The long-overdue reform of English libel law and its chilling effect on free speech has begun, but the battle isn’t won yet

BETWEEN 2008 and 2010, I found myself defending an eventually unsuccessful libel suit brought against me by the British Chiropractic Association. Other scientists, science journalists and journals have also been subjected to legal actions and threats, and the libel law of England and Wales has earned a reputation for being anti-free speech and for silencing scientific debate and criticism. A by the charity Sense About Science revealed that more than 1 in 3 editors of scientific or medical journals have refused material for fear of a libel suit.

Worse still, it is a matter of shame and embarrassment that English libel law is used to silence scientists overseas. For example, Israeli technology company Nemesysco used the law to force a peer-reviewed journal to remove from its website an article written by two Swedish researchers (). The US company GE Healthcare sued a Danish radiologist, Henrik Thomsen of Herlev Hospital in Copenhagen, over comments he made at a medical conference. GE Healthcare eventually dropped the case, stating that it did not mean to stifle academic debate.

As well as threats made after publication, I regularly hear from overseas scientists who self-censor their writing in order to avoid a potential libel suit.

Last month, however, after two years of , the UK government published a , the first step on the road to reforming English libel law. So how does it shape up?

The good news is that the draft bill would shift the balance of the law to give defendants a fairer chance. Under the present system it is ridiculously easy to issue a libel writ: any defamatory statement is enough to trigger proceedings. The new bill proposes that claimants will have to prove that the statement has caused or is likely to cause them substantial harm before an action can brought.

This hurdle will immediately block trivial libel actions and discourage bullies who merely want to scare off researchers or journals. Moreover, claimants will have to prove that there has been substantial damage to their reputation in the UK, and that the English High Court is the most appropriate jurisdiction for hearing the case. This will deter so-called libel tourists, except those with a genuine grievance.

The case of cardiologist Peter Wilmshurst of the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital in Shropshire, UK, is especially pertinent here. He is being sued in the English courts by NMT Medical of Boston, Massachusetts, over an interview he gave to a Canadian journalist for a North American online publication while attending a conference in Washington DC. Wilmshurst has tried and failed to find anyone who read the article in the UK. Under the new proposals it seems unlikely that NMT would pass the test of suffering substantial harm in the UK, or that the English courts would be deemed the appropriate jurisdiction.

Another positive recommendation concerns the window of opportunity for libel claims. The existing law states that claimants have one year to sue after a print publication, but online publications enjoy no such protection because of a 19th-century ruling. In 1849, the Duke of Brunswick sent his manservant to London to buy a copy of the Weekly Dispatch which he believed contained an article that defamed him. The contentious edition was 17 years old, but because he obtained it directly from the publisher it was deemed to be a fresh publication. The absurd legal consequence is that each time an article is accessed online it counts as a fresh publication and claimants can sue for libel even if the article has been available online for more than a year. The government is proposing to prevent this.

The draft bill also includes a public interest defence, which will help scientists. Moreover, it proposes to extend the defence of “qualified privilege” – which exempts reports of recent parliamentary and court proceedings from libel – to medical and scientific conferences.

However, the bill is not perfect. Evan Harris, a former MP who has been at the heart of the reform campaign, rightly argues that qualified privilege should be extended even further, to speakers at conferences and to peer-reviewed publications in academic journals, which spend large sums of money on legal advice and libel insurance and could be bankrupted by a single successful action.

Campaigners are also anxious to see the law revised to prevent censorship by libel threats aimed at internet service providers (ISPs). Claimants who fail to intimidate the author of an online article may go directly to the ISP. Though it is impossible for ISPs to police all their content, they may nevertheless be held liable and are likely to withdraw the article. This flaw needs to be fixed.

The other gap is the failure to address the problem that a law designed to protect the reputations of individuals is being used by companies to silence their critics. The law in Australia, the US and other countries does not discourage scientists from writing about companies, and the hope is that English libel law will move closer to these models.

There will be a period of consultation over the coming weeks, and it is important that the scientific community makes its views known. It is a tribute to scientists and supporters of science that our lobbying played a major role in bringing about the draft bill. We now need to refocus our efforts to ensure that the proposed reforms become stronger and even fairer, and do not get watered down by vested interests.

ON the evening of 12 March 1737, a group of eminent men gathered in a tiny
room leading off the novices’ chapel in the Franciscan church of Santa Croce in
Florence. For almost a century, this had been the humble resting place of
Galileo Galilei, condemned to an anonymous tomb because he had dared to say that
the Earth circled the Sun. The men meeting at Santa Croce, however, recognised
Galileo’s genius. Together they had built a grand, marble sarcophagus, a more
dignified resting-place for the man who had attempted to convince humanity of
its rightful place in the Universe. Guided by torchlight, they set about the
task of removing the bricks surrounding Galileo’s coffin. To their astonishment,
they discovered not one but two coffins. The first contained the skeleton of
Galileo, while the other held the remains of his daughter Virginia, a nun known
as Maria Celeste. She had been placed next to her father by Galileo’s loyal
student Vincenzio Viviani, who was aware of the great bond between them.

Dava Sobel, author of the bestseller Longitude, has spent the past
three years researching the story of Maria Celeste and translating the 120
letters she wrote to her father. Sobel uses the letters and her own storytelling
skills to add a refreshing slant to the story of Galileo and his clash with the
Catholic Church, one of the most dramatic episodes in the history of
science.

Maria Celeste was born in Padua on 13 August 1600, the daughter of Galileo
and Marina Gamba, his mistress for 12 years. Gamba later bore him a second
daughter and a son, but Galileo put both daughters, “born of fornication”, into
the Convent of San Matteo in Arcetri when they were 12 and 13 years old. While
the younger sister, Livia, remained silent, Maria Celeste spent the next twenty
years corresponding with her father, becoming his confidante and ally. Though
she was never allowed out of the convent, she had a uniquely personal
relationship with Galileo, and her letters record the details of his tumultuous
life.

