One of the constant refrains of anti-technology groups is to ask who is funding someone whose views they happen not to like; they never dwell upon the influence of the organisations and sponsors funding themselves. The implication is always that the word of anybody employed by industry or government, or in receipt of any research funding from such sources, is not to be trusted because they will be pawns in the hands of their paymasters. That, of course, excludes just about everybody save for the campaigners themselves and their few favoured friends.

Does it matter who is footing the bill? Are scientists and doctors – and for that matter, journalists and broadcasters – simply mouthpieces for their employers or sponsors? Or do they say what they themselves think, as one would hope?

Denis Murphy, Professor of Biotechnology at the University of Glamorgan, considered the issue in a Letter to the Editor of The BA – Connecting Science with People, the magazine of the British Association for the Advancement of Science:

Dear Editor,

There has often been an uneasy relationship between taxpayer-funded research for public-good applications versus its development for profit in the private sector.

The upsetting of this balance in the UK may be at the core of many of our current concerns, from GM crops to the funding mechanisms of scientific research in general.

Plant science research and its application for crop improvement illustrate my point (see ‘Cuddling, calculating and commercialising the biosciences’, Monica Winstanley, SPA March 2006, p 16). It can be argued that, in these areas, the UK is respectively a world leader and a global casualty.

Public funding

Over the past century, the UK and USA were important global powerhouses of plant science research and its application for crop improvement.

This paradigm of publicly-funded plant science research designed to be exploited both as a public good and, in some circumstances (such as the US hybrid maize) for private profit, started to unravel in the 1970s as plant breeders’ rights were introduced.

During the 1980s, the UK went further in privatising or closing many of its leading crop-related research centres, culminating in the sale of PBI to Unilever in 1989. Since then, the dwindling band of remaining research institutes have tended to focus more on basic aspects of plant science and, with a few notable exceptions, there is almost no practical plant breeding research in the UK public sector.

One of the consequences has been a loss in our capacity to exploit basic research for long-term use as public goods, especially in developing countries. Instead, new technologies like GM crops have been exclusively captured by the private sector and used for short-term commercial gain, for example to produce herbicide-tolerant crops.

Benefits lost

In the UK, the 1980s privatisation agenda proved to be deeply flawed when applied to plant breeding, where relatively immature markets were unable to assimilate the new developments. Instead of creating a vigorous commercial plant-breeding sector, we now have a situation where virtually all of the companies have abandoned the UK.

Since we have also destroyed our public-sector breeding capacity, the UK is now in the strange situation of being a world-class producer of basic plant research that has lost the wherewithal to apply the benefits of such knowledge for crop improvement.

The remaining UK plant research centres tend to focus on model plants like Arabidopsis, rather than crops, and on short-term (1-3 year) government contracts. Such contracts often address current public concerns, such as GM crop segregation, rather than more considered longer-term projects aimed at topics like crop improvement for the growing amount of saline or arid soils where public-good research could really make a difference.

Reasons for concern

Does any of this matter? I think it does.

Firstly, UK taxpayers might question why they are funding basic research in plant science while the country has lost its capacity to exploit its future benefits.

Secondly, we will still have to feed ourselves in the coming uncertain decades of possible climate change, but we have largely lost our ability to breed new crops for this purpose.

Thirdly, the public sector needs to ‘recapture’ technologies like genetic engineering for use in public-good programmes that are of little interest to commercial companies. Such initiatives are now under way in the US and Australia, but not so far in the UK.

As with previous crop improvement technologies, the key to the future success of GM might lie in its application as a public good rather than exclusively for private profit.

This letter is reproduced by permission of the author.

Source:

Denis Murphy. Public good or private gain? The BA (September 2006) (http://www.the-ba.net/the-BA/CurrentIssues/ReportsandPublications/ScienceAndPublicAffairs/SPASept06/CorrespondenceSept06.htm)

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