Beyond the Hype E-Book

Fiona Fox

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 454

Beschreibung

A Guardian Science Book of the Year 2022 'This is how to talk about science' Justin Webb 'A candid inside account . . . [Fox] reveals how frontline science can be just as messy, complex and feudal as any political drama.' Anjana Ahuja, co-author of Spike: The Virus Versus the People Do you remember the 'Climategate' email leak? Or the 'Frankenfood'-style headlines about the perils of GM foods? What about the time the government sacked its own science advisor for challenging drug laws? Beyond the Hype takes us behind the scenes of some of the most contentious stories in science over the past two decades. From animal research and genetically modified foods to hybrid embryos and a global pandemic, it demonstrates the vital importance of scientists talking to the media – and warns of the damage to public understanding when scientists are silenced on the defining issues of our times. 'The way the media covers science stories and breakthroughs has never been more important or relevant . . . This book should be recommended reading'Jim Al-Khalili, presenter of The Life Scientific 'The pandemic has repeatedly shown the vital necessity for accurate reporting of science . . . Fox provides some riveting stories about the ups and downs of this continuing struggle.' David Spiegelhalter, author of The Art of Statistics 'Engaging, illuminating, important' Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism 'A vivid account of how journalists and scientists interact' David Willetts, former Minister for Universities and Science

Leseprobe

For Declan

and

For Professor Sir Colin Blakemore, who personifies everything I have come to hold dear in science: the excellence in his research; the firm belief that engaging with the media is central to being a great scientist; and the courage and bravery to defend science under attack, way before there was the strength in numbers to give him cover and support. The SMC is imbued with Colin’s values, and I am proud that we are one of his many legacies.

CONTENTS

Introduction

1. The GM wars

How scientists fought the ‘Frankenfoods’ narrative

2. Don’t mention the A word

The long road to openness on animal research

3. First they came for the communists

The bitter row over ME/CFS research

4. Hype, hope and hybrids

The battle for research on human-animal hybrids

5. The sacking of David Nutt

The politicisation of science

6. Scientists v sceptics

The story of Climategate

7. From floods to Fukushima

How to respond to breaking news

8. The sexist professor?

The sorry saga of Tim Hunt

9. Strange bedfellows

The uneasy relationship between scientists and science journalists

10. A dying breed?

In defence of the science press officer

11. Follow the science

The challenges of reporting on and in a global pandemic

Acknowledgements

Index

INTRODUCTION

‘Cancer jab alert after girl dies’, screamed the news headlines in September 2009 when fourteen-year-old schoolgirl Natalie Morton tragically died after receiving the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine at her school. The rollout of the cervical cancer vaccine programme in schools had already been controversial among some members of the public, particularly religious groups, who took issue with under-sixteens being vaccinated against a sexually transmitted virus. Now concerns about the vaccine’s safety took centre stage and the story was headline news for several days. Ten years later I asked the audience at a science festival for a show of hands of those who remembered it, but there were none. When I asked who had heard of the row over whether the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine (MMR) causes autism – a row that first hit the headlines in 1998 – every hand in the audience went up.

Why did one vaccine scare story enter the public consciousness when another barely registered? My answer, and the theme of this book, is that scientists found their voice, in part because of an organisation that I set up. The Science Media Centre (SMC) was established in 2002. We have pioneered a new proactive approach to science in the headlines based on our founding philosophy that ‘the media will do science better when scientists do the media better’. The easiest and best way to improve the media coverage of science is for scientists to work with journalists to help them get their stories right.

Today, the SMC has over three thousand leading scientists on our database, is used by every national news outlet in the UK, and runs around sixty press conferences a year. Funded by small donations from more than a hundred organisations, we have spawned a network of SMCs in countries around the world, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Germany, and an organisation doing some of what we do in the USA. Recent additions include Taiwan and a pan-continental organisation for Africa, with a new centre due to open in Spain in early 2022.

When the first journalist called us in 2009 about Natalie Morton’s death, I contacted every vaccine expert on our database asking for instant reaction to the breaking news. Over the next hours and days, many of them did the rounds of TV newsrooms and their comments were quoted all over the press. Fact boxes, Q&As and clear graphics that they had helped to create appeared next to scary headlines about this awful and unexpected death. None of these scientists knew the precise details about the individual case of course, but that was no reason not to engage: instead, they talked about the mountain of data showing the safety and effectiveness of this vaccine. Within hours of the story breaking, the headlines started to change. ‘Cancer jab is safe, say the experts’, read the Daily Mail.

In the past scientists had tended to steer clear of the media, understandably preferring the laboratory to the glare of the spotlight. There was not yet a consensus on the importance of accessible science communication as a public good, and few incentives for academics to take part in any public engagement. Those who did so tended to be science popularisers with a flair for communicating their field of research or explaining the way that science works, but they were few and far between. But things were changing. In 1985 the Royal Society published a report called ‘The Public Understanding of Science’, also known as the Bodmer Report, calling on scientists to see public engagement as their public duty. By the late 1990s funders had started to introduce incentives for media work, including making grants conditional on researchers sharing their results with the public. These initiatives were having an impact: scientists had begun dipping their toes into media work, explaining their findings to trusted science journalists. But there was still a problem when controversial stories about science hit the headlines: researchers were much less used to wading into huge media rows that pitted them against campaigners or patient groups, and they were generally reluctant to engage. That exacerbated the media frenzy, allowing inaccuracies to flourish, with implications both for public understanding of science and public policy more widely.

