'There's both overt censorship where an organisation will step in and perhaps have a story pulled, but a lot of it is also self-censorship,' he said. However, it wasn't just funding and organisations that were causing scientists to keep quiet. Good things take time - no perfect science in a crisis 'And really I think in retrospect the public interest should have been put first and the government should have ensured there were scientific experts who could talk to the media.' He did not think it was a deliberate attempt to keep information from the public, but it was an attempt to control the information that was available to the government, he said. 'There is a sense that our funding, particularly from the government, is linked to our good behaviour.' He said spin and message control had become stronger and scientists even tangentially linked to organisations were finding they had much more constraints than in the past. 'What's happening on the Monday is that there's a real vacuum of information, and of course Gary Romano, who was a senior manager at Fonterra, went on Campbell Live and got the science horribly wrong.' Perhaps inadvertently, because our science community is small and we push for impact from our science.' 'Suddenly the country found itself without scientists who could speak - we just didn't have the experts who weren't constrained. I saw that a lot of these scientists had been pulled into this advisory group. 'But then it's really interesting to see that suddenly on the Sunday, scientists had stopped talking, they were no longer making themselves available. 'The story broke on a Friday, late on a Friday, and at least initially I think on the Saturday there were a number of scientists that were available to talk to the media. One prime example was the Fonterra botulism scare. New Zealand also had a limited pool of scientists available to speak on their field of expertise.

Silencing Science by Shaun Hendy