Sceptical of science

Once, an Irish-American millionaire with a tragically schizophrenic son sent me on a whirlwind fact-finding tour of research clinics in North America. He talked of setting up a foundation to fund research at the margins of mainstream theory, but also, I think, he was hoping I would phone him from somewhere with news of an imminent cure.

Not all the busy biochemists and research professors could find an early time to talk to me, but I found that introducing the foundation's address could achieve quite a change at the other end of the phone. The address was simple: Number One, Wall Street.

I had grown up regarding research scientists as dedicated souls working in a milieu well apart from the material, pressurised world the rest of us had to inhabit. What I started to learn was that most scientists spend their lives acutely concerned about money and their own material welfare and ambition: in a word, they are human.

They worry about research grants and their renewal; they fret about academic tenure or corporate preferral, they worry like hell that their rivals will pip them to the next plateau of reputation. They have a certain reliable objectivity about scientific method, and about the facts they present to their peers, but that doesn't necessarily make them wise or even scrupulous.

None of this makes me too sanguine about the management of Ireland's headlong rush into biotechnology, backed by State funding on a heroic scale. On the benign side, manipulating genes may be just the way to cure such human woes as schizophrenia: wouldn't it be great if that came out of Trinity or UCD? I'm more anxious about GM interventions that threaten natural ecosystems, that give global corporations more power over farming and food, and that turn life itself into patentable, profitable products.

After such a wildly successful adventure with information technology, it is understandable that the government should look to biotechnology and a whole new range of food products as the next development bonanza. The relevant Irish scientists, so long disregarded and undervalued in programmes of national investment, are in ecstasies about the sudden reversal in their institutional, even their personal, fortunes. They don't even mind if the Government buys in some highly-rated world researchers, like foreign football stars.

What I miss is any reassuring sense of wise and independent watchdogs to regulate the ethical progress of research policy and biotech field experiments. This is not, alas, always what our scientists mean when they say "the public must be reassured". For too many of them, the assumption that GM is safe in their hands has all the soothing superiority of a hospital consultant.

I am particularly put out by sweeping and disingenuous assurances that genetic modification of crops is "no different" from the techniques of traditional plant selection and breeding over 10,000 years of agriculture. This is kindergarten black propaganda. One has been the patient transfer of genes between plants whose evolutionary kinship lets them interbreed; the other, an arbitrary implant between species.

An anti-freeze fish gene in a strawberry is very alien indeed; so is a gene for resistance to a chemical weedkiller, or one that renders crop seed sterile so that Third World farmers cannot save it from year to year. The fear is that such genes will turn maverick, jumping between species through pollen transfer and other means. Evidence that the alien gene from GM oilseed rape has turned up in bacteria in honeybee stomachs is just the latest reason for disquiet.

At the moment, Ireland's support for the EU consensus of extreme caution on GM crops is some safeguard against indiscriminate field trials. As with so much else in our natural environment, I shudder to think about the path we might have taken without European constraints.

At home, whom do we really trust to exercise foresight and caution in a situation so permeated with profit, ambition and naive political enthusiasm? Universities, once the very repositories of wisdom, cannot be surprised if their integrity is no longer taken on trust. In turning to partnership with industry, both to be "relevant" to modern society and to earn, through research contracts, the money to keep themselves abreast, they have sacrificed much of their old monopoly on regard for ethical judgment and disinterested advice. Today, when a university scientist comes out in the letters columns with promotion of GM crops, one feels free to entertain the most unworthy of suspicions.

This, of course, is a lamentable paranoia. Unfortunately, given the nature of the multi-national biotech giants involved in the progressive annexation of seeds and food-plants for profit, conspiracy theory is all too easy to come by. Over a decade ago, when Monsanto's GM sugar-beet trials were first in prospect here, I wondered aloud if the company saw Ireland as an ideal laboratory, conveniently quarantined by the sea if anything happened to go badly wrong.

No such dark fancies, it seems, unduly afflict the youthful optimism of Irish teenagers, judging by the response of Transition year students to a group-paper competition, with a £12,000 prize fund, promoted by the organisation Agri-Aware. They were challenged "to investigate both sides of the debate and to research and evaluate the role of biotechnology for the future".

From then on, it was up to the Internet websites to battle for hearts and minds - beginning, presumably, with Greenpeace on one side and Monsanto on the other. With the chances of winning understandably in mind, 90 per cent of the entries gave "a strong endorsement" of adopting the technology, while entering careful recommendations about monitoring and evaluation.

They were congratulated by the AgriAware chairman, Mr John McCullen, as "the discerning consumers and decision-makers of the future and most likely to be unbiased and analytical in this controversial debate".

Whereas I'm just a sceptical old fart.