But something new and significant had happened in the case of the HPV scare. Rather than run away from a difficult or sensationalised story with the potential to damage or discredit their work, scientists had run towards it. This was a tragic and terrible case but the wider reporting on it was accurate and informed as a result of their engagement, and this in turn led to a greater public understanding of the evidence on vaccines.

So what changed? I’d love to say it was all thanks to us. But to really understand the extent of the change in science, you first need to know why the SMC came to exist in the first place.

***

The row over the MMR vaccine wasn’t the only science story to make the front pages at the turn of the new millennium: animal research facilities and the introduction of genetically modified (GM) foods, for example, were also attracting negative attention and misinformation. There were a few bold scientists willing to step into these stories but not enough to prevent the public and policy makers being misled.

Most scientists working in these fields actively avoided talking to the press, choosing to remain cocooned in their universities and research institutes, designing their next field trials, or preparing new findings for publication in peer-reviewed journals. Plant scientists in world-class research institutes told me how they watched, bewildered, as media-savvy campaigners from Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth joined forces with the tabloids to demonise and discredit the promise of GM technology. The result? The public, the politicians and the supermarkets all delivered a resounding ‘no’ before a single GM crop had even been developed.

In 1999 the ineffective response of the scientific community to such media furores became the focus of a House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology. The report of the Science and Society inquiry, brainchild of then science minister Lord Sainsbury and chaired by the late Lord Jenkin, is now studied in science communication courses as one of the seminal works on the public understanding of science. It is a fascinating reminder of the tense relationship between science and the media at the end of the last millennium: eminent scientists would bemoan the media coverage and accuse journalists of undermining public trust in science, while science journalists would point the finger firmly back at aloof and elitist scientists, blaming them for emerging once a year to deliver truth on tablets of stone and then retreating back into the safety of academia. Pallab Ghosh, science reporter at the BBC, urged scientists to stop whingeing about the rules of the game, roll up their sleeves and get on the pitch.

Published in February 2000, the final Science and Society report called for the investment of new resources to encourage and train more scientists to engage with the media. It concluded:

The culture of United Kingdom science needs a sea-change, in favour of open and positive communication with the media. This will require training and resources; above all it will require leadership . . . It will inevitably involve occasional embarrassment or frustration. But, if it succeeds, it will pay for itself many times over in renewed public trust.

It was to deliver on these recommendations that the idea of the Science Media Centre was born.

***

While MMR and GM were playing out in the headlines, I was working as Head of Press for the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD). I had great fun in the run-up to the millennium with a leading role in the aid agency’s Jubilee 2000 campaign for debt relief. In the short term the campaign galvanised an existing desire within both the public and the media to make a grand and meaningful gesture that would make the world a better place. But as the hangovers faded after the millennium celebrations, so too did media interest in developing-world debt. It was getting harder and harder to generate interest in straightforward development issues.

My media strategies became increasingly desperate: I took flood victims from Yorkshire to meet flood victims in Mozambique; dumped gold bullion outside Downing Street to protest at the International Monetary Fund’s refusal to sell off gold reserves to fund debt relief; and arranged for the recently converted Catholic MP Ann Widdecombe to visit CAFOD’s projects in Africa in the hope of changing her mind about debt relief. The visit did not go well for me. Widdecombe’s view that debt relief would enrich corrupt African leaders only hardened during her visit and, on her return, she did a round of radio and TV interviews to say so. When the Daily Telegraph op-ed editor told me he would happily take a piece from my director but only if I replaced his name with that of a celebrity like Bob Geldof or Bono, I knew it was time to move on. I needed to work in a field that didn’t require a quirky photo call or a celebrity to get some media attention, and when I looked at what had been making headlines, I realised that field was science.

My friends scoffed when I told them I wanted to do media relations for science. My A Levels were in Welsh, English and History, and I had a degree in journalism. But like others at that time, I was fascinated by the debates around GM and MMR, and I was very pro-science. I also wanted to be able to make a difference on issues that were in the headlines but often reported badly.

It was around this time that I read a January 2001 interview with Professor Susan Greenfield in the Financial Times in which she discussed her plans to set up a new independent media centre at the Royal Institution to bridge the gap between scientists and journalists. Greenfield was a flamboyant neuroscientist and populariser of science who had recently become the Institution’s first female director. Known for her willingness to pose for Hello! magazine in her trademark miniskirts as well as her ability to enthral huge crowds with her explanation of how the brain works, she was determined to shake things up. When Lord Sainsbury asked if the Royal Institution would play host to the new media centre recommended in his Lords report, she jumped at the chance.

Six months later, I found myself sitting in front of an intimidating interview panel of eight eminent figures in science including: Greenfield herself, who had by this point been made a baroness by Tony Blair; Dr Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief of Nature; and Professor Sir John Krebs, former head of the Natural Environment Research Council. I was the wild-card candidate but that meant I had the advantage of having nothing to lose. I knew I didn’t have the scientific qualifications they wanted, but back in 2001, I doubted anyone had the combination of media and hard science they were after. My approach was to argue that what they really needed was someone who combined a deep understanding of the needs of the media with the ability to help scientists speak English. The last thing they needed was an academic. The gamble paid off. Just to drive home the point that they were taking a risk, they offered me the job on £10,000 less than the advertised annual salary, suggesting that they would divert that money into recruiting someone with a PhD. I didn’t care. I spent the next few days announcing my new job to my incredulous friends. My adventure in the world of science had begun.

