly it means that private companies rarely research something which is unlikely to be profitable. From a commercial point of view there is a lot more to be gained from paying researchers to come up with a better cosmetic than there is from coming up with a quick and simple cure all for a medical condition that won’t require the patient to keep coming back for more drugs.
Then there is the problem of what to do with outcomes of research. There is no requirement on any organisation to publish information which disadvantages it. There is a heavy incentive to employ good marketing people to spin the science. Few companies want to publicise information which is bad for the environment but good for sales. The use of those techniques has gradually and systematically undermined trust.
To give just one example, the companies that produce neonicitinoid pesticides have funded a great deal of research that tells us that bees don’t die when they are exposed to their products in laboratories unless the dose is well above levels that are likely to be found in the environment. They use that research to argue that their products are safe and we should continue to use them.
It has taken quite a lot of time and effort for more independent scientists to find funding and persuade journals to publish more objective assessments. Once they did it turned out that bees weren’t directly killed by neonicitinoids. Instead their navigation systems were harmed and that means fewer of them got back to the hive with food so the hives started to starve. Bees become addicted to nicitinoids (who would have thought nicotine was addictive!?) and get much higher doses than the company scientists predicted. Neonicitinoids penetrate every part of the plant and so wash into the soil when the plant dies and then soils are carried to the field margins by rainwater. Hedgerows end up accumulating much higher doses in their soil than we were originally told could ever be possible and nesting insects like bumblebees get killed off or seriously weakened by those high doses. The facts were more complex and a lot more negative than the company researchers initially told us.
Similarly, oil companies have known for decades that burning fossil fuels produces CO2 and that there were increased concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere that originated from areas of the globe where a lot of fossils were being burned. That research stayed in house. It took publicly funded research teams and voluntary organisations to reveal the remarkably simple facts. If you put more energy into a system then more will come out. We’ve been pumping more CO2 into our environment for over a hundred years and the pace of doing so is still increasing. So it is hardly surprising that every objective scientist found that there must be a human impact on the climate and the environment from burning fossil fuels. The legitimate areas of disagreement are how much, how quickly and how long lasting. Climate change denial is like denying the earth moves round the sun. The basic facts are easy simple science but there is still a lot of money going into funding denial, confusion and belittling of the possible dangers. Dodgy politicians and businesses with a financial interest are quite good at trying to crowd out the facts that emerge from genuinely objective scientific research with bought and paid for scientific spin.
So when it comes to new scientific breakthroughs we all need to be rather cautious and trace the self interest of those announcing the new science before we trust it. That is my reason for extreme caution about genetic manipulation. If it was being done by objective scientists working on precise scientific principles with no pressure to produce a particular commercial outcome I would be highly inclined to trust the science. But that isn’t what is happening with most genetic modification research. There is a real tendency for the science to be driven by the search for a new wonder product and for the commercial pressures of paying for long research programmes to incline companies paying for that research to cover up unfortunate side effects and get the product out there.
DDT was sold as a magnificent breakthrough. We were told about how much bigger the crops would be. We weren’t told about the side effects and it took decades of persistent challenge to uncover the truth about exactly how damaging they were. Neonicitinoids were sold to us as a much more environmentally sensitive and entirely targeted pesticide that would never spread further than the actual plant that contained it. Now we are getting at the truth about the damage they have caused and it is massive.
Both those pesticides will take a very long time to remove from the environment but given enough time and effort it is possible that much of their damage can be undone or reversed. If we hit similar problems with genetically manipulated materials then there may never be any means of removing from the environment the unforeseen consequences.
It is possible that we might get very lucky indeed and every scientist in every lab will always carefully turn off all reproduction mechanisms and remove all opportunities for a cross between a genetic manipulation and the natural environment. It is more likely that budgetary pressures will mean that somewhere at some time some scientists will not understand all the implications of releasing their creation into our complex and messy environment. It only takes one mistake that is capable of reproducing and the consequences can’t be reversed. A self-replicating environmental disaster can’t be cleaned up.
I therefore continue to believe that genetic manipulation techniques need to be incredibly tightly controlled. I don’t believe that means banning every single form of GM science or stopping every form of GM research. There are some very helpful medical breakthroughs taking place as a result of turning on, turning off or inserting genes that already exist within the human genepool in order to help an individual that needs them. Similarly it is fine to edit existing genes on a plant to improve varieties. That is just doing what plant breeders have always done but a bit quicker. There is, however, a really big difference between editing genes that already exist within a species and cutting and pasting genes between different species. As soon as that is allowed we are generating huge risks because we are creating new species without entirely knowing what the impact of that will be. The idea that we can trust agrochemical companies to do that and never get it wrong is really dangerous.
At the moment the EU bans all GM crops because it recognises the fears I have outlined. US regulators have been much more cavalier and are growing crops in the open air that have been created by combining genes from different species. As soon as Brexit happens there will be real pressure on British politicians to allow their products to be sold here. The US lobby groups won’t be slow to target careless British MPs who are easily taken in by promises that this time the pesticide companies really have come up with the simple fix for monoculture agriculture.
One more reason why leaving the EU and putting ourselves at the mercy of US corporate trade lawyers is a very bad idea indeed.