In the Wake of Scientific Controversy: The Chilling of Scientific Dissent in Agricultural Biotechnology? Project Summary This project explores the claim that the highly politicized scientific controversies over agricultural biotechnology in the late 1990s have a chilling effect on scientists who currently pursue questions about health and ecological risks of genetically-modified (GM) crops. Even as institutional support of such dissenting research has grown in the early 2000s, the field remains controversial and vulnerable to political, economic, professional, and social pressures that favor the continued development and deployment of GM crops. This proposal examines one arena of that influence by investigating a group of scientists who have remained committed to researching the potential risks of GM crops, but who have avoided becoming the target of professional attack or censure. These scientific dissenters, who have received little attention, occupy a potentially critical position in debates over the future of agbiotech. Through semi-structured interviews with these scientists, observation of their professional conduct at conferences and hearings, and examination of the scientific literature and public media that document their research, this project explores three basic questions: 1. Do scientists anticipate resistance to their work, and how does this affect how they approach their research programs? 2. How is scientific dissent performed in terms of presenting results, communicating significance, and creatiing scientific and lay audiences? 3. How are boundaries between science and policy maintained, deconstructed, altered, or surmounted in the practice of scientific dissent?
Intellectual Merit: Following in the tradition of studying scientific controversies, this project focuses on the janus-faced character of scientific dissent. One face of dissent signifies the rational and democratic nature of science as a path to useful and reliable knowledge; the other reveals the uncertainty in science and thereby threatens its authority to guide social action and public policy. As such, dissent serves as an ideal site to explore the power and vulnerability of science in a field with high political relevance.The proposed analysis invokes the concepts of boundary-work (Gieryn 1999) and science as performance as lenses through which to understand the complex landscape of actors, institutions, and rhetorical resources in the agbiotech arena. Dissenting scientists must simultaneously do enough boundary-work to make their research relevant and somehow steer clear of the tempest of technopolitical boundary contests that could undermine their careers. Their performances of their data as legitimate, of their research programs as socially desirable, and of their expertise as relevant to policy debates reveal the complexity of managing the science-policy boundary in both professional and public discourse.
Broader Impacts While it is possible that the strategic practices of scientific dissenters have created a protected niche for researching the health and environmental risks of GM crops, this project may reveal a chilling effect, in which highly politicized scientific controversies have dulled the sharpness of scientific inquiry and muted the power of researchers to engage critically with scientific and technological governance. Investigating these subtle effects has implications for the management of dissent within the scientific community, the capacity for scientific institutions to embody the public interest under conditions of political and economic pressure, and the process of incorporating scientific data and expertise into public policy.