***

There has been a revolution in the culture of science in the past two decades, which has seen scientists transformed from remote figures hidden away in their ivory towers to accessible experts central to our national life. The SMC is widely acknowledged as being both a product of and a catalyst for that change. Through the stories in this book, I chart the progress of this quiet revolution, reveal what was happening behind the scenes of some of the most controversial science stories of the past twenty years, and share my concerns about the new threats facing science communication. We are now familiar with what really happens behind closed doors in politics, thanks to inside stories from spin doctors and special advisers such as Alastair Campbell and Dominic Cummings. The same cannot be said of science, but it clearly has a profound impact on our lives, particularly as we continue to grapple with a world profoundly changed by Covid-19. As a science press officer who has watched from ringside as the worlds of science and the media have collided, I hope that this book will make compelling reading for anyone interested in some of the big science questions of our day or in the complex intersection of science with politics, culture, and society at large.

Some of the stories may be familiar to people of a certain age. Some of you, for example, will recall reading about the October 2009 sacking of Professor David Nutt as the government’s chief drugs adviser (Chapter 5), or just a month later, the global furore when climate sceptics seized on an academic’s hacked emails as proof that climate science was a hoax (Chapter 6). Other chapters tell bigger stories such as the remarkable transformation of animal testing from science’s dirty little secret to a broadly accepted element of medical research (Chapter 2), or how the GM researchers who ran away from sensationalised headlines on ‘Frankenstein foods’ became the cheerleaders for a new form of media engagement, even when that meant doing battle with Prince Charles and environmental campaigners (Chapter 1). Then there is the story of how the government’s attempt to ban research on human–animal embryos led to an unprecedented fightback from scientists and patient advocates (Chapter 4). This laid the basis for future battles for the hearts and minds of politicians and the public on ethically complex issues such as human genome editing and so-called ‘three-parent babies’.

Two of the chapters move away from specific science stories and focus on the topics of science communication and journalism more broadly. In Chapter 9, I describe how, despite the SMC’s remit and our many battles with the media, I have become a huge champion of the UK’s science, health and environment journalists and am often at odds with scientists making lazy generalisations about poor reporting. And in Chapter 10, I talk about my fears that science press officers have become an endangered species, as research-intensive universities become ever more like businesses and research comms get swallowed up within their huge marketing departments.

Not all the stories I have been involved in have ended positively or fit neatly into a wider theme – or arguably even our specific remit – but they cannot be left out. The SMC did relatively little on the controversy that arose when Nobel Prize-winning biologist Sir Tim Hunt made sexist remarks at a science journalism conference in 2015, but I ended up advising him in what became a major global science story (Chapter 8). Conversely, the bitter row over research into myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), also known as chronic fatigue syndrome, is not an issue most readers will have heard about, but it contains important lessons about what we do at the SMC when research evidence and scientists come under sustained attack (Chapter 3).

The underlying theme of much of the book is that the gains of the revolution in openness need to be vigorously defended. In particular you will find stories about my repeated hard-fought battles against government moves to restrict independent scientists from speaking publicly – from the proposed anti-lobbying clause to the excessive control exerted by government comms officers over independent science communication.

***

Unlike Alastair Campbell, I never anticipated writing a book, and have not kept diaries. As a result, these stories are my own recollections of events that have happened over a period of twenty years. I have no doubt that my version of events will differ in important ways from the recollections of others who lived through them; and am equally sure that – despite my best efforts – my memories will not always be accurate. I apologise now to anyone who feels overlooked or misrepresented in these chapters. When I recently told a Home Office press officer that I was writing about the sacking of Professor David Nutt, he suggested I check that my version of events accorded with his. I politely declined his offer. This book is not intended to be an objective record of science in the media during the twenty-first century: it is my account of my time in it. Or to put it another way – this is my book, and all the things in it are what I remember. Mostly, it is about the people and the stories that touched, angered or inspired me, and the lessons learned from each, now embodied both by our centre and the network of SMCs around the world.

As someone who encourages scientists to emphasise the caveats and limitations of their work, let me add a few more. The media is a broad term used to cover very different kinds of journalism, including news and current affairs, features, documentaries, investigations and so on. As implied by our strapline – ‘where science meets the headlines’ – the SMC is focused primarily on news and current affairs, and this book reflects that. I am a great fan of investigative journalism and wish there was more of it in science, but the SMC is a small team of eight and our hands are full dealing with a 24/7 news beast that needs constant feeding.

Secondly the SMC does not claim the credit for the changes in the culture of science communication we have seen in the past two decades. In 2002 many doors had already been opened to us by organisations such as the Committee for the Public Understanding of Science and following incentives by funding bodies to reward scientists doing media work. This cultural revolution had well and truly begun; we came along as enthusiastic volunteers to man the barricades.

