SCIENCE FOR PUBLIC GOOD

Public good research that might triangulate, affirm, or challenge industry claims regarding long- and short-term risks from chemicals, commercial products, and technologies is persistently underfunded at a global scale. Similarly, public good research focusing on nutrition, particularly nutrient mixtures for neurological health and disease prevention across the life course, remains seriously under-resourced.

A critical challenge affecting the public’s right to be independently informed arises from the growing difficulty of accessing and evaluating scientific information produced in the public interest. Research funded and produced by industry-related institutions now vastly exceeds public good research. A clear example is the recent declaration by the Stockholm Resilience Institute that the planetary boundary for novel entities, including man-made chemicals and biotechnologies, has been exceeded, largely because environmental releases now outpace monitoring and stewardship capacity.

This raises fundamental questions. How can scientific information be judged as credible and trustworthy when a substantial proportion of the peer-reviewed literature is funded by institutions with political or financial conflicts of interest? How should such information be weighted when the objective is long-term stewardship of health and ecosystems?

Risk is never black and white. The interface between technology, pollution, and biology is inherently complex and uncertain.

Navigation of uncertainty and complexity in the public interest will always be an inexact science, because biological vulnerability and the need for protective action (i.e. stewardship) to safeguard a biological system over time, whether a river catchment, a fish, animal, insect population, plant species, or a young child, necessarily requires human judgement in complex and uncertain informational environments. Intergenerational harms can severely degrade population health, yet because these harms are slow-moving or ‘chronic’, they are often difficult to detect and attribute.

Decisions about system vulnerability and intervention inevitably require human judgement under conditions of incomplete information. This obliges decision-makers to engage not only with technical data, but with ethical questions concerning acceptable risk, system fragility, and intergenerational harm, and political questions of who funded the science, and what does that science seek to address, or not address.

Biological tipping points rarely follow linear trajectories. Stressors can disrupt and dysregulate feedback systems designed to maintain homeostasis. These disruptions may be subtle, cumulative, and difficult to predict. It is impossible to specify in advance when endocrine disruptors will impair cognition, fertility, or behavioural regulation, or when assaults on microbiome diversity in soil, water, or the gut will result in irreversible dysregulation.

Granularity around risk therefore obliges decision-makers to engage with ethical and moral questions of system vulnerability, including recognition that immature or developing organisms are inherently less resilient. Such judgement should also incorporate an awareness of strategic influences that shape the informational landscape.

In the period 2020–2030 and beyond, it is not only health that must be stewarded, but the scientific systems themselves.

BARRIERS TO KNOWLEDGE: GLOBAL NETWORKS & POLITICAL & FINANCIAL CONFLICTS OF INTEREST.

Barriers to public-good information and knowledge not only include time and scientific (including techno-biological) complexity. They include paywalls, strategic communications, hidden conflicts of interest, and institutional opacity. The problem is amplified by the concentration of influence within multinational investment structures that span agriculture, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, media, and digital infrastructure.

Barriers arise from the difficulty of navigating information, disinformation, and misinformation within highly contested, politically-fraught, knowledge environments.

Conflicts of interest can often be hidden by sophisticated public relations messaging. Websites and information platforms can be designed to appear independent, but which are instead funded by powerful actors with financial and/or political-conflicts of interest who benefit from creating policy-like content, and effectively launder policy and information through these presumed-to-be-independent vehicles. These conditions make it difficult to identify and evaluate bias, or to detect conflicts of interest that may compromise the integrity and trustworthiness of scientific and policy-relevant information.

These barriers to trustworthy information, increase with the sequestering of financial and political conflicts of interests inside lobbyist think tanks; private-public partnerships, trade and treaty agreements; political and media financing and regulatory processes. Much of this has arisen from off-shore webs of influence that eclipse New Zealand owner-operator models. Multi-national investment fund managers oversee portfolios of trillions of dollars of assets, and they can influence domestic policy, something that small and medium sized firms cannot do.

INSTITUTIONAL IGNORANCE - THE UNDERFUNDING OF NON-COMMERCIAL SCIENCE

Over the past three decades, policy and funding systems have increasingly prioritised research aligned with innovation and economic growth. However, over the same period, funding programmes for science, law and policy research that might traverse the complex issues that revolve around ethics, power, risk and public-good judgement, which do not fit the 'innovation' definition - have been deprioritised.

