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This report is the product of an expert working group acting under mandate from the European Commission Directorate General for Research (DG RTD), including contributions from specialists in science and technology studies, policy analysis, sociology, philosophy and law, as well as participants from civil society organizations.

The report looks at the causes and implications of widely-recognised European public unease with science and science-based technologies. It asks how we might at the same time further EU commitments to enhance democratic civil society in Europe, as well as address urgent challenges for science and technology policy, for science and governance, including those of climate and sustainability. Individual chapters deal with innovation policy, the regulation of risk institutionalised approaches to ethics, and modes of learning in complex environments, as well as efforts to engage European publics in the governance of science.

A final conceptual chapter draws these themes together by analysing the role of overarching ‘imaginaries’ in shaping practices and perspectives in all these areas. In conclusion, the report advances a number of salient messages for policy makers and sixteen specific recommendations for policy improvement. In sum, the authors call for new forms of experiment in both governance and science, moving beyond conventional linear understandings and engaging afresh with the rich diversity of European public life. Only in this way, the authors argue, will European policy take ‘knowledge society’ seriously -and fulfil its abundant promise.

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The aim of this article is to further our understanding of the “GM is unnatural” view, and of the critical response to it.

While many people have been reported to hold the view that GM is unnatural, many policy-makers and their advisors have suggested that the view must be ignored or rejected, and that there are scientific reasons for doing so. Three “typical” examples of ways in which the “GM is unnatural” view has been treated by UK policy-makers and their advisors are explored. These are the Government’s position (DEFRA Report), the account of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, and the position of Nigel Halford, a scientist with an advisory role to the Government. I show that their accounts fail to mount a convincing critique. Then, I draw on an empirical research project held during 2003–2004 at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the north east of England.

Scientists met with non-scientists in a range of facilitated one-to-one conversations (“exchanges”) on various environmental issues, one of which was on GM. Our findings show that some scientists who rejected the “GM is unnatural” view struggled to do so consistently. Their struggle is interpreted in terms of a conflict between a so-called “scientific” worldview, and a different worldview that underlies the concerns of those who held the “GM is unnatural” view. This worldview is explored further by an examination of their concerns. What distinguishes this worldview from the “scientific” worldview is that the instrumentalization of the nonhuman world is questioned to a larger extent.

I conclude that, because the underlying concerns of those who held the “GM is unnatural” view were not with GM as such, yet with a worldview that was considered to be problematic, and of which many GM applications were held to be expressions, policy-makers and their advisors should reflect on the critical worldview of those who claim that GM is unnatural if they want to engage seriously with their concerns.

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Taking European knowledge society seriously

Are scientists right and non-scientists wrong? Reflections on discussions of GM