Schedule of events

New Fellows seminar

Awards presentation

Symposium program

Early-career researchers program

Teacher awards

Teachers program

President's address

Distinguished guests, Fellows, ladies and gentlemen. As President of the Academy, I welcome you to the fifty-third anniversary of the formal ceremonies of the Australian Academy of Science.

Yesterday we heard about some of the wonderful science that has been done by our new Fellows and today we will hear more about frontier science from our medalists and awardees. A primary objective of the academy is to recognize outstanding contributions to science and this we clearly do well if the presentations of yesterday and the promise of today are any guide. But our activities do not stop here. The science has to be promoted and ultimately translated into policy decisions that are beneficial to society as a whole. Thus the objectives of the Academy also include the promotion of science through education and public awareness, science policy development and international relations.

We heard about our education program last year from the Past President Jim Peacock and I will just say that Primary Connections, built on the earlier Primary Investigations, is going from strength to strength. Recently it was said that ‘Primary Connections may rank as one of the [Academy’s] most innovative and influential decisions’.¹ We are also poised to run with the secondary school science program, Science by Doing, the moment Government shows the green light. We have carried the development of that project about as far as we can, substantially from our own resources, and we now are in a position to trial it on a large scale.

On international relations, I will no doubt return to it in a year or two and all I wish to signal now is that I consider that the equitable distribution of technological skills is essential for a harmonious world, that ultimately the security of the planet rests on the wide embrace of the core values of science – fact-based questioning and acknowledgement of uncertainty. They are not my own words², but they do reflect my strong conviction that capacity building in the developing countries is important such that these countries can make their own decisions and avoid the past mistakes of the now-developed world. This becomes particularly important in the link between industrial development and climate change. That is why we have increased our activity in the Inter-Academy Panel (IAP) and in the Federation of Asian Academies and Societies and why we will be hosting the Executive Committee of IAP in Canberra later this year.

What I do want to talk about this morning is the third area, that of science policy. What does the Academy do? What could and should we do? And why we don’t always achieve what we aspire to do. Why do decision makers not act on what is so blindingly obvious? How can outcomes be reached that go so against our science-based assessment of the facts? What can we do – what should we do about getting a better translation of science into policy? Why is it that when we are involved, the outcomes often still grate against our understanding of the obvious?

I cannot claim to have answers to such questions other than to say that we deal with humans with individual histories of belief, prejudice, experience and knowledge. Even with this audience I suspect that we would not reach unanimous agreement on what to recommend about some of the very major issues faced by society and for which the answers may lie at or beyond the current frontiers of science. Paraphrasing what Albert Einstein is purported to have said: The problems we face today cannot be solved by using the same level of thinking that we had when the problems were created in the first place.

Above all, we know the limitations of our own individual knowledge, that we are dealing with uncertainty, and that while we will not accept any doctrine of infallibility, we still experience the difficulty in separating objective assessments of risk from subjective feelings.

Yet I will pursue these questions to see if there is anything that we can learn that may help in improving our success rate of turning science into policy.

Turning science into science policy

I start from the following premises:

1. That the understanding of how the world works has unquestionably made life better. It may not always have appeared to be so, but integrated over the existence of Homo sapiens we would have to agree that the human condition has improved as a result of the pursuit of knowledge.

2. That the understanding of how the world works is reached through the pursuit of secure, experimentally verifiable, knowledge – unfettered by past beliefs and prejudices.

3. That the conversion of this knowledge into science policy is critical for the socio-economic and environmental well being of society.

And I start with the experience that the process of translating science knowledge into successful policy, as well as to raising the profile of the underpinning science, can be frustrating indeed.

The Academy seeks to meet its science policy goals through the development of a clear understanding of the scientific facts and their associated uncertainties and through the provision of open and inclusive advice involving, where appropriate, expertise from areas beyond the construed science. This it does through workshops, think tanks and other public forums to discuss the underlying science or to identify and develop potential policy issues. Where appropriate, it does this alone or in cooperation with the other Academies, either singly or under the Academies Forum umbrella. The outputs include:

1. Reports on public issues such as national research policy setting, stem cell research and human cloning, pesticides, ecological reserves, food quality, genetic engineering, space science and climate change, and

2. Submissions to government ministers and parliamentary inquiries.

What happens to these reports and submissions is then increasingly beyond our control. Occasionally we can see direct outcomes, sometimes we can identify pieces of our advice buried and unacknowledged in resulting policy, often it seems to have disappeared into a black hole.

