John Beddington sneezes, then apologises. “You may wish to consider a contact prophylaxis, against the possibility of my having caught swine flu at yesterday’s meeting about the epidemic,” he jokes. It would, of course, be a very unfortunate irony if the government chief scientific adviser – a man deeply involved in advising and coordinating departments’ work on this virulent disease – came down with a dose himself. But as he points out, that is highly unlikely – at least until this autumn.

“In the UK, we’ve got just over 100 cases; this is not going to bring the country to its knees,” he tells me (the figure has since increased to about 200). “The concern I have is that it’s hit the northern hemisphere at the best possible time; transmission declines during less humid and warmer weather. But there’s almost certainly substantial infection in South America, so the concern is one of re-infection in the autumn of the northern hemisphere’s population. And in the meantime, there could easily be some mutation in the virus that makes it more resistant to anti-virals or more severe or more contagious.”

Ultimately, says Beddington, the majority of the population are bound to be exposed to this influenza virus. “There’s no way we can keep it out; even if you could close the borders, it would only delay its spread,” he says. “Just look at it: it’s in 45 countries, with new countries added almost daily. I think it will go around the world.”

However, the professor adds, the government is well prepared. By isolating patients and using anti-virals, it can slow the disease’s transmission while a vaccine is developed and distributed to protect vulnerable groups. And we owe this preparedness, he believes, to the government networks of independent scientific advice established since Britain’s outbreaks of BSE and foot and mouth disease.

“We have an apparatus in place that works pretty well,” he says. “As soon as it started to look serious I contacted the Department of Health, and we agreed to set up an independent science advisory group, which I co-chair. We brought in additional virologists and epidemiologists from academia, and we’ve been meeting every week before [civil contingencies committee] Cobra to provide it with independent advice. I don’t wish to be complacent, and heaven knows what will happen if we have a very bad outbreak in the autumn, but we’re using the current time to test a whole series of procedures.”

Professor Beddington’s experience of crisis management as a scientific adviser in the heart of government is, he believes, quite different from that of his predecessor, Sir David King. “I don’t think Dave King would recognise things compared with the foot and mouth outbreak that he dealt with,” he comments. “Government learns – and it’s really important that the government has advice that is underpinned and peer-reviewed by an independent group.”

Indeed, Beddington believes that the value of much of the scientific advice that government receives rests on its level of independence and autonomy – and since his appointment at the beginning of 2008, he has continued King’s crusade to persuade all the major government departments to recruit their own chief scientific advisers (CSAs).

A scientific adviser for all

Interviewed by Civil Service World last year (then Whitehall & Westminster World, 22 April 2008), King complained that certain permanent secretaries “control their empires and don’t like interference from others”; Jonathan Stephens at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), he said, “is simply against [employing a CSA]. And yet they run the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum”.

“When David was here, some departments believed this was important and accepted it, but I think there was quite a degree of resistance during his time,” comments Beddington. However, things have changed: the DCMS has recruited a CSA, while the Foreign Office and Department for Energy and Climate Change are recruiting. “With the exception of the Treasury, every major department either has a CSA or is advertising to recruit,” says Beddington with pride. “For whatever reason, I have managed to break through.”

The recruitment of departmental CSAs, argues John Beddington, is crucial in “getting high-level, independent advice into government – and by independent I mean: not civil servants”. And just as important in this agenda is the creation of independent scientific advisory councils; he cites as an example the cross-governmental Council for Science and Technology, which he says “does work that government asks it to do – it’s currently working on a project on future infrastructure, at the request of the prime minister – but it also does things off its own bat.”

“Most of the major departments have some form of independent [scientific] advisory committee, but only a few go across the whole agenda of the department,” he explains. “There are something like 150 advisory committees, but they tend to be subject-specific and some are ‘speak when spoken to’ committees.” Beddington argues that every department should have an independent committee, with the freedom to examine any aspect of departmental policy and make recommendations.

Look at the example of the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, he says: by the time of the second foot and mouth outbreak, its science advisory committee – which he chaired – “had given a fair bit of thought to foot and mouth, and been able to make significant changes. It was all fairly friendly, but we had brought in independent experts and the department revised its planning. So the good news was that the outbreak was dealt with well.” Then a wry smile appears on his face: “The bad news was that it came out of Pirbright.” As disease sources go, the government’s Institute of Animal Health was an unfortunate one.

So the quality and remit of scientific advice across government is improving; coverage is now “okay, but it could be better”, says Beddington. Keeping up the pressure on slow-moving departments, he has reformed the system of science reviews introduced by King: the new Science and Engineering Assurance Review system, he says, involves “speeding up the reviews and making them much more focused”.

Crucially, they are also now compulsory: “The Civil Service Board recently agreed that these reviews should be mandatory for all departments that haven’t had a previous science review,” says Beddington. “So that’s now in tablets of stone, and I’ve put together a programme that will operate from now until March 2011. All these reviews will be published – and having the Civil Service Board agreeing that these reviews have to be mandatory means that the permanent secretaries have bought into the idea”.

With the expansion in CSAs, independent science advisory boards and departmental science reviews, it’s clear that Beddington is strengthening the government’s scientific arteries. And now he’s working on its scientific bloodstream, with the creation of an active professional group for science and engineering. “Being the head of the profession is really important, but when I came into the job nobody could tell me who they were,” he recalls. “There was no data set to say: ‘These people are scientists or engineers’.”

