OPINION
Gillian Burke
“The funders with the biggest pockets set the direction of travel”
“SCIENCE, HOPE AND HUMILITY” was the somewhat optimistic title of a blog I wrote at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. I dared to believe that world leaders and decision-makers would be humbled by the force of nature, albeit a little one in the shape of a virus that brought our 21st century lives to a standstill.
As we all got a crash course in bending curves, I hoped this new-found science literacy would effortlessly carry over into tackling the climate and ecological crisis. We would all, finally, start listening to the science. What I didn’t factor in was that ‘science’ might have a problem.
Flashback to my university days and my final-year project involved spending what felt like hundreds of hours staring down a microscope as I measured the spines on countless specimens of flies. The species in question was Lucilia sericata, the common green bottle fly, famed for laying eggs on livestock, primarily sheep.
Their preferred egg-laying sites are on soiled fleeces and on open wounds, and the voracious feeding habits of the emerging larvae cause or aggravate painful skin lesions. In the livestock industry, this is known as blowfly strike and is a major pest.
My aim was to measure the distance between microscopic spines that flank the frontal head stripe. If you’ve ever looked a fly in the eye, this is the dark band that runs between the eyes – wider in females than in males. I was looking for a phenomenon called ‘fluctuating asymmetry’ or, in other words, wonky faces. I was testing the hypothesis to determine whether increased asymmetry, or wonkiness, could be used to detect stress in a population on the cusp of developing pesticide resistance.
Just as overusing antibiotics selects for antibiotic resistant strains, so too with pesticides. Fluctuating asymmetry held the promise of a low-cost, low-tech tool to inform appropriate dosing and targeted applications of pesticides to avoid the buildup of pesticide resistance.
In my own little way, I believed I was helping to make a real-world difference, even if I did smell of rotting liver (the preferred medium for lab-raised maggots) for the best part of that year and never got asked out on a date, oddly enough.
But had I saved the world? Apparently not. “It was an interesting idea in its time but not sufficiently reliable for most applicatons,” reflects my supervisor Richard Gillian Burke presents The Watches. Catch up on iPlayer. Wall. Okay, so my third-year project was a dead end, but how many research dead ends never get explored, even if valuable learning opportunities await? Even worse, does bluesky thinking get stifled by a process where the funders with the biggest pockets set the direction of travel?
But this is more than a case of ‘who pays the piper calls the tune’. The worst side of ‘the science problem’ is exposed in books like The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception by David Michaels, and a recent no-holds-barred opinion piece in the British Medical Journal titled ‘The illusion of evidence-based medicine’, which flatly calls out deep-rooted corruption and misconduct in scientific research.
“The SARS-CoV-2 virus has exposed the choke points and weaknesses in our 21st century systems,” I wrote in my blog. “Connections light up in my mind’s eye but only as fleeting glimpses. I can’t seem to get a view of the whole. It’s like trying to see the big picture while being stuck on the canvas.”
It’s been a rude awakening to have to peel myself off the canvas and realise that science isn’t beyond human fallibilty. My hunch is that it’s time for some cold, hard introspection if we are to truly ask people, hand on heart, to follow the science.
Gillian Burke stars in The Watches. Catch them on iPlayer.
The Wildlife Trusts are re-wilding nature-depleted neighbourhoods through the Nextdoor Nature campaign. Visit wildlifetrusts.org.