More Sense about science?

http://www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=151

The UK lobby group Sense About Science says it is 'A Trust to encourage a rational, evidence-based approach to scientific and technological developments'. Its exact launch date is unknown but the domain name was registered in March 2002.

Within months it had begun to promote its point of view on GM crops to parliamentarians and the media, and had raised funding from 'corporations and learned societies'. An item on the Sense About Science website also refers to a 'Sense About Science network of scientists and NGOs'. Clues to the network's constituent members would seem to be provided by the organisation's officers, staff, trustees, advisors, funders and project particpants.

This confirms my suspicions, also pointed out in the Mail on Sunday by Zac Goldsmith, that Sense about Science is more about Big Business than Science. George Monbiot, Honorary Professor at the Department of Politics in Keele and Visiting Professor at the Department of Environmental Science at the University of East London, notes on his blogspot:

Are we looking at a group which wants power for its own sake, or one following a political design, of which this is an intermediate step? What I can say is that the scientific establishment, always politically naive, appears unwittingly to have permitted its interests to be represented to the public by the members of a bizarre and cultish political network. Far from rebuilding public trust in science and medicine, this group's repugnant philosophy could finally destroy it.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles9/Monbiot_Entryists.htm