Day 2: M.bovis 2014

So on to day 2 in sunny Cardiff for M.bovis 2014, and two plenaries stood out: Ian Boyd's and Peter Roeder's. Both were interesting for different reasons - here's what I found interesting.

1. Ian Boyd's talk covered some issues which he has already spoken about in different places already: the politicisation of science being one. He said some controversial things about the Badger Protection Act which sent my twitter feed into haywire when I tweeted it. You can check that out for yourself. But I think its important to put what he said into context. Personally, I don't like hypothetical questions: I dont think good research comes of it (although some economists and psychologists would probably disagree). Ian Boyd was asked one such question: Q: 'what would you do if you had a time machine and could go back to 1973?' A: '[long pause] hmm, Id probably advise not passing the badger protection act...'. Are these sorts of questions meaningful? Its certainly useful to look back at history to understand why and how things have happened. But worrying about 'woulda, shoulda, coulda' is the preserve of football pundits, not scientists. No-one knows what would have happened: isnt it better to spend your energy on thinking about what to do next? These sorts of questions also provide a sort of accountability test: its a bit of a loaded question. Questions are tests - I think Ian Boyd may have even wondered aloud that he was being tested. Answers can be 'right' or 'wrong', and the answers we give account for who we are and who we belong to: its like we're being asked whose side are you on here? Are you with 'us', or against 'us'? Maybe in his long pause to think about what to say, that's what was going through his mind?

2. Peter Roeder's talk on the eradication of Rinderpest was fascinating. It was interesting because of the emphasis he placed on the role of socio-economic research in eradicating disease. 'Without it', he said, 'we wouldnt have got where we did'. 'If only we had that data earlier' he reflected. 'The social was more important that the technical' he said. But on the technical he was also interesting. One of his themes was about the imperfection of diagnostics. 'Don't worry about it' he suggested, 'you don't always need new technology - in some cases (thinking of working in Africa) it can be more harm than good'. So long as you know the limitations of your tools, you can work with them and adapt to them. Adaptive management is the key. The idea of imperfection in systems is an interest to social scientists too. Is there really a perfect system? Does the idea of a perfect system perform a symbolic role to hide how things really work - providing legitimacy and status to some whilst denying it to others? Perhaps systems actually work because they have imperfections within them, and those imperfections actually hold social systems together? That's a conclusion from many studies of science and technology, and its interesting to think how it might be relevant to the control of animal disease.