Recently George Monbiot drew attention once again to the way in which members of the extremist LM network were gaining control of "much of the formal infrastructure of public communication used by the science and medical establishment. They hold key positions in Sense About Science, the Science Media Centre, the Genetic Interest Group, the Progress Educational Trust, Genepool and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service. They have used these positions to promote the interests of pharmaceutical and biotech companies and to dismiss the concerns of the public and non-governmental organisations."
George Monbiot also noted that the colonisation of these bodies was unlikely to have happened by chance given that one was talking about a very small group of people and that most of those "who have taken these posts do not have a background in science."
http://www.lobbywatch.org/p1temp.asp?pid=52&page=1
Now comes the news (see the item below) that a member of the LM network - a movement which eulogises genetic engineering and human cloning - has become the Policy Manager of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the Government body which, amongst other things, licenses and monitors all human embryo research being conducted in the UK.
The fact that a pro-cloning lobbyist is in such a sensitive position is unlikely to worry the British government which is currently preparing to vote against the ban on cloning at the UN. And this week also brought news that the government will spend GBP1bn on biotechnology by 2008. This represents 10% of the projected budget for UK science over the next three years. Investment in nanotechnology-related research would also rise.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4325885.stm
Much of the funding will be targeted at human biotech and the government is determined to promote genetic technologies to the public. To that end it seems happy to use whoever it sees as effective lobbyists.
The LM lobbyist in question, Juliet Tizzard, previously headed a controversial lobby group with close links with the pharmaceutical industry. Latterly, this lobby group has also been receiving funding via an educational grant from the Department of Health, following a Government White Paper "Our Inheritance, Our Future - Realising the potential of genetics in the NHS" (June 2003). This specifically announced funding was to be given to the lobby group as part of an effort "to promote public understanding of genetics".
http://www.gmwatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=160&page=P
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Pro-cloning lobbyist helping to regulate cloning!
http://www.lobbywatch.org/p1temp.asp?pid=52&page=1
Hard on the heels of renewed controversy about how LM ers are colonising the infrastructure of public communication used by the science and medical establishment, comes news that Juliet Tizzard has become the Policy Manager of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the Government body which, amongst other things, licenses and monitors all human embryo research being conducted in the UK.
Prior to joining HFEA, Tizzard was director of the lobby group, Progress Educational Trust, which 'believes that reproductive and genetic technologies have much to offer' and argues against their regulation. As Tizzard put it, 'our organisation exists to make sure that access to new technologies is not restricted by parliament or by doctors'. PROGRESS, which is even equivocal about human reproductive cloning, enjoys a close relationship with AstraZeneca.
Prior to joining PROGRESS, Tizzard appeared in the Channel 4 TV series Against Nature, which represented environmentalists as Nazis responsible for death and deprivation in the Third World, and argued germline gene therapy and human cloning would liberate humanity from nature.
Subsequent investigations revealed that certain of the programme makers and several key contributors to the series, including Tizzard, had been closely involved with LM. As well as contributing articles to LM, Tizzard has also contributed to the LM network's later fronts: Spiked, and the Institute of Ideas .
Tizzard appears to regard 'spin' as a valid way of overcoming public concerns, 'Three cheers for PPL Therapeutics! Not for their success in cloning pigs (although this is worth at least three cheers), but for their success with the media coverage of those five little piggies. Press coverage in the United Kingdom of the cloned pigs was almost universally positive... Perhaps PPL Therapeutics is just good at media spin. But maybe media spin isn't such a bad thing in science... perhaps instead of spin doctors, what we need is spin scientists!'
The news that an ideologically-driven pro-cloning lobbyist is working for a Government body egulating cloning came shortly before the news that HFEA has granted a licence to the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, which cloned Dolly the Sheep, to create stem cells from embryos produced by cell nuclear replacement, a technique also referred to as therapeutic cloning.
Tizzard is not the first Furediite to gain entry to the HFEA. HFEA's former Director of Communications was Ann Furedi, wife of the ideological 'Godfather' of the LM network and star of Against Nature, the sociologist Frank Furedi.