This funding asymmetry is structural. Public interest research often conflicts with the objectives of powerful institutions. Provision of unbiased, public interest information can conflict with the principles and priorities of powerful institutions. Interdisciplinary science, legal research and ethics-based work has become wickedly difficult to fund if such research lies outside, or potentially contradicts, the policy aims of the state. Scholars who pursue critical, risk-focused, or stewardship-oriented work face chronic funding insecurity. Careers may be threatened when research challenges dominant policy narratives or commercial interests.

Market-driven (neoliberal) trends in governance have directed resources towards commercially focussed, market-oriented science, law and deliberation, and away from public good research that might triangulate claims of safety and efficacy by institutions. These trends shape the focus of many of our public science institutions. Many public science institutions, including universities and New Zealand Crown Research Institutes, now depend on patent income, royalties, and industry partnerships.

When publicly funded science organisations must secure patents and royalties to grow their business, this creates institutional incentives to deregulate the technologies that might potentially generate revenue streams. Deregulation, where institutions do not have to declare research, the formulation toxicity of their retailed products, inflammatory and neurodevelopmental impacts and risks, certain gene edited organisms, - and more - potentially enable the institutions to expand their research capacity without consequence for the health and environmental impact.

THE BROADER SOCIAL, POLITICAL & HEALTH-BASED IMPACT

As these institutions are tasked in production of innovation, no equal weight is placed upon (often complex and interdisciplinary) stewardship issues, such as exploring pollution from their or other technologies or disease risk from exposures to toxins. These issues do not have immediately identifiable opportunities for the production of intellectual property (such as royalties and patents).

The incentives, to produce IP, steer research communities in a different direction, resulting in governance failures - remember, these are taxpayer funded, public sector institutions - to provide informational feedback loops into regulation and policy.

The result is a systemic governance failure.

Policy-makers, law-makers and regulatory agencies, are less likely to face publicly-funded expert pressure that would require them to engage with complex ethics and uncertain risk-based issues.
This funding distortion shrinks independent expert communities who could be available to contest industry claims and provide evidence-based feedback loops back into the policy, governance and regulatory 'sphere'. Expert groups aren't available to challenge outdated guideline approaches which fail to reflect newer and more nuanced knowledges of the risks of the technologies and their emissions.
Regulators are left reliant on industry-supplied data protected by commercial confidentiality. The health effects can then be effectively 'buried' when government agencies claim an absence of evidence, based on their legacy scientific guideline processes and the advice from industry representatives tasked with organisational responsibility for liaising with regulatory authorities.
The remaining independent expert communities capable of contesting industry claims are marginalised. In current funding environments, scientists are unlikely to publicly critique technologies or pollutants. Research that does address such issues is typically short-term, fragmented, and underpowered.
Lay public concerns are easily dismissed because independent science is absent or inaccessible and there are no experts to 'back up' their scientific claims.
It is then easier for regulators to dismiss public (lay) claims of harm - despite the fact that the science regulators habitually depend on, is unavailable, due to commercial in confidence clauses that privilege the industry provider.

When scientific and research communities lack autonomy to carry out such work - scholars, policy-makers, the judiciary, medical doctors and the general public are left on the back-foot when discussing complex socio-biological issues. The barriers to research promote systemic ignorance and the science remains undone. Independent voices can be rare, and careers may be threatened if they deviate from established norms.

NEW TECHNOLOGIES, RISK, AND MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

Market prices rarely reflect biological or ecological externalities. Persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic (PBT) exposures can generate systemic harms. Advances in biomarker technologies now demonstrate that environmental risk factors frequently outweigh genetic determinants in health outcomes. For example, epigenetic and endocrine disruption, inflammation, and oxidative stress are now recognised as key mechanisms linking exposure to disease. These stressors can impair fertility, cognition, development, and learning across species. Yet research commitments and guideline approaches by government agencies do not prioritise scientific research to understand how technologies and their emissions can harm human systems when these pathways are disrupted.

Large-scale national research programmes who actively investigate the mixture toxicity of industrial and agricultural chemicals, who undertake biomarker surveillance to understand system level risks, and who research preventive infrastructure (such as advanced water filtration) remain absent in New Zealand. Similarly, New Zealand lacks a dedicated institute examining nutrient insufficiency and optimum nutrition in relation to metabolic disease, mental illness, and educational performance. These omissions have long-term implications for population resilience and national security.