And a quick note on terminology: this book is a homage to specialist journalists – ‘beat’ reporters as they used to be called, who focus on one subject, gaining in-depth understanding and insight over many years. In my world these are the science, health, medical and environmental reporters, and they cover different kinds of stories. For ease of reading, I have included them all under the umbrella term of science journalists.

Similarly the SMC works with a wide range of experts, including social scientists and engineers. The latter have often lobbied us to change our name to the Science and Engineering Media Centre. We have resisted because there are no ‘engineering journalists’ and the media treats engineers as we do – as a critically important group of experts for certain stories. I have generally included them throughout as part of the broad category of SMC experts. On the whole, engineering tends to be seen as less controversial than science, which may be why engineers are sometimes neglected by the media. They are rarely accused of playing God or exposing society to new risks. My response to frustrated engineers who ask us for help in raising their media profile is, be careful what you wish for.

***

I did not set out to become a campaigner for openness in science or to spend so much of my time arguing for a separation of science from government communication. But the SMC’s philosophy and outlook have emerged from the stories we got involved with and the battles we fought. If we are more strident than some about the need for scientists to be free from institutional constraints, it’s because we have seen how these restrictions can take experts out of the public debate when they are most needed. People often ask me for evidence that such restrictions are harmful to the public. That is hard to prove, and for every scientist prevented from speaking to the media others are thankfully able and willing to help. But I hope that by the end of the book readers will agree with me that allowing more of the UK’s scientists to speak to the media can only be good for our national discourse.

When I joined the SMC, I assumed I would spend some years in science before moving on. But twenty years later, I am still here. When I set out, the narrative of science in the media was one of a culture clash between two fields that were once described as ‘poor bedfellows’. Quentin Cooper, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Material World, once attempted to explain why tensions between the two were inevitable: ‘Science values detail, precision, the impersonal, the technical, the lasting, facts, numbers and being right. Journalism values brevity, approximation, the personal, the colloquial, the immediate, stories, words and being right now.’

But in an organisation set up precisely because of this clash of cultures, I found something in science that mirrors what I most value about journalism. The scientific method and the journalistic principle of impartiality are both mechanisms aimed at rising above bias and politics to reveal facts and truths that can be conveyed to the public. Such an idealised version of science and the media will be seen as horribly naive by readers who see both disciplines failing to live up to these standards on a daily basis. Others actively want science to embrace politics and disagree with me that this can undermine public trust. But I am sticking to my view that the aspiration, embodied in both science and journalism, of seeking objective and impartial information is needed more than ever in our polarised post-truth world.

People who dislike what the SMC does love to point out that I joined a far-left revolutionary group in my college days, and imply that I have brought some kind of political agenda into the world of science. The first bit of this is true. I did become a communist at college and was politically active for several years. The second bit, however, is not. Unlike some of my former comrades, I was never a very dedicated communist and always much more interested in pursuing a career in media relations.

Far from bringing any political views into science, I have become ever more convinced that science should try hard to maintain a clear separation from politics. Many will say that this is also naive, but I feel that one of the USPs of science is that the scientific method and its associated rigour mean that the public can trust the integrity of research.

In 2013, I was contacted by the honours committee to ask if I would accept an OBE for my services to science. Most people would not have to think twice before proudly accepting. For me, things were not so straightforward. I had met my husband-to-be, a proud Belfast republican, on a protest outside the BBC against the broadcast ban on Gerry Adams. When the offer arrived, we had a short conversation in which he confirmed that he would not leave me if I accepted, but asked that I never mention it in front of him again. It was a deal. As the saying goes, OBE should really stand for ‘Other Buggers’ Efforts’, and I appreciated the recognition it brought for the work of the whole SMC team, past and present, and for science press officers everywhere who rarely get recognised. I also knew that it was nothing to do with approval by the British Empire, and everything to do with the science honours committee.

***

This book was largely written in a short sabbatical in the summer of 2019. The original plan was to get it out by the summer of 2020. But my book about science in the media was put on hold because of the biggest science story of our times – the Covid pandemic. Returning to my draft after an exhausting and often overwhelming eighteen months, I was struck by how the huge cultural changes I relay in this book had prepared the scientific community for a story like no other. Scientific controversies such as Climategate, GM foods or the ‘statin wars’ had all been a training ground for Covid. The public need for scientists to engage with them via the news media had never been greater. Lives depended on it, as people looked to science for answers about vaccines, mask-wearing, social contact with others, the safety of schools and much more. The idea that science communication was a niche or trivial part of working in science, far less important than the actual proper business of being a scientist, gave way to my vision – that communicating science to the public is a vital, central part of being a great scientist.

1

THE GM WARS

How scientists fought the ‘Frankenfoods’ narrative

I ONCE WATCHED Tim Radford, the Guardian’s former science editor, tell a room full of eminent plant scientists that they should have enjoyed the media feeding frenzy on the dangers of GM crops during the late 1990s. He argued that headlines like ‘Frankenstein Foods Horror’ had offered researchers a God-given opportunity to explain the science behind this new plant-breeding technique to an engaged but worried public. Looking out at the audience I could see the bewildered scientists trying to process this alien message. Seeing their work presented as a scare story had been their worst nightmare. Of course, Radford was right – they may not have wanted to see GM on the front page of every red top, but once it was there, the best thing to do was to embrace it. Unfortunately, few saw it that way at the time – and their reluctance to engage with the media had disastrous consequences for their work.