Success stories

One example of a success story is the Academy’s first venture into public policy. In 1956 the Academy’s Committee on High Mountain Catchments managed to gain State Government agreement to exclude alpine grazing above 1500 meters in Kosciusko State Park. And in the following year the Academy recommended that the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Authority’s plans for engineering works above 2,000 meters should be re-examined, resulting in the planned Kosciusko Reservoir and its associated waterworks near the summit of Kosciusko not being built. And in the following year the Academy’s intervention resulted in the planned Kosciusko Reservoir and its associated waterworks near the summit of Kosciusko not being built.

A more recent example relates to legislation regarding somatic cell nuclear transfer, sometimes called ‘therapeutic cloning’. In December last year, federal parliament passed Senator Kay Patterson’s private member’s bill to permit Australian scientists to undertake research using therapeutic cloning techniques. In helping to achieve this outcome, the Academy started back in February 1999, the Academy with a Position Statement that said:

The Council, in accord with international opinion, considers that reproductive cloning to produce human foetuses is unethical and unsafe and should be prohibited. However, human cells, whether derived from cloning techniques or from embryonic stem cell lines, should not be precluded from use in approved research activities in cellular and developmental biology.

It took nearly nine years from the time of that statement to the passing of the enabling legislation, during which the Academy continued to provide public comment in print and radio media, in public lectures, in symposia, and in written and verbal evidence to many parliamentary and other enquiries. I would like to give special acknowledgement to Fellows John White and Bob Williamson for their tireless and statesmanlike contributions to the ongoing debate. But when I look at the proposed changes to the ethical guidelines, I fear that the Academy’s work may not yet be complete.

A not so obvious success story

Sometimes we can see vestiges of our activities in subsequent policy actions. A recent example where I like to think the Academy played a not unimportant role is the recent discussion on Uranium Mining, Processing and Nuclear Energy. In late 2005, the Academy, together with ATSE, proposed to the Prime Minister that the two Academies would run a series of workshops to explore the full range of issues associated with the nuclear fuel cycle. The intent was to provide an authoritative report that would have served as the basis for the subsequent wider community discussion and for development of any eventual policies. Instead, the Academy was invited to nominate experts to the Uranium Mining, Processing and Nuclear Energy Review Committee and to make inputs to the committee. In addition, I accepted membership of the group that reviewed the subsequent draft Switkowski report. We take some comfort that the issues canvassed by that committee largely followed the Academies original proposal.

Miserable failures

One does not like to admit that there are issues where the translation from science into science policy can only be considered as a dismal failure but one of them that has to be so considered has been the inability to repeat the success story of transgenic cotton with other crops, perhaps most notably canola.

Lessons?

In trying to extract lessons from past experience, we have to remember that the Academy is not a lobbying body. This is not always understood by the wider science community and we are sometimes criticized for not speaking out publicly on all and every issue. The Academy, instead, acts as an advisory body that attempts to deliver independent advice when asked for it and that offers uninvited advice when it considers this to be appropriate.

The President of the Academy is, by virtue of that position, a member of the Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council that advises the Prime Minister on scientific issues. The position also gives entrée into other advisory processes. Thus in some instances there will have been Academy input into a government decision although this will often have been diluted by inputs from other areas. But by having participated in the process we cannot then be over critical of the outcome, at least not publicly.

We can only be critical of our own performance in not being able to convince the decision makers that our views should have been followed more closely. Neither, when we have had some success, can we trumpet the outcomes from the rooftops because a degree of confidentiality is required if we expect to be asked to contribute the next time.

There are sometimes very long lead-time between initial advice and outcomes, as the somatic cell nuclear transfer issue has shown. Thus even if the first round is lost, the Academy has to continue to provide expert scientific advice and to continue to address the issues critically and publicly. Thus the Academy needs to remain involved in developing the scientific cases necessary for enunciating policy issues associated with, for example, the nuclear fuel cycle, on living in a changing climate environment, and on how to maximize the public benefits of medical research.

Public education

I cannot claim to provide an answer as to how we get to the state where science plays a greater, more visible, role in decision making other than to stress that public education of the understanding of science is critical. The Academy has long recognised this through its pioneering efforts at science education in our school system. Our intent is not merely to ensure a future flow of researchers, although this is clearly essential, but also to produce a scientifically knowledgeable public that contributes constructively to the debate: the so-called principle of ‘enlightened cognitivism’.³ But if we achieve the latter we should not be under the delusion that this will mean that scientifically rational decisions flow more easily.

I am not aware if comparable studies have been carried out in Australia, but studies in Europe have given at first glance a paradoxical result of a negative correlation between the general level of science education and the public acceptance that science makes positive contributions to society.⁴ What appears is that with raised levels of the awareness of science and of its uncertainties, there may be a corresponding increase in the concerns expressed. The faith that science provides unambiguous factual answers becomes replaced with increasing understanding of the limitations of science, particularly when it deals with emerging issues that are only beginning to be understood. It becomes a case of the more you understand, the more other factors enter into consideration involving culture, institutional frameworks for regulating technologies and trust in the regulators, the intensity and type of media coverage of technological controversies, environmental values and risk perceptions.⁵ It is a case of the more the public understands, the more the public worries about unintended consequences.

