Rutter – policy

It’s a big question, it’s a really important question, and in a working party report that I did on environmental causes of disease, one of the key parts of that report were when you decide to act. So that knowing when the science tells you that you could act is one thing, but the issue as to when do you know enough to decide to act is a part of it. It has to involve judgment. It needs to be well informed judgment it’s true, but it’s not all automatic and you also have to recognize that not acting is acting. That’s to say if you decide not to, what should we say, distribute vaccination against polio, it will mean that polio will come alive again, so that in a country like India now it has more or less been obliterated. It hasn’t in the neighbouring states of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and there’s a problem will that mean it will spread again.  

So policy involves value judgments. That’s what politicians have to do. One hopes it’s done honestly, sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t, and science comes in not in telling you what that value judgment should be, I mean scientists as citizens will have views on that but that’s not what science is about. It can tell you how you will know whether a policy will achieve what you want it to achieve.