GM foods are produced from organisms that have had changes introduced into their DNA through genetic engineering as opposed to traditional cross-breeding. The first GM food approved for release in the USA in 1994 was called Flavr Savr – a tomato variety produced by US company Calgene, and sold as a paste in UK supermarkets. The tomato was genetically engineered to have a longer shelf life and by all accounts proved popular with consumers. The arrival of this new technology in the 1990s had been met with a furious reaction from campaigning bodies such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, which saw GM as a risk to human health and the environment as well as an opportunity for huge multinationals like agricultural giant Monsanto to consolidate their control of the food chain.

Newspaper headlines like ‘GM Food “threatens the planet” and ‘Is GM the New Thalidomide?’ became par for the course. When then prime minister Tony Blair came out in support of GM, he was variously portrayed by the press as the Grim Reaper or Frankenstein. Public concern mounted as the headlines piled up. In March 1998, the supermarket chain Iceland announced that it would ban all GM foods; other UK chains soon followed. In 1999, Prince Charles made his opposition to GM known. The Daily Mail led with ‘Charles: My fears over the safety of GM foods’. The prince spoke for those who didn’t like the idea of meddling with ‘natural’ food and objected that scientists were taking ‘mankind into realms that belong to God and to God alone’. In Alastair Campbell’s diaries of the period, the spin doctor reveals that he advised the PM to stop advocating for the technology.

Campbell’s diaries also reveal that he suggested to Blair that it ought to be the scientists making the case for GM, not the politicians. The problem was that the UK’s mild-mannered plant scientists were ill-equipped for the job. These were the days when most scientists were media shy. Plant scientists had always been the poor relation to medical researchers in terms of media interest, so the sudden and unprecedented demand to go head-to-head with media-savvy non-governmental organisations was completely bewildering to most GM researchers. Some rose to the task, but most ran in the opposite direction, only to then watch in despair as their area of science was repeatedly misrepresented in the news.

Meanwhile, scientific evidence to support the judicious use of GM was mounting. The Farm Scale Evaluations on GM in 2003, the report from the Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment in 2004, and a major report by the chief scientific adviser to the UK government in 2004 all built on the global scientific consensus that GM was safe and, when used carefully, need not have a negative impact on the environment. Our challenge at the SMC was to persuade plant scientists that it wasn’t enough to do the research; they also needed to get out there and talk about it.

Our first significant encounter with the GM story was inauspicious. It ended with the editor of a national newspaper calling for my head on a plate and me believing that my adventure in science had come to an inglorious end just months after it had started.

It began in 2002 with a call from Dr Mark Tester, a senior lecturer in plant biology from the University of Cambridge who had been working on drought-resistant GM crops. Tester explained that he had been involved as an adviser on a forthcoming TV drama called Fields of Gold for the BBC, co-written by then-editor of the Guardian Alan Rusbridger and scriptwriter Ronan Bennett. The plot followed the fictional story of a young photographer, played by Anna Friel, who discovers that a GM superbug is killing elderly people and wildlife and threatening global havoc. Like most of the plant scientists I had met, Tester was a Guardian-reading environmentalist and had been pleased to be recommended as a scientific adviser by Tim Radford.

But this initial pleasure had evaporated when Tester returned from an extended trip to his home country of Australia to find the final rushes of the two-part drama on his doormat. The viewing was not a happy one. Tester felt the film-makers had either ignored his advice or stretched what he said was theoretically plausible to support a sensationalised storyline. He feared the drama would encourage uninformed anti-GM hysteria. Having contacted the production team to request some changes, Tester was told that he had missed the deadline and he was now horrified that his name was going to be associated with the drama. At first, I urged him to relax. It was only a drama after all, and discerning viewers should be trusted to see it as such. But Tester was determined to put on record that the science was sensational and inaccurate. I suggested an opinion piece in a broadsheet and that perhaps the Guardian – despite its links to the drama – would be the best home for it. I reasoned that although the paper probably would not welcome the fact that the main scientific adviser wanted to distance himself from it, it might feel it was smart to give him the space to do so. I therefore sent an email to Tim Radford, suggesting that given that Tester was keen to write something, it might be better published there than in rival papers who would be only too pleased to ‘have a pop at the Guardian’. It proved to be a fateful email.

In the meantime, alarm bells were ringing elsewhere. My initial argument that we should take a relaxed attitude to a TV drama was not chiming with the scientists and press officers who had been working hard for several years – with little success – to get a more accurate representation of GM crops in the UK press. Bob Ward, who led the media team at the Royal Society, and Ray Mathias, Head of Science Communication at the John Innes Centre, a world-class plant science research institute based in Norwich, had been contacted by the BBC and told that the broadcaster wanted the film to prompt a wider discussion on GM. Producers wanted scientists to take part in a web debate immediately after each episode aired. A great idea, but it showed that the BBC was not treating this as just a standard Saturday night drama – there were no expert debates after Spooks! One BBC employee told Mark Tester that the drama would ‘show the GM conspiracy as it really is’, while the corporation’s website declared that one of the aims of the drama was ‘tapping into a very real fear, to make people think about what they eat’. As the broadcast date approached, Rusbridger was quoted as saying that Fields of Gold ‘will – if it succeeds – engage a mass audience and make them question the issues behind it’. Even the actors were buying into the educational aspects of the drama. Max Beesley, who played the heroic anti-GM farmer, told the Daily Express: ‘People are going to think it’s sensationalism because it’s television, but I think that it’s very close to what actually goes on.’