The outcomes of a more recent study conducted in the United Kingdom (UK) for the Office of Science and Technology⁶, may appear to give more comfort. It finds that most people have positive associations of science with advancement and progress: that most people (86 per cent) think that science generally makes a positive contribution to society and that scientists are not all lab-coated nerds, eccentrics or worse.

But when it comes to perceptions of specific science issues, the same UK report indicates that the results can be quite different: that on issues of GM foods, ‘cloning’, radioactive waste or health hazards of mobile phones, the debate is still more influenced by the above cited factors, as well as by emotive language, faith, trust and instinct rather than by the scientific method of establishing the facts, acknowledging the uncertainties, and the development of reasoned choice.

Thus, while we would probably all agree that informed debate must be beneficial because it ensures that resulting policy outcomes are more rational and more likely to have widespread support than if built on ignorance, the relationship does not appear to be direct and the debate must be continually underpinned by the development of the scientific facts and by public education. In particular this should lead to broader recognition at attempts by special interest groups to deliberately misinform the public and to use the uncertainty associated with experimental science to discredit science as a whole and to manipulate policy making. I will return to this later.

Distorting prisms

Comparable survey in Australia would probably yield similar results. For how else can one explain that if the correlation between scientific evidence and policy-making is so straightforward, why is it that the following situations occur?

• No fluoridation of the water supply in Brisbane;
• A moratorium in every Australian state and territory on the growing of GM canola;
• Easy availability of tobacco, alcohol and drugs for underage children;
• The slow introduction of seatbelts for school buses;
• Limitations on the use of human embryonic stem cells in research;
• Many years of debate before the drug RU482 was available to women in Australia;
• Lack of acceptance of recycled water;
• No nuclear-powered desalination plants.

When you add from your experiences, it becomes a long list indeed of where scientific knowledge has not been effectively translated into public policy.

Thus while translating science into public policy should be a straight-forward, even mundane, business – one in which policy makers evaluate the research, recognise the uncertainties within the science, weigh up the benefits against the costs and risks, then shape the policy – other issues creep into the equation and distort this process.

What prevents this logical process from being more effective? John Horgan⁷, writing in the New York Times, asserts bluntly, that what colours the way science is viewed comes down to ‘God or money’. But are there only the two prisms, God and money, that distort the translation from science to good policy? Do political expediency, special interest groups, conservative and fundamental religion, and fear of change and of the new, play no role in this translation? To what extent do the other distorting prisms fuse into what has been identified in the US as the abandonment of science in Chris Mooney’s book The Republican War on Science.⁸

The global climate change debate

When, in the US, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment that, with a high degree of probability, human activity has driven global warming is seriously equated to the views of a science fiction writer and a retired mining executive⁹, we can perhaps be excused if we ignore it as an abnormality, were it not that similar trends may be occurring here.

In particular, sectors of the print media, most notably The Australian, appear to be taking a strong stand against the evidence presented in the 2006 Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC, with stark headlines such a Calm down, the planet is not facing a catastrophe¹⁰ and Sceptics turn the heat on climate change cataclysmists.¹¹ I accept that some extreme statements have been made about the negative human impact on the planet that are not justified by the scientific evidence but what I find unacceptable is that they are being used to discredit the science underpinning what we do know and understand.

Opinion pieces include those by Albrechtsen¹² who talks about ‘the ostensible consensus among experts that humans are causing catastrophic warming’; Devine¹³, whose headline is quoted above; and Pearson¹⁴ who notes:

Suffice it to say that the scientific evidence is less than conclusive. In any event, the fundamental challenge for Christians of this and any other age is not saving the planet but, old-fashioned as it sounds, the infinitely more important matter of saving souls.

A more recent contribution was the headline Now our children are being force-fed warming hysteria.¹⁵ Editorials in The Australian¹⁶ take up this theme, the most recent of which refers to the IPCC reports as ‘misguided populism’. They all use very similar arguments and sources to create the impression that climate science is mired in uncertainty and that, therefore, it is unwise to take any action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

One argument used is that there are two sides to every story and that the IPCC report presents one side only. To ensure balance in the debate the other side of the story must therefore be given equal time. This ignores the fact that the IPCC position is based on the examination by some 2500 scientists and reviewers of the totality of climate science research published in the scientific literature and that divergent views have been considered in reaching its conclusions. Someone who thinks that scientists are consensus minded people has not moved in serious scientific circles! Yet today there would be few scientific issues about which there would be a greater consensus.