In fact, he adds, many senior civil servants have actively hidden their scientific or engineering backgrounds: “The worry that people have expressed to me is that there was a glass ceiling for scientists and engineers, who couldn’t get promotion into administrative grades,” he says. “But that isn’t the case now. I think it’s recognised that having a scientist or engineer in a policy job is a real advantage, because they have the policymaking skills, but they also have that bit extra.”

To fill out his skeletal professional group, Beddington reached out through each department’s science and engineering representative and asked people to identify themselves. Gathering a list of 1,600 names, he ran a conference in January that attracted 400 delegates. “So I’m encouraged, but there’s a long way to go,” he says. “There’s something in the order of 16,000 scientists and engineers in government, and we’ve got ten per cent of them signed up.”

Changing the climate

Raising the profile of science and engineering in government will pay off, says Beddington, because “so many of the problems we’re facing involve the need for some form of scientific or engineering or social science assessment.” And at the top of this list, of course, looms the expanding agenda on climate change. The need for action, Beddington believes, is becoming ever more acute: while the Independent Panel on Climate Change’s 2004 report represented an overwhelming scientific consensus on the nature and gravity of climate change, “we are starting to accumulate evidence that certain of its predictions, even at their most pessimistic, are not as bad as what is really happening.”

“The general feeling is that things are worse than the IPCC report, so it’s becoming still more important to reach some agreement at [December’s international climate change negotiations in] Copenhagen,” Beddington concludes. Meanwhile, he adds, we must simultaneously focus on three other massive drains on the planet’s resources: population growth; changing consumption patterns in the developing world; and urbanisation.

“These three drivers mean that by 2030 we’ll need 50 per cent more food, something in the order of 50 per cent more energy – hopefully, clean energy – and about 30 per cent more fresh water,” he says. “And we have to do all that while mitigating climate change: that’s an enormous challenge. There’s no doubt that climate change is happening, but its really devastating effects will probably come in after these issues of food and water security. The world really needs to recognise that these challenges are going to be coming earlier, creating the potential for conflict, civil disturbance and a generation of refugees.”

Might massive geo-engineering projects, designed to draw CO2 out of the environment, help address climate change? We’re awaiting a Royal Society report, Beddington replies, “but the general calculation indicates that the scale would have to be so huge that this is probably unfeasible.” Instead, he points to carbon capture and storage technology, which he says will be “absolutely essential” in reducing emissions from power generation. Still, we do have to “think big”, he argues; new, laser-based technologies seem to offer an opportunity for controllable nuclear fusion within the next 20 or 30 years.

Equally, though, Beddington is keen that we think small: “The unsung hero of this is really low-technology,” he says. “Thirty-three per cent of our emissions come from homes, and insulation can save people money while significantly reducing emissions.” People and businesses currently have little incentive to concentrate on such unglamorous solutions, notes Beddington – but a different regulatory and statutory environment could prompt rapid change.

“This is about reorganising industries,” he says. “You can legislate on standards for new buildings; for commercial buildings; for refurbishment. How does regulation, for example, affect the way that water, electricity, or information technology are supplied? This problem will need good science, some very strong engineering skills – and an awful lot of innovative thinking about these issues of infrastructure and markets and regulation.”

Any dramatic changes to markets and regulation, Beddington accepts, will demand a “general buy-in” on the importance of these issues. And what would create such buy-in? “Well, we haven’t got an international agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” he replies. “But I think there is progress, and that has hinged on the change of regime in the USA, and the recognition that these are real problems that hard-nosed businessmen are worried about.”

In fact, Beddington believes that the world’s renewed progress towards consensus on climate change – tentative as it is – can be traced directly back to the revival of science within the US government. “Science and engineering is crucial for policymaking in large, modern economies. The previous regime didn’t accept that, but Obama has changed things,” he says with evident pleasure, rattling off a list of top-flight scientists brought into the new president’s administration.

Europe, the UK’s most influential scientist adds, trails badly on the quality and independence of scientific advice to government: “There’s no direct scientific adviser to [European Commission president José Manuel] Barroso; there is no independent scientific adviser in any of the EC’s departments; and within the community as a whole, apart from us, only Ireland has a chief scientific adviser.” It is strange, he continues, that “a body as powerful as the EC doesn’t have a network of scientific and engineering advisers at a level where they can challenge or develop policy”.

So Europe is way behind, but Professor Beddington is confident that the UK and USA are developing stronger ways to inject high-quality scientific and engineering thought into policymaking. This, he believes – and he calls as witness America’s new conversion on climate change – will lead to better policies and, ultimately, a safer world. “The key is,” he concludes, “do you have the opportunity for scientific advice and challenges at the highest level?”


Career Highlights

1945     Born in Cinderford, Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire
1968     Awarded MSc in economics from the London School of Economics
1973     Completes PhD in population biology at Edinburgh University
1984     Joins Imperial College, London, as a lecturer and reader in applied population biology 1991    Made professor of applied population biology at Imperial College, London
2001     Becomes a fellow of the Royal Society
2005    Made chair of Defra’s Science Advisory Council
2007     Appointed government chief scientific adviser, beginning work on 1 January 2008