With concern growing among scientists, I felt under pressure to do something. I still didn’t want to overreact, but equally waiting passively to see what impact it might have was probably not the bold and proactive approach the scientific community was hoping for from the SMC. Then I had an idea. Thanks to Dr Tester, we had a copy of the drama. Why not invite scientists to watch a private screening of the film, get their responses and circulate them in advance? It seemed in line with our mission to move scientists onto the front foot.

We bought the popcorn and invited ten eminent plant scientists and their press officers to a film show. Our sole interest was in the science that drove the plot – specifically the central idea that the effects of GM could jump across species from crops to animals to humans – so I urged the scientists to limit their comments to what was scientifically plausible rather than comment on the quality of the acting or cinematography. After several years of bruising headlines, they did not hold back. Professor Phil Mullineaux from the John Innes Centre described it as ‘the BBC’s answer to the X-Files, where the science is complete fantasy’. Many of them lamented a missed opportunity for a nuanced debate about this complex issue.

By far the strongest statement came from Lord May, president of the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science, and former chief scientific adviser to the UK government. He hadn’t been able to join us at the SMC showing, but watched it later that day. He did not mince his words:

This ludicrous piece of alarmist science fiction, which is presented as a realistic examination of the issues surrounding GM, is a disgrace . . . This hysterically inaccurate treatment of an important and many-sided public issue shows the same lack of sensitivity as, say, a drama that portrayed asylum-seekers as murderous aliens from Mars. The BBC will be abdicating its responsibility to its viewers by broadcasting this error-strewn piece of propaganda, which most certainly does not help to promote informed public debate around the issues.

With the Guardian seemingly not keen to run Mark Tester’s piece, after some discussion with the other press officers involved, we agreed to send the responses to science correspondents at the Daily Telegraph and The Times – papers perceived by scientists we were working with at the time as having a track record of accurate reporting on GM. The next day was a shock to me, so I can only imagine how it felt to Alan Rusbridger. The two papers had splashed the ‘row’ on their front pages. I knew I had inadvertently waded into something bigger than the science of GM when Roger Highfield, then science editor of the Telegraph, called up later that day saying his editors wanted more. I was later told that for Charles Moore, the conservative and ‘unionist’ editor of the Telegraph, the criticism of Fields of Gold was a double delight as Ronan Bennett, Rusbridger’s co-author on the drama, was a former Irish Republican who had once been accused of and briefly imprisoned for shooting a policeman in Belfast. I told him there was nothing more to offer and that neither we nor the scientists were interested in using this against the Guardian. I spent much of that day avoiding the phone. If it wasn’t The Times and the Telegraph wanting more, it was the rest of the press yelling at me for not giving them the story. The scientists meanwhile were thrilled. Lord May, who had been sceptical about the establishment of the SMC, sent me a congratulatory note to say that he could now see what our purpose was.

Any sense of achievement on my part, however, was short-lived. Soon after I turned on Newsnight to see Rusbridger claiming that the SMC was a sinister, pro-biotech ‘lobby group’ with an axe to grind against the Guardian. He referenced the email I had sent to Tim Radford, claiming it proved that the SMC had an anti-Guardian agenda as I was offering the criticisms around as a terrific story for anyone wanting to dump on the BBC and the Guardian. The following week, the Guardian’s sister paper the Observer ran a piece by Ronan Bennett attacking the scientific community’s response to the drama. Under the headline ‘The conspiracy to undermine the truth about our GM drama’, Bennett described the SMC as the ‘lobbying organisation’ behind the story and singled out the industry supporters from our list of donors without acknowledging others. ‘Its funders include DuPont, Merlin Biosciences, Pfizer, PowderJect and Smith & Nephew – all biotech or pharmaceutical companies with a direct interest in the promotion of the technologies the drama explores.’ Bennett claimed that Mark Tester had changed his mind about his scientific advice, a claim Tester denied, and argued that scientific opinion remained deeply divided over GM.

The next day I called Steve Connor, then science editor of the Independent, offering him my version of events to ensure it was in the public domain. None of this felt like fun. It was May. The SMC had only opened its doors in April. The words of Alastair Campbell were ringing in my ears – you have really fucked up when the press officer becomes the story.

In June, Rusbridger wrote a three-page letter to my employers at the Royal Institution, Britain’s eminent science research body, raising questions about my role and my suitability for the job:

Ms Fox was, as I am sure you aware, a contributor to Living Marxism . . . a magazine and movement which grew out of the Revolutionary Communist Party. Her sister, Claire, remains a director and leading figure within the group. This was an organisation which praised the IRA and Saddam Hussein, defended the right of racists publicly to deny that the Holocaust occurred while comparing environmentalists to Nazis . . . I would be interested to learn whether she has disclosed these facts to her board.

