Food Ethics Council

How can science and technology can be made socially and ethically robust?

Public confidence in the ways that science and technology are governed has been shaken by a succession of controversies about risk regulation, new technology and public health. As ethical and social issues have been thrust to the forefront of debates about research and innovation, scientific and policy institutions have struggled to cope. Food and farming have been at the epicentre of this upheaval, in the wrangling over BSE, Foot and Mouth Disease, GM crops and, of late, obesity.

The policy response has been twofold. First, the evidence base for government decisions has been shored up with revised guidelines on expert advice. The second response has been to promote public engagement in science, both during research and 'upstream' in research planning.

Public engagement has been a priority for science policy since 2000, when a House of Lords committee reported that there was a crisis of public confi dence not in science and technology as such, but in the ways they were handled by government, businesses and other institutions. Until then, politicians and scientists had tended to assume that anyone who was uneasy about science and technology simply did not know enough about them. By contrast, since the House of Lords report, 'science and society' initiatives have been developed to help decision-makers listen to public concerns and take them more seriously.

Upstream public engagement is more recent, at least in the UK. Consensus is growing that citizens should engage in science when choices remain open and research priorities are being set. Public engagement should take place during research and development (R&D), rather than being confined to the regulatory end-of-pipe. This idea has quickly entered the mainstream. Not only do campaign groups such as Greenpeace espouse it, along with policy think tanks like Demos, but so also do the Royal Society, the science journal Nature, the Research Councils and the UK government.

Our work on research and innovation has concluded that greater public engagement is necessary but not sufficient to making science and technology socially and ethically robust. In particular, we have argued that the government should rethink its focus on 'wealth creation' as the primary objective of research and innovation policy, prioritising sustainable development instead, and should make serious changes to current rules on 'intellectual property', in the UK and internationally.