Rebecca Nesbit's Blog, page 6

Book Club: Which characters do you have sympathy for?

This is one of the book club questions for my novel A Column on Smoke. Please add your thoughts in the comment section below – I will be very interested to read them.

All of them! Some to a much greater extent though.

I can identify with Sally’s challenges pretty much throughout. I can understand how pressure from her colleagues would prevent her from doing what she knows to be right, even though high moral values are very important to her. Her treatment of Mel and Darren is where my sympathy wanes.

I can empathise with Paul’s struggle to properly move on from his relationship with Katie. If you told everyone you were going to make a new life in America only to come back when it fails, that’s hard to deal with in itself.

Darren’s unwillingness to question Vangelis’ choice seems to me a sign of weakness. I can, however, still identify with his commitment to his results (albeit misguided). His relationship with Sally may not always make her life easier but he is always well intentioned and in many ways he is a very good friend to her.

Amy I have great sympathy for, as does Sally. The final stages of your PhD can be hard and confidence-sapping. I’m not sure she has it in her to be a great scientist, so I think any help that her colleagues give her towards getting an academic job may not be doing her any favours.

Vangelis is perhaps least deserving of sympathy. He brought about his own downfall. He clearly cares for his employees though, and is passionate about science. Both these things, however, have perhaps become mixed up with his ego and desire to be a visible leader.

Even Judith I have some sympathy for. Technicians do vital jobs which can be undervalued, and socially it could be hard to fit in with colleagues who are much younger than her.

I think the characters I identify least with are Sally’s mother and brother, partly for their complete unwillingness/inability to properly engage in anything to do with Sally’s science (or life in her brother’s case).

Book Club: Why did you decide to write a novel?

This is one of the book club questions for my novel A Column on Smoke. Please add your thoughts in the comment section below – I will be very interested to read them.

I can’t quite remember, and looking back I’m almost surprised that I was brave enough to give it a go. When I was at junior school my career ambition was to be an author, but my English lessons in the first few years of secondary school turned me off reading and therefore writing.

It was many years before I started reading again and my interest in fiction writing started to come back.

Once I came up with the story I didn’t want to keep it all inside. I also hate the way that people against GM can be very insulting about GM scientists. I wanted to give a more realistic portrayal of university scientists and their motivations.

During my PhD I started writing and really enjoyed it, though I didn’t get very far. In 2010 I was weekly commuting to Cambridge and wanted to make the most of my evenings, so I got out what I’d written. It was terrible – I didn’t use a single sentence. With the help of my writing group (Cambridge Writers) I started writing seriously. I don’t think I would have had the skills or dedication to write a novel without a writing group, and it made writing feel like a normal hobby open to everyone.

Writing allows me to use any difficult situations in my life in a very positive way, developing them into something larger which hopefully people can identify with. I like drama, when it happens to other people. So perhaps writing is a way to indulge in drama which is thankfully fairly absent from my real life.

Book Club: Do you portray life as a scientist accurately?

This is one of the book club questions for my novel A Column on Smoke. Please add your thoughts in the comment section below – I will be very interested to read them.

Yes, I think so. I wanted it to be as accurate as possible, with lots of different characters who you encounter in the lab. I wanted to portray the pressures which scientists experience, particularly the pressure to publish, and explore how this can affect their lives and their judgements.

The blurring of personal and professional life I think is also very common for scientists. I suspect many people will also identify with the power hierarchies as students, research scientists, professors and technicians all interact.

I would be very interested to hear which bits people felt did or didn’t match well with their experiences in the lab. What characterises life in the lab for you?

Book Club: Does your novel give a balanced view of GM?

This is one of the book club questions for my novel A Column on Smoke. Please add your thoughts in the comment section below – I will be very interested to read them.

No, and I don’t believe a novel could or even should. A Column of Smoke has characters with a wide range of opinions and I hope that it will cause readers to stop and question their own views.

To me, balance is looking at the evidence around a wide range of views. It’s about trying to free ourselves of biases and preconceptions. To fill my book with unbiased characters would be entirely dis-satisfying.

All the characters are biased – they have developed their point of view based on their interests. Mel, for example, has a pragmatic view of patents and the relationship between business and biotechnology. Sally is more idealistic so doesn’t want this to be true.

Do you think fiction could, or should, be un-biased? Is it more important when a book covers an issue such as GM? In the case of A Column of Smoke, Which characters do you agree/disagree with and why?

Book Club: A Column of Smoke

To celebrate the publication of my novel ‘A Column of Smoke‘ I’m going to dedicate some posts to book club style questions. Please ask more questions and join in the discussion under each post. The first one is perhaps the most obvious:

How did you come up with the plot?

