The prize is right
Tom Wakeford picks a deserving winner of the Pants on Fire award
Friday July 27, 2001
http://www.education.guardian.co.uk/higher/columnist/story/0,9826,528429,00.html

I have just submitted a nomination for a special prize. It is open to academic, government or corporate scientists and has been presented every month for the last couple of years.

The Pants On Fire award is the prize offered for scientists' services to lying and deception by Professor Bullsh*t, a friendly bloke in a white coat who works in a virtual laboratory on the web.

Until recently, my nominee, Dr M V Rao, was vice-chancellor of the University of Hyderabad, one of India's own ivy league of central universities. Now he tours the state of Andhra Pradesh, telling any of its 83m population who will listen about the marvels of GM crops. Acting as a witness to a citizens' jury in Medak District last month, he started to make claims for the technology that caused his audience to immediately sense underwear combustion was underway. "We have published a biotechnology policy which states that by the year 2007 there should be no more hunger in the state," he proclaimed.

Rao had to respond to accusations from the 19 poor and marginal farmers on the jury that GM crops would lead to a rise in unemployment in their villages. New crops genetically engineered for herbicide tolerance not only eliminate the need for manual weeding that employs hundreds of thousands of people across the state each year, but will also come as a package along with mechanised sowing and harvesting technologies, throwing yet more people out of work.

"It is true that mechanization displaces labour, in particular women, but the changes also lead to the creation of new employment," spluttered the eminent plant scientist, without specifying what sorts of jobs these would be.

"Out of every 100 people in our population at the time of our independence from Britain, 84 were farmers. Now 74 are farmers. In the US, only two in a 100 people are farmers. The process of job diversification they have undergone takes time, but we should move in this direction."

The members of the jury were visibly shocked. Under the kind of industrialised agriculture Rao was proposing they would be driven off their land and forced by hunger to move to cities, where unemployment is already high.

Farmers from their region who fell into debt had already been sucked into a form of bonded labour in the brick kilns of Hyderabad, where conditions were unregulated and dangerous.

At the moment, most of those remaining were able to ensure their families were fed by growing crops themselves on their own land. How could this scientist claim that by driving them off their land, and replacing their jobs with machines, their food security would be anything other than destroyed?

Having heard of a genetically engineered plant that contained a gene from a deep-sea fish, one juror, Anjamma, retorted: "I think these scientists and all their equipment should be thown into the bottom of the sea." She was furious, yet Rao continued to attempt to placate her with his bland and largely baseless predictions.

Most of the witnesses had been happy to stand to present their evidence to the jury, who sat in a semi-circle under a bamboo and thatch roof in the hot monsoon winds.

Rao, however, insisted on sitting behind a desk, which he had demanded so he could quote from official reports and projections. The desk and the papers became a symbolic barrier between his self-justificatory and narrow scientific mindset, and the reality of 14 female and five male farmers, who knew far more about feeding themselves and their families than he evercould.

So, on their behalf, I hope Professor Bullsh*t will consider Rao for the award, for grossly irresponsible predictions of a genetically engineered nirvana that are about as likely to come true as the promise from another pro-GM witness, Syngenta, of miracle, drought resistant crops that can grow in the desert.

The virtual professor lives on an award-winning website run by the Norfolk Genetic Information Network. [http://www.ngin.org.uk]

Jonathan Matthews, its creator, is the director of a school teaching English to foreign students in Norwich. Unable to take scientists on in person because of a back injury, he challenges them from cyberspace, helping to provide an intelligent and humorous assault on the uncritical promotion of the virtues of GM crops.

The second science-related prize is only open to Indians. The Green Scientist award is an annual demonstration of the way in which many scientists on the sub-continent, especially those working with NGOs, are resisting the western trend to focus purely on short-term wealth creation and instead are devoting themselves to the long-term benefit of their fellow citizens.

The Deccan Development Society, co-hosts of the Andhra Pradesh farmers' jury with the communications programme of the University of Hyderabad, is part of India's thriving NGO sector.  The hundreds of NGOs working on issues of sustainable development across the country were asked to nominate an individual for an annual Green Scientist award "to highlight the state of environmental research in India and to encourage and honour commendable efforts".

This year, India's Green Scientist award was presented to Vinod Sharma who has pioneered malaria control methods that do not use toxic insecticides, such as DDT, but instead attempt to help communities irradiate the mosquito vector's breeding ground, thereby permanantly defeating a disease that kills 3,000 people worldwide every day.

The prize is awarded by the New Delhi-based magazine Down to Earth, which is a brilliant example of a publication that critically evaluates the potential of scientific developments to benefit those most in need on the sub-continent.  It catalysed the formation of a generation of scientists in India who no longer believe the mantra of Nehru, their first prime minister, who stated "dams and laboratories are the new temples of modern India".

Instead, they want science to descend from its artificial pedestels and get back in touch with the earth.

In Britain, we only award scientists for the originality or technical brilliance of their research, rarely to demonstrate their responsibility to society or the environment. India's community-based organisations and scientists are now showing the way to supposedly developed countries like ours, but it remains to be seen whether our scientific community can be roused from its self-absorption.