Science and Politics

This post has been running around in my head for a while. Doubt that will improve on its clarity, consistency or how well argued it is.

I’ve been reading the book Bogus Science by John Grant. In its introduction it covers an interesting case of politics vs. science. Post-war America, and there is a shortage of lead. This leads to a search for additives that could expand the life of lead acid batteries. There were many of these on the market and so the National bureau of Standards conducted testing. All the additives failed to improve the performance of batteries and most faded away, all except one, called AD-X2, the difference was not that AD-X2 actually worked, it was every bit as useless as its competitors, but the man in charge was good at lobbying politicians. The case for whether AD-X2 worked spanned administrations, cost hundreds of thousands of tax dollars and demanded re-tests and resignations. All because politicians thought for some reason that persuasive debate could alter the results of an empirical scientific test.

Oddly enough, although with somewhat less open and shut tests, this continues in present day UK.

The first is the recent Parliamentary Sci Tech Committee Evidence Check on Homeopathy. This was purely a committee established to check for evidence on the effectiveness of Homeopathy. Unsurprisingly for anyone with a smidgen of knowledge on the subject the evidence check revealed Homeopathy to be no better than a placebo and advised on removing NHS funding. This has been blogged by better men than me including Ben Goldacre, The Quackometer and David Colquhoun.

The Society of Homeopaths reacted badly, badly in the way that every world religion might if a parliamentary evidence check deemed the existence of God unlikely, or indeed badly as if someone had just seriously threatened a major stream of revenue. (Of course not, that would be cynical) They threw around accusations and smears about those involved and, well I’d advise you to read the blogs above for more on this.

Anyway, one of the things they managed was to convince an MP to put forward an Early Day motion expressing concerns. The MP, David Tredinnik, who claimed for astrology software on expenses and wanted to use distance healing as health policy. Obviously a sharp scientific mind. Now this doesn’t really matter, EDMs aren’t debated and rarely amount to anything, however it has attracted the signatures of over 60MPs. What this demonstrates is that regardless of evidence, and this was a check on evidence, not opinion or anecdote, it takes very little to get an MP to sign an EDM, yes that’s how desperate for votes they are. Worse was probably the Lib Dems, who had quiet a few signatories, and who came out with the final fallback for the person who knows deep down they’re not going to win on evidence “More Evidence is needed” Oh yes, the Oil Company favourite “More research is needed” is one of the most obvious stalling tactics, and would suit the SoH and its ilk fine. Apparently 200 years of research where the only trials showing Homeopathy better than a placebo are badly run small trials. Any well organised large trial shows no better than placebo, so are we back to AD-X2 with Homeopathy, keep testing until you get the result we want? Regardless what we do know is an MP will always take votes over evidence.

The second to come to mind is of course the humorously named Nut sack affair. For those who came in late, the government’s chief scientific advisor did a big round up on the evidence for harm caused by drugs. His report was based purely on scientific research but demonstrated that many currently illegal drugs such as cannabis and ecstasy were in fact safer than Alcohol. As this went against two very important things, the governments current drugs policy upgrading the classification on cannabis, and more importantly, disputing the mainstream media’s view that “Drugs are Bad, except for Alcohol and tobacco which have wealthy backing” the government decided not to follow the recommendations. Nutt was clearly tired of being ignored for what was basically political reasons and so revealed his findings publicly, for his trouble he was sacked and we had to put up with a cross party harrumph from MPs about how they were elected to lead and these scientists should bloody well keep their facts to themselves.

This demonstrated one of the unshakable truths of when science and government collide. No amount of evidence can beat a policy that will upset the views of the right wing press consensus and therefore middle England, (or as described by some ministers “We have to consider many other factors”). Sadly this is the major problem evidence based policy faces, from the mounting evidence that sending petty criminals to jail merely acts as a gateway for greater offences (And the lambasting that a Scottish Justice secretary got for suggesting not sending many minor offenders to jail is evidence of this) to drugs policy the evidence clearly shows that science can find out what it likes but should be prepared to be ignored if it doesn’t fit existing government policy.