While I was doing my PhD at Rothamsted Research a friend saw me reading The Girl at the Lion D’Or by Sebastian Falkes. He pointed out that ‘The Girl at’ was a common book title but ‘The Girl at Rothamsted Research’ doesn’t have the same ring about it. That set me thinking about what could happen at somewhere like Rothamsted to make a sufficiently exciting plot, and fraud was an obvious answer.

It didn’t come to me in a single moment of inspiration though, and throughout the writing I came up with new ideas that were needed for the plot.

I decided on Sally’s relationship with Paul while I was still planning the story, and Vangelis’ character was also easy to create because I knew he would be the one to initiate the deception. I decided on extra characters, such as her housemates, whenever the plot needed them. The same is true of sub plots, such as Darren’s relationship with Mel – I just saw where the characters were going.

‘The Girl at Rothamsted Research’ still doesn’t have a good ring to it though, and choosing the title was the hardest part of writing the book. The title is an image taken from Sally’s views of the farmhouse as the fire is being put out.

News round-up

Mexican honey

In Mexico, a district judge in Yucatán overturned a permit issued to Monsanto in June 2012 that allowed commercial planting of Roundup-ready soybeans.

Bee keepers apparently led the protests against the permit, and the ruling followed scientific evidence presented about the threats posed by GM soy crops to honey production. The popular press were scant on the details of the threat so I’m not able to anaylse it. What is interesting is how the honey industry could be affected by the ruling (it’s a major export).

Here’s an interesting ruling about whether pollen from a GM plant counts as a GM ingredient of honey.

EU regulations

The European Union has agreed on a new approach to the cultivation of Genetically Modified Organisms. Member states can ban or restrict GMOs in their territory, rather than there being a single EU ruling for each GM variety.I can recommend this interesting analysis.

Golden rice paper retraction

There is a large legal battle going on about whether a paper on golden rice with reported ethical violations by a Chinese scientist should be retracted.

Jean-Claude Juncker, Greenpeace and ‘Madness’

This week nine environmental charities (including Greenpeace) wrote to Jean-Claude Junker requesting the abolition of the position of Chief Scientific Advisor to the President of the European Commission.

The scientific community rallied together to write counter-letters to Mr Junker, speaking out in support of the Chief Scientific Advisor position and its role in evidence-based policy making. I’m pleased to say that I’m a member of two organisations which signed one of these letters.

The environmental organisations particularly objected to the views of the current Scientific Advisor (Professor Anne Glover) on GM crops, specifically her claims that there is scientific consensus about their safety. They have 297 signatories from scientists who believe this isn’t the case. This raises questions of what a scientific consensus is but seems rather feeble compared to the organisations who have spoken about their safety (some are referenced in counter letters).

I liked this quote from Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society: “There will always be those who attack the messenger because they do not like the message but when that message is backed up by the scientific evidence, politicians should be smart enough to listen to the independent scientific experts.”

It’s sadly not hard to find examples of politicians tackling inconvenient advice by getting rid of scientists (David Nutt’s advice on illegal drugs springs to mind). It is, however, worrying that members of the environmental lobby should be keen to adopt this tactic.

The scientific community were quick to support Professor Glover, though back-up was less forthcoming when she went on to do an Owen Patterson. She called opposition to GM as ‘madness’, which in my opinion is not a vast improvement on ‘wicked’.

I was more impressed by a completely unrelated article, with a summary that included: ‘Belittling deep-held concerns won’t alleviate fears or convince doubters’.

 

Apologies if anyone read the title and hoped I would be talking about a meeting between Jean-Claude Junker, Greenpeace and a well-known band. I wish I was, but to my knowledge that’s yet to happen. Hmmm, short story material?

Go with the consensus

I wanted to quickly share some words of wisdom from Nobel Laureate Sir Paul Nurse, who I was lucky enough to see speak at a recent event in Parliament.

First, he gave a quote which speaks for itself: “Data trumps everything, even the most beautiful theory.” I hope more people can remember this when dealing with the GM crops debate.Also, he spoke of why it is generally wise to listen to the scientific consensus. The consensus view of experts reached through ongoing debate usually represents the best analysis of the best information we have available.

Disagreements are a fundamental part of increasing scientific knowledge, and when new evidence emerges it is often inconclusive.

When scientists have reached a consensus, this means that the maverick views have been considered, and almost always ended up discounted. If the mavericks have failed to convince the experts, that’s a pretty good sign that they shouldn’t convince me.

This doesn’t mean close your mind to alternative interpretations. Scientific ideas always come with some level of uncertainty (although sometimes that uncertainty is very low). New evidence may become available, and who knows what ‘facts’ we will have to reassess in the future.

