New book highlights life on the front lines with science

A Batman ringtone injected a slice of humour during the six years that Professor Dame Juliet Gerrard served as the Prime Minister’s chief science adviser.

The ‘batphone’ was never switched off, she writes in Front Row Seat, and the calls were almost always about something urgent or important.

The Waipapa Taumata Rau academic was perturbed during a reception at Government House in 2019 when her phone began to vibrate incessantly. Whakaari/White Island had erupted. On a Sunday morning early in 2020, then-prime minister Jacinda Ardern phoned asking to be talked through how and when viruses mutate.

The book’s subtitle, ‘How Science Can (and Can’t) Shape Public Decision-Making’, highlights that scientific evidence alone won’t drive policy action; people must be up for it and the political climate right. 

When she started in the role in 2018, Dame Juliet travelled the country asking researchers to jot down ideas about where science could better inform policy and to pop their notes into her biscuit tin. That resulted in a wall of Post-it notes, which helped shape a work programme spanning fishing, gangs, cannabis, fluoridation, AI, gene editing and alternatives to plastic.

Her team’s first report to the Ardern government on plastic was, she says, one of its most successful, building on the ban on single-use plastic bags with more comprehensive changes to plastic use in New Zealand. Everyone knew plastic was a problem, and people were ready for action.

By way of contrast, the second, on sustainable commercial fishing, hit the rocks and sank. Dame Juliet, herself a one-time prawn trawler worker (in her student days), says problems with the fishing study included intractable feuds between key players and an absence of solid, uncontested scientific evidence. There was no public launch of the report, and the next government jettisoned its recommendations.

In the book, Dame Juliet takes readers inside the National Crisis Management Centre in the Beehive basement, a location known as ‘the Bunker’ – “a peculiar space, generally not used, but ready to house a hive of activity at a moment’s notice”.

“You can eat in the Bunker and sleep in the Bunker; it gets very crowded, and the air circulation seems poor. After a few days, it develops a rather funky odour, which thankfully everyone is too busy and focused to notice after descending the dark steps and signing in.”

The rollout of 5G – fifth-generation cellular technology – drew anti-science activism.

“I got my first real taste of anti-science sentiment turning personal: a couple of friends discovered memes with my face on them and various bits of text that (at their most polite) referred to ‘New Zealand’s most wanted woman’.”

When she wandered through the occupation at Parliament during the pandemic, she initially got a festival vibe.

“There were showers and toilets, food, and a medicine truck. I love a good protest and felt quite at home until some of the placards revealed themselves as violent and vile, many deeply misogynistic.

“Realising that my name was on the long list of those some protestors proposed should be executed for crimes against humanity began to mess with my head a little, and I left.”  

The three prime ministers – Ardern, Hipkins and Luxon – had “different thirsts for detail” but all examined the evidence, commissioned work to inform policy and listened in emergencies, she says.

Today, Dame Juliet is working out of the School of Biological Sciences and, following her secondment as chief science adviser, the biochemist is now focused on researching and teaching the interface between science and public policy.

She’s involved in an MBIE Future Foods Research Programme project on cellular agriculture and is mulling over ideas for another book. Looking back, she says the chief science adviser role was undoubtedly the most challenging and rewarding period of her career. Contributing to a team that saved up to 20,000 lives during the pandemic was “almost certainly the most useful thing I will ever do”.

- Paul Panckhurst

Front Row Seat, $35, is published by Auckland University Press.