The Royal Institution passed the letter to the SMC’s board to deal with and I spent a nervous few weeks wondering how the board members would react. Rusbridger’s theory that my work on Fields of Gold was motivated by a malign political agenda sounded plausible. And I don’t doubt he believed it. But it wasn’t true. Nothing that had happened in those few weeks had anything to with my past involvement in radical left politics. Every decision had been made alongside my immediate colleagues in the SMC and scientists and press officers from leading research institutes. At the next board meeting, I offered to leave the room while they decided my fate. The board did not feel the need. They had examined everything we had done and were satisfied that Rusbridger’s complaint was a classic case of shooting the messenger. I lived to fight another day.

I did, however, have my own nagging doubts about whether we had strayed too close to the kind of media campaigns I had been involved with in my previous roles for organisations such as CAFOD. Working for an overseas aid agency desperate to get the media interested in developing-world issues had made me especially accomplished at media campaigning and PR stunts. With hindsight I certainly felt that offering the GM story to only two newspapers had been the wrong decision and had fuelled Rusbridger’s suspicion that there was a more sinister agenda at play. My reservations stimulated a good discussion about the positioning of the SMC. Were we to become a sort of Greenpeace for science or adopt a more cautious approach more in line with mainstream science? We decided to tread more carefully in future.

In the event, nothing quite like this has ever happened since, so it’s hard to judge how we would handle such a scenario today. Maybe we would ask scientists to watch the programme when it aired and then send their reactions to all news outlets at same time. But it’s worth saying that the science press officers we worked with back then felt a sense of deep satisfaction that the viewing public could enjoy an entertaining Saturday night drama safe in the knowledge that the UK’s best plant scientists felt it was more akin to science fiction than science fact.

It is also worth pointing out that Fields of Gold aired at a time when the Guardian was seen by some in science as an anti-GM newspaper. Exactly a year later in April 2003, I was a guest at the launch of Life, the paper’s new science supplement. Its contributors included Ian Sample, James Randerson, Alok Jha and David Adam – all excellent science reporters who had cut their teeth on specialist titles such as New Scientist and Nature News. They all remained on the paper after Life closed and the Guardian’s science coverage remains among the best. Maybe there were positives for both the SMC and the newspaper from the events surrounding the drama, even if it was a bruising experience on all sides.

My next major encounter with GM came hot on the heels of this first one, but thankfully it involved the SMC doing something it was much more comfortable with – supporting scientists to get the best possible media coverage for important scientific findings on a controversial trial. It was Professor Chris Pollock who initiated our involvement by asking me for a meeting in the summer of 2002 to discuss the findings of the Farm Scale Evaluations (FSEs) – a five-year-long series of field trials designed to test whether GM had a negative impact on biodiversity.

The trials had started back in 1998, when three types of genetically modified herbicide-tolerant (GMHT) crops (beet, spring oilseed rape and maize) were on the verge of entering commercial agriculture in the UK. They had passed most of the government’s regulatory risk-assessment procedures, which focused on genetic stability and gene-flow issues, but there were concerns about their impact on the environment. English Nature, the government’s own advisory body, raised fears about the potential future role that GMHT crops would have, if commercialised, on already-struggling farmland wildlife. Several ecology studies had identified the intensification of agriculture since the 1950s as the major reason for the decline measured in farmland wildlife. Many organisations and environmental scientists were legitimately concerned that the herbicide management of GMHT crops in commercial use would further exacerbate a decline in wildlife if they encouraged very strong levels of weed control, which in turn would reduce invertebrate and bird numbers.

It was in response to these concerns that in October 1998 Michael Meacher MP, then minister of state for the environment, announced the FSE trials. Importantly, the trials were never intended to study gene flow or food safety, both of which had already been assessed and deemed to present a sufficiently low risk to human health and the environment to allow commercialisation. The core purpose of the FSEs was to establish whether the management of GM crops had a perceptibly greater impact on wildlife compared with standard crops.

Professor Pollock, who was a leading figure in GM science and director of the respected Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research in Aberystwyth, had been appointed as chair of the FSE steering group and I had been in touch with him right from the very earliest days of the SMC. In fact, in his typically straight-talking fashion, he had been quick to communicate his reservations about our approach with Fields of Gold and was keen for us to focus more on helping plant scientists facilitate better-quality reporting on GM research. Valuing his input, I was all too happy to accept his request for a meeting in the summer of 2002.

Before either of us had even taken a sip of tea Pollock expressed his discontent with the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra), declaring, ‘Defra press office is handling this story over my dead body.’ Instead he wanted the SMC to handle the announcement and press briefing for the results of the FSE trials, working with the scientists involved to prepare them for speaking to the media. He had got my attention. The professor went on to say that poor media handling by Defra, political meddling by Meacher, and the anti-GM editorial stance of many of the big newspapers had meant that the public had never really seen balanced and accurate reporting of the experiment. That pained him. His modest request was that the hundreds of ecologists who had worked so hard on the trials would get to have their say when the results were published. I was in.

Professor Pollock was not only a great researcher. He also embodied the philosophy of science that I fell in love with, especially the need for science to resist politicisation and to strive to achieve impartiality. One of the phrases he used when explaining why he did not want political interference or spin in the communication of the FSE trials was: ‘If it’s not open, it’s not science.’ It is a phrase that has had a huge influence on our approach.