I plan to take his advice. Yes I always search out different points of view, but I still work to avoid false balance and if there’s a clear message coming from the scientific community then I don’t feel compelled to listen to every dissenting voice. Fiona Fox from the Science Media Centre in London has just blogged with very similar thoughts.

I smell (a badly treated) rat

Last year I blogged about the retraction of Professor Seralini’s toxicology study on rats claiming negative health effects of eating round-up tolerant GM maize. Well, last week it was re-published, in a lower-ranking journal.

The republication has been met with a fraction of the publicity from first time around (perhaps unsurprising given that it was basically the same paper with slight re-analysis and a more political slant).

A post-publication review of the original paper stated that “the data were inconclusive, and therefore the conclusions described in the article were unreliable.” The new paper was met with the same reaction by the scientific community, again unsurprising as it is exactly the same data.

Retraction Watch has uncovered interesting aspects of the story, including doubts over the validity of the peer review for the new journal. It seems that it the review process was simply to check that the scientific content of the paper had not changed since the original paper, rather than to evaluate its scientific merits.

For me it’s been a bit of a scary story, not because I fear for my health but because it has highlighted the consequences of failings in the peer review system. This is nothing new – the problems with peer review are being widely discussed. Like our current system of democracy, it’s a system with drawbacks but an extremely valuable one to have. Unlike democracy, people are working to improve peer review.

It concerns me that a flawed paper could get through peer review, but what concerns me far more is that a paper which doesn’t hold high standards of animal welfare can be published.

Photos of rats with huge tumors from this study have been splashed around the internet. I can only think of two reasons why animals would have been allowed to live long enough for tumors to get so large. One is that they were kept alive to create more dramatic scare pictures, and the other is that the people doing the work have sufficiently little regard for welfare as to make them unsuitable for experiments using animals.

I’m disappointed that animal welfare hasn’t been more prominent in the debate, but pleased to have others who agree. Professor Bruce Chassy, Professor Emeritus of Food Safety/Nutritional Sciences, University of Illinois, said: “Seralini now states that the research was not a cancer study. If that is true, then there was no reason not to euthanize animals when tumors were first detectable. There was nothing to gain or learn. This is unethical treatment of animals.”

 

Balance, false balance and China Daily

I recently stumbled on an article in China Daily with the headline ‘Agriculture minister reaffirms safety of GM foods’. The China Daily a publication I take strange pleasure in reading, mainly trying to understand the level of censorship and fruitlessly attempting work out whether people believe any of what’s in there.

The article itself is very accurately summarised by the headline – you learn the specifics of where he was, but there’s nothing approaching analysis.

This is in complete contrast with the UK media, something we can be thankful for. Our Environment Secretary tells us of the safety of GM crops and we may get headlines such as Opponents of third world GM crops are ‘wicked’, says Environment Secretary Owen Paterson but they’re followed by other points of view. This balance reminds us to question what politicians tell us, but does it do more than that?

If you read further down, you get comments from known GM opponents, but it’s pretty thin on facts and analysis.  It’s ‘he said, she said‘ journalism.

I recently went to a debate about ‘false balance’ in the media, a common criticism of the BBC when they go in search of opponents to balance every story. You can’t invite a scientist speak in favour of GM without having a representative of the Soil Association to disagree. The trouble is that for cases such as climate change you end up with a debate which is represented 50:50 by those who believe in climate change and those who don’t. The minority view gets equal representation.

There’s a full write up of the event, but there were a few take-home points for me.

We need to represent different points of view, even when we are extremely close to a scientific consensus. We don’t need to argue whether climate change is man-made every time it is covered, but there are many legitimate ways to act on the evidence we have, and it is valuable for the media to report these differences.

Choosing the extreme points of view is one way to show ‘balance’, but it generally ignores most of the nuances. In a GM Freeze vs university scientist show-down I’m pretty much guaranteed to side with the scientist. I know really that I want to walk the middle ground, but that was too boring to present, so I don’t get to hear of the genuine concerns I should be analysing.

One of the reasons I would side with the scientist is that the ‘anti-GM lobby’ often misrepresent the facts – Seralini tells us that GM gives you cancer and so on. A great idea that someone came up with at the debate was to give a science editor the chance to fact check (we were specifically talking about the Today programme but it applies everywhere). If one interviewee says that climate change will boost global crop yields, the science editor gets the chance to say ‘well, actually…‘.

The moral of the story – be grateful for the UK press, but we need to find a better way of reporting the uncertainty and differences of opinions surrounding issues such as GM crops, and interviewees need to stick to the truth.