This is not to say that climate science is perfect, that we know all there is to know and hence need to go no further. There remain limitations in our collective knowledge and scientists who poke holes in the theories or numerical methods by publishing in the peer-reviewed literature are an essential part of the scientific process and what leads to improved assessments from one IPCC report to the next. But to give equal time to the views of a few economists and discredited or cantankerous scientists does not make a great deal of sense to me. Devine, quoting the economist David Henderson, states:

Even if the IPCC process were indisputably consistent and rigorous, objective and professionally watertight, It is imprudent for governments to place virtually exclusive reliance, in matters of extraordinary complexity where huge uncertainties prevail, on a single source of advice and a single process of inquiry.¹⁷

In other words, even though we know that the world is round, we should plan our air routes on the possibility that it may just be flat.

The other argument used is that the peer review process is flawed or that its importance is overstated. But is it better to use the views expressed in a research paper that has been carefully examined by experts before publication, and then subjected to continual review by other researchers who have used the outcomes of that research, or to use quotes from a FOXnews opinion piece?

The climate change debate is actually two debates: one about the science and its uncertainties, the other about what action should follow from the conclusions reached in the scientific debate. And it is really the latter that seems to raise the ire of some sections of the community: we don’t like the outcomes of the scientific research and therefore it must be faulty. In what are essentially economic debates between, for example, Stern, Henderson and others, the scientific research has become the culprit. It has become the excuse for inaction on mitigation and adaptation questions. It is this reluctance to respond to the scientific evidence that has resulted in precious lost time since the first IPPC Assessment report in 1990 and has reduced the available timefor societies and ecosystems to adapt as smoothly as possible.

Back to distorting prisms

This digression on climate change has taken me away from the original aim of trying to develop the various prisms that affect the translation from science to policy, but the climate change debate does provide ample examples and merit a greater in-depth analysis.

Of the previously identified prisms, for ‘political expediency’ read an avoidance or reluctance to make decisions for long-term global good that may also be detrimental on the shorter time frame for parts of the community. For ‘special interest groups’ read industries that are dependent on the status quo. For ‘conservative and fundamental religion’ read the Genesis 1.28 man, ‘God said to them “Be fruitful and become many and fill the Earth and subdue it, and have in subjection… every living creature that is moving upon the Earth’.¹⁸ For ‘fear of change and the new’ read a fear of anti-development and environmentalism, read the fear of being yesterday’s science man.

Academy action

I have no reason to doubt that the Australian public is largely supportive of the scientific enterprise so what can the Academy do in making the translation from science to policy more effective? One is to encourage the public recognition of good science when and where it occurs with the corollary of encouraging and facilitating the presentation of that science to the wider community. That means working together more with the media but this is not supping with the devil because I do appreciate the sector that responsibly reports and interprets the news.

Another step is to be prepared to counter erroneous science when this is being used in attempts to shape policy in self-serving directions. Another step is to enhance our policy advice capability: particularly in anticipating and developing issues before they appear on the public horizon, as was so successfully done about therapeutic cloning. And above all it requires a continuation of our efforts at educating future generations of policy makers through improved science teaching at all levels of education. These are things that the Academy does well, has done well since its foundation, and will need to do more about.

¹ Maslen G. Science Teaching, Fast Thinking, April 2007, pp26-28.
² May RM. The 2004 Royal Society Anniversary Address, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 59(1); 99-119.
³ Pardo and Calvo. (2002) Attitudes towards science among the European public, Public Understanding of Science, 11; 155-195.
⁴ Bauer, Durant and Evans. (1994) International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 6(2) 163-186.
⁵ Gaskell et al., Science, 285; 384-387.
⁶ Science in society: Findings from qualitative and quantitative research. Conducted for the Office of Science and Technology, Department of Trade and Industry, by Market and Opinion Research International, March 2005.
⁷ Horgan J. Political Science, The New York Times, 18 December 2005.
⁸ Mooney C. (2005) The Republican War on Science. Basic Books. 351pp. See also 9Quiggin J. The Australian Financial Review, 7 April 2006.
⁹ Quiggin J. The Australian Financial Review, 7 April 2006.
¹⁰ The Australian, 12 April 2007, p11.
¹¹ The Australian, 16 March 2007, p11.
¹² The Australian, 28 February 2007.
¹³ The Australian, 16 March 2007.
¹⁴ The Australian, 7 October 2006.
¹⁵ The Australian, 2 May 2007.
¹⁶ The Australian, 26 April 2007.
¹⁷ The Australian, 16 March 2007.
¹⁸ Attributed to R. Evans Secretary of the Lavoisier Group, by The Age, 27 November 2004. I am doing something here that I have deplored in others in not tracking back to the original statement.