The seeds of Galileo’s battle with Rome were sown in summer 1609, when he
heard news of the telescope. He refined the instrument, achieving a
magnification of 10. By the end of the year he was using his telescope to study
the heavens, starting with the Moon. “It is like the face of the Earth itself,”
he concluded, “which is marked with chains of mountains and depth of valleys.”
In June 1610, he discovered four new “planets”, namely the moons of Jupiter.
Then, in the following year, he observed sunspots, which “are carried around by
the rotation of the sun itself, which completes its period in about a lunar
łľ´Ç˛ÔłŮłó”.

Galileo had long been a supporter of Copernicus’s Sun-centred view of the
Universe. His telescope was providing him with evidence to back this theory and
contradict Ptolemy’s theory that the Universe was centred round the Earth. The
heavenly bodies were not perfect, but cratered and spotty; and not everything
revolved around the Earth, because Jupiter’s moons clearly orbited Jupiter.

Galileo promoted the Copernican theory widely and aggressively, arousing the
anger not only of jealous academics, but also of Pope Paul V, who summoned the
Jesuit intellectual Roberto Cardinal Bellarmino to look into the matter in 1616.
Many years earlier, Bellarmino had served as Inquisitor at the trial of Giordano
Bruno for heresy, who insisted that the Earth circled the Sun. Bruno was burnt
at the stake. Galileo was luckier—he was merely silenced. A vote by 11
theologians declared that the Earth was the centre of the Universe, and that any
subsequent statement to the contrary was heresy.

The situation seemed to change seven years later, when Maffeo Cardinal
Barberini was elected Pope Urban VIII in 1623. Galileo knew that the liberal
Pope looked upon him fondly, so he sought and obtained approval the following
year to re-open his research into the possibility of a Sun-centred Universe. He
began to write Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, a
discussion among three characters—a Copernican, a Ptolemist and an
intelligent layman. By voicing his opinion through these characters, Galileo was
distancing himself from the argument and protecting himself.

As well as describing the argument contained in the Dialogue, Sobel
adds marvellous drama to her book by including period detail, incidents that
ultimately determined Galileo’s fate. Outbreaks of bubonic plague seriously
delayed publication, for example, because travel was dangerous. Quarantine made
trips that usually took a few days into ordeals lasting weeks. Further delays
resulted when gangrene of the bladder killed Galileo’s publisher Prince Cesi,
founder of the world’s first scientific society, the Lyncean Academy.

Consequently by the time the Dialogue was ready for publication, the
political situation in Rome had changed and Galileo once again faced charges of
heresy. His trial began in the spring of 1633. Pope Urban, sympathetic towards
Galileo when initially elected, had since presided over the disastrous Thirty
Years’ War which had weakened his political clout. He could not afford to be
seen to be lenient towards Galileo so, on 16 June, papal legates declared that
the rebellious astronomer must serve a prison sentence.

Although some of the letters just contain convent gossip, Maria Celeste’s
words frequently add enormous emotion to the story. In October 1633, she writes
to her father, who had been ordered to recite the seven penitential psalms every
week for three years as part of his punishment, offering to say them on his
behalf. “Had I been able to substitute myself in the rest of your punishment,”
she says, “most willingly would I elect a prison even straiter than this one in
which I dwell, if by so doing I could set you at liberty.”

We don’t know Galileo’s response because his letters to her no longer
exist—a tragedy to historians and a weakness of this book. When Maria
Celeste died, the mother abbess discovered a vast pile of Galileo’s letters, and
burnt or buried them out of fear. After all, no sane Catholic wanted to be
caught in possession of the writings of a “vehemently suspected” heretic.

PRINCIPIA is arguably the most significant publication in the history of science. Without doubt, Isaac Newton was the greatest scientist Britain has ever produced, if also an isolated, obsessive, cruel genius. Michael White’s biography does describe the great man’s scientific achievements, but the real focus is the events in Newton’s tormented personal life.

Newton’s early childhood was marked by rejection and hatred. His mother, Hannah, was widowed before Isaac was born, and when she remarried, her new husband refused to accept her three-year-old son into his home. He never forgot the pain of abandonment

An embittered man, Newton lived a life full of vengeful disputes, including long-running battles with John Flamsteed over access to astronomical data, with Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz over who invented calculus, and with Robert Hooke over virtually everything imaginable. White does not skimp when describing these hostile conflicts.

As the subtitle suggests, there are descriptions of Newton’s secret life-long fascination with alchemy throughout the book. Newton wrote more than a million words on the subject, but many other members of the Royal Society privately shared Newton’s obsession. Alchemists tended to work in secret to avoid the wrath of the church and prosecution under an anti-alchemy law passed by Henry IV. Later monarchs were slightly more tolerant, hoping that discovery of the philosopher’s stone might help the Crown to pay off its debts, but the law remained in force.

White gives enlightening accounts of Newton’s exploits in alchemy and his scientific research, but he also attempts to go one step further by arguing that the former influenced and inspired the latter. His controversial argument is not wholly convincing, and merely distracts from an otherwise fascinating biography.

Even beyond the realm of science, Newton’s life was eventful. He was Master of the Royal Mint for a while—until he reformed the nation’s currency, Britain was on the point of economic collapse. Newton also frequented brothels and bars in the effort to hunt down counterfeiters, whom he would have hung, drawn and quartered. Here was a scientist who could explain gravity, create calculus, humiliate his rivals, dabble in alchemy and still have time to torture counterfeiters—those were the days.