Social Issues Research Centre

The Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC) 'seeks to establish a 'serious, rational and calm debate' on GM to counteract 'deceitful, agenda-driven campaigning'. It is for this reason that the SIRC is working 'in conjuction with the Royal Institution, to seek a remedy to this dangerous state of affairs.'

The SIRC, in the words of a profile in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), 'fosters the image of an ultraconcerned public spirited group' and of 'a heavy-weight research body'. In fact, it is neither.

As the BMJ notes, 'on closer inspection it transpires that this research organisation shares the same offices, directors and leading personnel as a commercial market research company called MCM Research.' Both are based at the same Oxford address.

SIRC has received funding from the food and drinks industry (e.g. Bestfoods, the giant US food group now part of Unilever) as well as from its sister organisation MCM Research Ltd. whose clients come from the food, drinks, oil and pharmaceutical industries.

On its website MCM says that it is 'well-known for its research aimed at positive communication and PR initiatives'. Its website used to be more explicit about what it had to offer: 'Do your PR initiatives sometimes look too much like PR initiatives? MCM conducts social/psychological research on the positive aspects of your business... The results do not read like PR literature... Our reports are credible, interesting and entertaining in their own right. This is why they capture the imagination of the media ­ and your customers.'

The SIRC set up a Forum to lay down guidelines for journalists and scientists on how they should report science stories in the media. It was co-convened with the Royal Institution whose director, Susan Greenfield, is also an advisor to the SIRC. Among those taking part in the Forum were Food Standards Agency chief Sir John Krebs, David Boak of the Royal Society, Lord Dick Taverne, and Mike Fitzpatrick - a stalwart of the Living Marxism network.

In September 2000, Guidelines on Science and Health Communication for the media were published. These guidelines were later fused with a separate but similar set of advice developed by the Royal Society.

The Guidelines focus on how to avoid overstating risk and alarming the public. They have nothing to say about the danger of understating risk, i.e. the kind of false reassurances that go to the heart of the BSE crisis.

The Guidelines, similarly, have little to say about the dangers stemming from conflicts of interest, arising through industry funding of research, etc. This despite a whole series of recent scandals centring on the issue of how commercial interests can undermine free, fair and objective communication about science.

In the words of the Editor of the BMJ, 'These competing interests are very important. It has quite a profound influence on the conclusions.' The BMJ asked SIRC co-director and MCM consultant, Kate Fox, whether she didn't think SIRC faced a conflict of interest in laying down how science should be reported. 'No, I don't think so,' Fox told the BMJ. 'The kinds of work we have done at MCM have been fairly worthy things... They are fairly uncontroversial'.

But in 2003 the BMJ turned its attention again to the SIRC, noting how the organisation HRT Aware had commissioned the SIRC to produce a report which 'last month won a Communiqué award from the magazine Pharmaceutical Marketing in the public relations and medical education category. SIRC's research linked the improved lives of modern day postmenopausal women to HRT.' It led to 'widespread-and supportive-media coverage in the UK'. The Evening Standard, for instance, ran the headline, HRT 'leads to better sex and a happy healthy life'.

But, like virtually all the other media coverage of the SIRC report, the article made no mention of the fact that the SIRC's report had been commissioned by a front group for the pharmaceutical industry, and that it formed part of an industry-fashioned campaign.

Revealingly, the Forum that drew up the guidelines on science and health reporting, did not include anybody from the BMJ or the Lancet, nor the British Medical Association (BMA), all of whom have been very alert to the issues surrounding conflict of interest. The BMA has also been cautious over the GM issue. The Lancet published Dr Arpad Pusztai and Prof Stanley Ewen's research showing adverse effects from GM potatoes. It's editor has also been critical of the Royal Society and the tactics it has adopted in its repeated attacks on Dr Pusztai and his research.

However, while the The Lancet, the BMJ and the BMA were all absent from the Forum, it managed to include several fairly obscure clinicians, suggesting attitude rather than eminence was the real basis of selection. Forum-member Dr Roger Fiskin provides a case in point. He first came to public notice with a letter to Private Eye: 'Prof. Krebs is right and you are wrong: the whole GM debate in the British media has been a disaster as far as public information is concerned. The experiments carried out by Puztai were, in scientific terms, a pile of steaming horse-shit'. (Private Eye, 24 March 2000, p14)

This savage disparagement of Pusztai's work came from a little-known hospital consultant without a single research publication to his name. Dr Fiskin also wrote to The Lancet, furious at its publication of Pusztai and Ewen's paper. In the context of an attack on the views of the Lancet's editor, Fiskin bemoaned the failure of scientists to attack the media in general with more vigour, 'we as scientists have not been nearly aggressive enough in attacking the scaremongering and sheer nonsense put out by the lay media on a variety of medical and scientific topics.'

On the SIRC's website those with opinions differing from the SIRC's on genetic engineering are given short shrift. For his 'predictable attack on genetic engineering' during a Reith lecture, the Prince of Wales merits an article entitled, 'The madness of Prince Charles'. In an SIRC article attacking another contributor to the Reith lectures, the Indian scientist Dr Vandana Shiva, the SIRC suggests 'more appropriate for a Reith lecture than the ramblings of Dr Shiva', when it comes to the plight of Indian farmers, would have been the contribution of right-wing Daily Telegraph columnist Matt Ridley.

The identity of opinion of an organisation which has the Director of the Royal Institution on its Advisory Board and 'Vox Rationis' as its motto, with a right wing libertarian such as Ridley, should come as no surprise given that many of the SIRC's complaints about the media coverage of the GM issue bear a marked similarity to ones which have surfaced in the output of those, like Ridley, associated either with the far right free market think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs or with Living Marxism (LM).

Another indication of what the SIRC apparently regards as models of sound, evidence-based communication is given by its recommended websites. These include the American Council on Science and Health, which the SIRC says has a 'Sensible, balanced approach to a wide range of health issues.' In fact, controversy has raged throughout ACSH's over twenty-year history, focusing particularly on the issue of linkage between its extensive corporate backing (eg Monsanto, Dow, Cyanamid) and its tireless crusading against 'health scares' and the 'toxic terrorists' who promote them.

With regard to MCM's many drink industry clients, it is worth noting that in the view of Dr Griffith Edwards, editor in chief of the journal Addiction, this is an industry tainted not only by the exploitation of vulnerable populations but by the mounting of attacks on valid research and independent researchers. There is also evidence for its use of front organisations to mount such attacks. Thus, the Portman Group, which presents itself as a drink industry 'watch dog', sought to pay academics substantial sums of money to support 'an anonymous attack on a report by the World Health Organisation that had documented evidence on the relation between alcohol consumption and drinking problems.'

This media and research handling front organisation is on the client list of MCM Research Ltd. SIRC's sister organisation. SIRC director Peter Marsh is on the Board of Trustees of Sense About Science.