New, globally relevant technologies have enabled scientists to confirm that environmental risk factors outweigh genetic influences in risk to health and wellbeing. A substantial literature provides evidence that healthy genetic function arises when surrounding environments support optimal health (such as nutrition, beneficial feedback loops, and absence of persistent stressors). New technologies, such as biomarker assisted technologies, can assist researchers to understand the biological interactions following exposure to a technology.

The lack of long-term independent research results in blind, or captured environments are slow to integrate technologies and interventions which are critical to human resilience and, arguably, national security. For example, it is unlikely New Zealand scientists are testing drinking water for mixture toxicity effects, and conducting laboratory research to identify biomarkers from exposure synergies.

Examples demonstrate our lag. As a consequence, there is no research investment at scale looking at enhanced filtration technologies to strip hormone-level chemicals from drinking water, but also to prevent emission of waste stream chemicals into rivers. In parallel, New Zealand's nutritional research environment is poor, and there is no evident science institute engaged in evaluating the relationship of nutrient insufficiency, and the role of optimum nutrition, not only to more greatly appreciate the scientific underpinnings of metabolic disease, but the impact on psychiatric and brain-related disorders and educational performance. Increasing levels of disease and disorder in the human population, lowers productivity, alters intelligence and impairs the capacity to contest future threats. Such high-level work is not undertaken.

SCIENCE ADVICE FOR PUBLIC GOOD STEWARDSHIP

The public, scientists and physicians and even judges in New Zealand courts, have legitimate expectations that governments and their regulatory institutions will act to intervene to prevent market failure. This is stewardship, where governing bodies will take precautionary action to protect the public and future generations, from unintended, off-target or accumulating risks that arise from free market activities. But the freedom to do such politically controversial research is not available.

Shifts have occurred from local government, up to the global level, and feedback into local media and regulatory environments, embedding technical processes which make it impossible for decision-makers to reason and weigh uncertain issues against ‘the economy’.

We continue to observe that white papers, conferences and policy papers, and science advisors, downplay and avoid highlighting industry (often global in scale) interests. This results in often contradictory environments where officials and elected members fail to soundly articulate reasons for their decisions but claim the new laws or policies are required. Then we observe institutional patterns that persistently operate to deny, dismiss, divert (or decoy) and displace meaningful discussion relating to the evidence in the scientific literature and the stewardship of technologies and regulation of pollutants and environmental risks. However, the processes - as institutional failure to reason in the public interest - are not targeted for exploration and discussion by the legacy media. Officials can also, simply fail to engage in scrutiny of scientific information even when they have the power to do so. For example, the recently established Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission, which is tasked with protecting mental health, has no language for the problem of nutrient insufficiency, neurodevelopmental risk from inadequate nutrition or toxic medical exposures, and drug-drug risk, both short and long-term which can impair mental health and well-being. Scientists that have been the public face advocating for the deregulation of gene editing technologies, are funded by the agency that is pursuing that deregulatory process.

Such contradictory environments consequently inflame and encourage accusations of misinformation and disinformation in the public arena. At times, these intractable issues have been ethically corrupted at an early stage by early-stage policy-framing, and through secret confidentiality agreements that prohibit transparency and accountability relating to the provenance and quality of the scientific information.

As such it is important for the public, for scientists and physicians, to recognise the political shifts and influences that distort the political and regulatory landscape, if they are to critically assess claims made by powerful interests.

Governance and regulatory arenas are intensely political. Billions of dollars are dedicated to science used specifically to support regulatory decision-making and on political lobbying to media interests, officials, elected members and science advisors. Vested commercial interests habitually present scientific evidence to support sufficient safety to authorise release of a technology as certain. However, once deployed into the environment, once there is evidence of human or environmental harm, their energies turn to the production of scientific information that perpetuates uncertainty and doubt in order to avoid and delay regulation.

PSGRNZ's work continues to reflect our charity objectives which include the provision of information and critical analysis in the service of the public’s right to be independently informed on issues concerning genetics, including genetic engineering and biotechnology, and other relevant matters of science and technology.

Support for and encouragement of robust transparent and accountable knowledge-making, across lay-public, policy-makers, scientists and expert communities, in order to promote 'public-good' spaces of knowledge and information, is what we do.