What this is indicating and certainly in the West, we find that the last 20 years or so, we are seeing an increase in technological innovations in all sectors, where the focus of public concerns, of critical scientific concerns, and so on has been right at the back end of this life cycle -- in other words, on risk, impacts and on risk assessments as institutionalized, in regulatory processes.

The GM case in Europe of course has been one of the most globally significant of these kinds of processes in relation to both critical science emphasizing that actually the risk assessments as produced and as referred to ‘sound science’ in the context of protection of environment and human health and so on. But those risk assessments are entirely inadequate for the kind of jobs, which they are supposed to be able to do in these very processes. So just to point out one of the historical points which is obvious when one stops to think about it , but many of these regulatory processes don’t appear to be able to do that --. Is it actually the innovation trajectories of GM crops, the innovation commitments that promise us the imaginations but also the economic investments and the material investments in GM crops as an innovation trajectory in agriculture and food were  developed and established and made under the intellectual auspices of the central dogma of Genetics that there was one gene code for one protein, which creates one organismal trait. A trait that you might be looking for in new crops like for example drought resistance, or perhaps pesticide resistance, and increased market share for the chemical pesticides producers.

 
So what we have seen in that whole field and the same is true for the risk assessment frameworks which have been established and institutionalized too. Is that actually those commitments were made under the central dogma is that  the very simplified reductionist, and deterministic account of the control of all of the impacts by the genetic constitution of the plants and crops which would be created through transgenic processes and technologies and then distributed through agricultural systems and so on and so forth.  We know and we’ve begun to recognize increasingly in these scientific fields that actually the central dogma has been really quite misleading in many respects. In other words, the gene functions are influenced by cellular, intra-cellular and extra-cellular processes, organismal processes and even environmental processes . So the very control of the technologies has been introduced into these kinds of sectors, is actually a lot less than the risk assessment was actually able to realistically  promise and  claim. So there is now a lot of work which has been published and been shown over the case precisely about these processes of lack of control which of course means the lack of predictive control, over future risks. And a lot of uncertainty as to the cause of connections which might be being made in those kinds of domains.

 So a lot of that focus has arisen from risk assessment and from critical scientific work exposing the inadequacy of the existing risk assessment procedures. But it calls for raising questions about the vulnerability of the whole life cycles of innovation trajectory which has been established through these kinds of processes.  And one of the things which has been evident to us studying these kinds of processes which we emphasized in the European report “Taking European Knowledge Society Seriously”, was that actually the fashion for describing an adequate societal management of new technologies, new sciences and innovation trajectories, of defining the processes as being about risk governance, actually should be talking about innovation governance… and systematically attempting to find  ways of being able in a mature and responsible fashion to actually render more accountable the innovations and the R&D dimension need imaginaries of future outputs and benefits which those imaginaries are articulating and promising to society.

 So, in the UK for example, and this also true to a lesser extent in Europe too (in the European Union) it’s been recognized by the Basic Science Research Council --the Bio-technology and Bio-Science Research Councils (BBSRC), that actually they did a Crop Sciences Review in 2004 and one of the points that the Crop Science Review recognized was actually we have been locked in, in Plant Sciences and Crop Sciences research and development investment, into a monopoly of GM imaginaries as to what the only future outcomes of agriculture and fuel trajectories were going to be. 

 So, in other words Plant-Genomics as a field was being developed under that kind of imaginary and various alternative technologies which actually have to use Plant-Genomics, in a very sophisticated way were being neglected in practice and also in the science research as well by those imaginaries. In other words a forward projection having been invested in from the 1970s onwards was actually monopolizing scientific imaginaries to the extent that the diversity and the biological sciences in this domain was actually becoming a serious problem for science itself. So contrary to many of the pronouncements by leading plant scientists in the UK, like ?Derik. Berg  for example who chaired the Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes during the 1990s without GM there would be no Plant Science and no Genomics, Plant Genomics at all in the UK. That it was either this or nothing in a very black or white form.  There were many other alternative trajectories; that were available to Plant Science as in Plant Genomics that were simply being neglected.  The BBSRC has begun to recognize that in recent years as I just indicated. It has begun to think, about how we might begin to define public good science as being the science which actually incorporates for example, diversity and which doesn’t become locked in to monolithic trajectories - all of our eggs in one basket in that way-- which were reflections of a particular stakeholder investment or involvement rather in the definition of basic science and research processes.

 So what was a background point to this, which is actually increasingly beginning to be recognized as being central was actually the political decision  in the late 1980s to basically privatize the plant breeding communities in the UK, commercially and in terms of knowledge generation. The Plant Breeding Institute for example, the BBSRC Institute in Cambridge, was actually privatized in the late 80s by the Thatcher government destroying the communities of plant breeding in the UK over subsequent years to the extent that now we find that there is actually a pressure( This is a classic path dependency and a classic example in fact of the co-production that Sheila has talked about earlier), through the social existence of a huge lacunae in plant breeding as a set of practicing stakeholders on plant genomics and plant sciences has actually   meant that there has been pressure to maintain the monopoly trajectory of GM research even although it is also being recognized that it isn’t actually producing the benefit which it was claimed to produce. There is pressure now to maintain that kind of monolithic commitments, because we don’t have a plant breeding community which is going to be in a position to use those alternative scientific strategies. We sort of have a logic which is almost built into this system because of previous political commitments and previous intellectual commitments which is set of social conditions that generate a demand for a particular scientific trajectory. It’s still an open question where this will lead in the next few years. But at least it’s being recognized we have put ourselves into historical dilemma of that kind in both scientific and the institutional social economic fields related to agriculture.

So, what I am trying to point out is, just exactly the logic I was trying to introduce in this diagram that issues of accountability in respect of  imaginaries and in respect of investments, right up the very upstream points in this life cycle in research and development as well as in innovation itself are actually where we should be focusing our reference when it comes to trying to develop new kinds of intellectual and institutional frameworks which can actually bring innovations into that kind of accountability in a way which hasn’t been at all  in a present kind of a context. And one of things we noticed when we were doing the European report is the systematic ways in which in fact the upstream parts of this life cycle are being defended from any notion that they might be able to be rendered accountable. And we also took the opportunity to criticize that as being part of the deep culture if you like of European Commission when it comes to thinking about science, and research development investment. So I would stop there