The results of the trials were due to be published in 2003 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society and I found the months of preparation for publication fascinating. I spent a day at one of the trial sites and marvelled at the low-tech nature of their experiments. How do you test whether a GM crop damages biodiversity? Well, you literally collect, identify and count the number of bugs in the GM fields and then compare and contrast them with the equivalent figures from conventional fields. It amused me that even the ecologists didn’t always recognise the insects captured in white plastic pots and had to consult a huge bug field guide to check what some of them were.

The tension mounted as the publication date approached. There was a lot riding on these results for both sides in the ‘GM wars’, with people hoping they would be either a green light or the death knell for the controversial new technology. By that time, the authors knew the scientific results were, as so often, not going to be that clear cut. For two of the three crops (beet and rape), the level of biodiversity was found to be higher in the fields of conventional plants than in the GM ones. But for the third crop (maize), it was the other way round – the level was higher in the fields of GM plants than in the conventional ones. To add to the complexity, the difference in biodiversity was significantly bigger between different types of crop, regardless of whether they were GM or non-GM varieties.

If reported in a fair and measured way, the trials represented neither the green light nor the death knell, which is exactly the kind of complexity and nuance the media hates. My job was to help prepare the scientists to present the findings clearly and accessibly and to anticipate the main questions from the media. I have never been a big fan of tightly controlled press conferences and am wary of the ‘key messages’ and ‘agreed lines’ beloved of many PR officers. At the SMC we prefer to encourage authors to stick to the science and go for maximum openness. Critically, preparation for our press conferences involves ensuring that scientists are not hyping their findings and doing everything possible to maximise the chances of measured and accurate coverage. I also tried to prepare them for the backlash from anti-GM campaigners and for the high chance that some journalists would go straight to campaigners and lead with their reaction. If the data had shown a clear result against GM, the scientists would probably have been lauded by anti-GM campaigners. But the more ambiguous findings would prompt lots of criticism of the trial. I was also wary of the reverse: pro-GM campaigners trying to spin the findings as strong evidence in favour of GM. The goal was to generate coverage that reflected the nuanced scientific findings in the context of accurate reporting of the trials themselves.

The results of the study were under embargo – a long-standing ‘gentleman’s agreement’ whereby journalists are allowed to see results a day or two before the time and date that they are officially published. Both science and the media benefit from the embargo system. Ensuring that the world’s media all publish a story at exactly the same time means you can dramatically improve its visibility and impact, while also giving reporters time to check facts, set up filming and interviews, speak to authors and approach third-party experts.

On this occasion, however, the Guardian splashed the key findings on the front page days before the embargo lifted. When we contacted the paper asking it to take the report down, it claimed that no embargo had been broken and it had been sent a leaked copy of the paper. I disagreed. All the science and environment reporters knew the paper was going to be published in an embargoed journal and launched at an embargoed press conference. It was not the first or last time we would disagree with journalists on what constitutes a broken embargo, but it was the first test of an approach that I had brought with me into science – never reward a newspaper for breaking an embargo by lifting it, thereby sacrificing your entire media strategy and the months of preparation for a press launch. Despite other journalists yelling down the phone at me that we had to lift the embargo, I persuaded the scientists and the journal to hold their nerve. We issued a statement pointing out that the leaked findings were an early draft and therefore not accurate and confirmed that the press briefing would go ahead as planned.

The day before the conference, scientists arrived for a practice event hosted in the SMC. We had decided that wine was in order and by the time the mock briefing was coming to an end several of us were quite merry. The next morning, I poked my head around the doors of the beautiful and historic library at the Royal Institution to see a room full of familiar faces – mostly science and environment reporters, who tended to cover GM more responsibly and accurately than their colleagues in politics and consumer affairs. The press briefing was reserved for these journalists, our standard policy to ensure that scientists could present their findings directly to the press and respond to their questions, without being diverted by other stakeholders wanting to grandstand or ask longer, more convoluted questions. The media could and would go to third parties after the press briefing. Then word reached the green room that Michael Meacher had turned up and walked straight past the press officer on the door.

Although Meacher had commissioned the FSEs, he was regarded with suspicion by scientists. They resented the fact that he was openly anti-GM when they felt he should have been neutral, and they suspected him of leaking secret details about the research to members of Greenpeace and the Soil Association. With minutes to spare, and preferring to deal with the minister before the press conference rather than during it, I dashed off to find him, took a deep breath and asked him to leave. He was extremely displeased but obliged, which was just as well because I didn’t have a plan B. I personally escorted him down the Royal Institute’s iconic staircase and on to the street. Only then did I realise that I had been filmed by several camera crews. Fortunately, throwing Meacher out of a press conference did my reputation no harm within the scientific community.

The press conference went beautifully. The journalists asked probing questions but listened carefully to the answers. It was exactly what the scientists had wanted – their day in court to explain the science to a group of journalists who were keen to report what they had learned. Predictably some of the next day’s headlines were negative, reflecting the narrative of the previous reporting. But underneath the headlines, the articles themselves were much more nuanced than previous coverage and included quotes and facts from the conference.

Despite the success of the media work around the FSEs, however, the wider debate about GM raged on for several more years. One problem with working in news is that it’s hard to escape. Building sandcastles with my young son on a beach in France in the summer of 2008, I caught sight of a gentleman reading the Daily Telegraph