Susan Greenfield

Baroness Susan Greenfield CBE is a neuroscientist and Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford University. From 1998 to 2010 she was Director of the Royal Institution (RI).

She was made redundant by the RI in January 2010 and reportedly within hours of the redundancy was locked out of her grace-and-favour flat in central London. She said that she would sue the RI for sex discrimination.

She makes frequent TV and radio appearances, and has written popular science books and articles for the press. In 1998 she was awarded the Michael Faraday medal by the Royal Society for disseminating science to the public and in 1999 was elected to an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians.

She has been described as "our most visible scientist and, with her RI appointment, one of the most influential." That influence is felt at the highest levels. She has been part of a consultation with the Secretary of State for Industry on science funding. She has also given a consultative seminar to Tony Blair on the future of science in the UK and has reported, "Tony Blair is really into the meshing of private and public scientific research." She has also submitted at Blair's request a memorandum for his consideration on Genetics, Science and Risks. She is also a Forum Fellow at the World Economic Conference at Davos.

Controlling how science stories are reported

Greenfield has been at the heart of efforts to control how controversial scientific issues, like GM crops and cloning, are communicated to the public - most notably, via the Science Media Centre (SMC), which she played the key role in founding, and via her work with the largely industry-backed Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC), whom Greenfield advises.

She was pivotal in the SIRC and RI co-convening a Forum to lay down 'Guidelines on Science and Health Communication' - a code for the media and for scientists as to how science stories should be reported. Among the Forum's members were Sir John Krebs, Chairman of the UK Food Standards Agency, Lord Dick Taverne who went on to become the Chairman of Sense about Science, and Dr Michael Fitzpatrick, who is part of the Living Marxism network.

According to another member of that network, Tony Gilland, in an article for Spiked:

For Greenfield, the importance of such a code of conduct is clearly demonstrated by the frenzied media coverage generated by Arpad Pusztai's pronouncements on "poisonous" GM potatoes in February 1999.... One of the problems in this instance, says Greenfield, was the media spotlight "focusing on one maverick".

The SMC developed out of the work of the Forum, with Greenfield seeing the need to go beyond guidelines and have an organisation that would engage pro-actively with the media. Lord Melvyn Bragg, President of both the Science Media Centre and the RI, made clear in a debate in the House of Lords that

this issue has an economic dimension which is of crucial importance to this country. Put bluntly, if ignorance stirred to hysteria by sensationalism were to get in the driving seat, thousands of highly skilled and remarkable opportunities for self-fulfilment, wealth creation and knowledge formation would be lost. The more we know, the more we can make of what we know. There is the sniff of the born-again Luddite in the air, and that could be destructive to our future as a trading country whose increasing wealth depends increasingly on its brains.

Selling science's soul to private sector

Bragg's linking of commercial considerations with the role of the SMC would appear to sit happily with Greenfield's known views. She has frequently expressed her approval of the highly entrepreneurial character of contemporary science. She happily identifies herself as one of those accused of selling their souls to the private sector.

Her attitude is best exemplified by her own research funding where she not only secured £20 million pounds from a pharmaceutical giant (the then Squibb Corporation) for her Oxford Department, but has since co-founded her own privately funded firm, Synaptica, which aimed to become a leading neuroscience-based biotechnology company within five years. As of 2009 it had ceased trading.

A 2001 PricewaterhouseCoopers report takes Synaptica as a model for how scientists can gain greater financial rewards out of their biotechnology research:

Last year, for example, The Sunday Times (January 30, 2000) reported that Dr Susan Greenfield, Director of the Royal Institution, had taken out a patent on a naturally occurring brain molecule which could hold the key to curing Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. Oxford University, where Dr Greenfield is also Professor of Pharmacology, has taken a 30% stake in Synaptica, the company Greenfield and her colleagues set up to research the peptide before selling the results to a pharmaceutical operation. This approach - like that in many biotechnology start-ups - clearly involves assuming a much bigger share of the risk/reward ratio than is normally the case in Pharma, yet the industry needs just such people. We predict that a growing number of companies will therefore adapt the model for themselves - and that the research scientists they employ will ultimately have a financial as well as a personal stake in the molecules they are studying.

In one of her Millennium lectures, Professor Greenfield defined one of the key criteria for 'good science' as better industrial exploitation of 'the real practical advances that arise from research.' She complained that UK performance was only 'respectable without being spectacular' in this area. She measured this in terms of the number of patents being generated by UK science, concluding,' UK science needs to translate its strength into better industrial performance'.

To achieve more efficient commercial exploitation of scientific research you need a supportive environment in terms of both political policies and public attitudes. According to journalist Peter Riddell:

This is allied to her belief in the need for more inter-changes between scientists and politicians and the media. In the end, it comes back to understanding the potential and opportunities of scientific research. So there is no contradiction between Professor Greenfield's role as a media star, as a distinguished scientist and as an entrepreneur. All three are linked.

LM network

In order to forward her agenda Greenfield has shown a willingness to work with very diverse allies. On 9th May 2003 a London conference titled 'Panic attack: interrogating our obsession with risk' was held at the RI. It was advertised as being organised by Spiked with the RI and with the far right pro-technology group Tech Central Station.

Michael Fitzpatrick and Bill Durodie were among the multiple contributors to the event who were part of the Living Marxism network. Peter Marsh, director of the Greenfield-advised SIRC was another contributor and the SIRC was named as a sponsor, as was the far-right International Policy Network.

This is not the only time that Greenfield has actively cooperated with the Living Marxism network, whose members eulogise science and technology and want no restrictions on cloning or genetic engineering. In summer 2000 Greenfield was the co-convenor with Tony Gilland and Helene Guldberg, two prominent members of that network, of Interrogating the Precautionary Principle. This event was organised by the Institute of Ideas and held at the Royal Institution.

It is in this context that the long involvement in the Living Marxism network of Fiona Fox, the director of the Science Media Centre - an organisation which Greenfield says the RI served as "midwife", needs to be seen.

It is not just Greenfield's dubious alliances that are open to question. Jon Turney, who teaches science communication in the department of science and technology studies at University College London, describes Greenfield's attitude to communicating science as "dangerous and unhelpful".

Turney writes:

if large numbers of people fail to achieve some ideal of scientific literacy this may be because they have got the message that they have no real purchase on scientific decision making, not because they are incapable of mastering technicalities.

Greenfield's outlook may have been affected by her marriage (until 2003) to Peter Atkins, the SmithKline Beecham Fellow and Tutor in Physical Chemistry at Oxford. Atkins has been described by the writer and journalist Bryan Appleyard in an article about the science establishment's "attack dogs ... fired by the ideology of scientism", as "AlScientism's most crazed ideologue" (punning on Al Qaida).

Affiliations

HealthWatch, patron Mentor UK, patron