March 12, 2007
Part of the problem in communicating science to the public is the scientists themselves.
“Scientists have a responsibility to communicate what they do,” said science journalist Tom Siegfried this morning. “Part of the whole purpose of science to communicate what you found out to the world at large.”
Michael Lemonick, who has declared himself the morning’s iconoclast, argued that that would require too much of scientists. “You’re asking people to do something beyond their job,” he said.
Even if communicating with the public is not a responsibility of a scientist, it is an essential part of being successful. In order to write a successful grant, you must convince the funders that your research is important. In order to get a faculty position, you must explain your work to people in different specialties. Even fellow scientists will have no idea what you’re talking about unless you can explain it in something close to plain English.
Scientists usually like to talk about their work, and if they have achieved any prominence, they are usually very good at talking (and writing) about it. But we are not taught to communicate.
Even though we are funded by public money (the NIH is paying for my PhD!) and work in the public interest, communication with the public is not emphasized. Instead, we learn how to talk in the jargon of our field, to write scientific papers, grants, and give research presentations. We use words like elucidate, attenuate, and potentiate. When we do talk about the significance of our research, we are instructed to condense it into one long, unreadable sentence; “These studies may help elucidate the role of the neurotransmitter transporter GAT1 in contributing to epilepsy, stroke and excitotoxicity.”
Cartoonist Larry Gonick said that there should be a class called “Verbs for Scientists.”
I say “Please!”
By Katherine Leitzell, 03/12/07 at 11:00 am
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Science journalism
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March 12, 2007
Science is complicated. Seeing it with your own two eyes is almost impossible these days, even for scientists. Some things are too small (the spin properties of a single molecule) and some things are much too big (the mysteries of the universe), and some things are just plain invisible. However, the closer we can get to “seeing” something, the more we believe it. Consider how reputable the TrimSpa creators look in their white lab coats, while they stand among beakers and flasks. However, eye-witness accounts are rarely found in science stories.
This is why explaining science is so damn hard. Rarely does the public catch a glimpse of a real scientist in action. And even if they could, who knows if they’d enjoy watching? Often, the crawl of scientific evidence doesn’t make for a compelling scene. But then again, maybe it would.
According to some conference participants, some websites now have “lab-cams” to catch scientists in action. This means that someone, somewhere, wants to see what goes on behind closed laboratory doors. As a young(ish) person starting out with the hopes of communicating science, this is an important lesson. I don’t mean to say that watching a researcher pipette her sample into tubes is inherently beneficial. But rather, knowing something about the set-up of a lab or the smell of a certain room lends itself to a deeper understanding. And these days, science is in desperate need of de-mystification.
By Laura Sanders, 03/12/07 at 10:48 am
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Visual science
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March 12, 2007
Talk about getting back to the basics ... the first session of our gathering had nothing less than the theme of defining what science and writing about science is all about. There’ll be a comprehensive report provided later by the good folks from the Annenberg School, but this is just a quick rundown - aimed as much at testing the blog tool and providing a couple of links as anything else.
Don Kennedy, editor-in-chief of the journal Science, started out by noting the “terrible public confusion” over how science works. He ran through the main steps of the process - hypothesis, experimental testing of that hypothesis, efforts to falsify the hypothesis based on the facts, etc. He also provided a rundown of the types of research that Science finds most intriguing: work that confirms a hypothesis that’s important but hadn’t been confirmed before (say, global warming?), counterintuitive breakthroughs (say, the Chicxulub asteroid) and explorations of new territory that the editors “jump out of our shoes about.” Kennedy said the “secondary market [that is, journalists] is pretty good at picking out what matters and what doesn’t matter.”
Among the links to follow up, particularly if you want to address the ever-popular “theory vs. fact” debate, is the National Academies publication “Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science.”
Alex Witze, senior news and features editor at Nature, weighed in with her outsider-turned-insider view of the scientific publishing process. “Journalists in general do not recognize how sloppy science can be,” she noted. Peer review, for example, is “no inoculation against stupidity.” But there are ways to fight the madness.
She recommended getting up to speed on statistics, citing the classic work “News and Numbers.” ... and she recommended using a diversity of sources as your truth squads for scientific claims (not always turning to, say, John Pike, Keith Cowing and Art Caplan, for example).
She also put in a plug for Connotea, a social recommendation site for scientists a la Del.icio.us.
Michael Lemonick, a veteran of Time magazine, took on the “iconoclast” role: He cited the example of an astrophysicist who thought he discovered planets circling a pulsar - then, weeks before giving a big presentation, found a flaw that led him to reverse his views. He was persuaded to give the presentation anyway, and won a standing ovation for it.
Similarly, journalists should have a strong ethic of questioning what is thought to be known. “I don’t think we question ourselves enough,” he said. And in keeping with the iconoclastic point of view, Lemonick questioned whether having more science-friendly editors would solve the problem. “The proposition that ‘if only we could do it more, things would be better’ ... I think we’re kidding ourselves.”
In the discussion part of the session, we talked about the implications of a world in which embargo times were more fluid, or really hardly existed at all ... as well as some of the cautionary tales about going off half-cocked in science reporting. Some examples and links:
- The Arxiv site for physics papers, which is eroding the embargo paradigm.
- A controversial study about the origins of corn.
- Pyramids made out of concrete?
- The Bosnian pyramid.
By the way, all these links are purely plucked out by me - in some cases, recommended by presenters, and in some cases not.
By Alan Boyle, 03/12/07 at 11:01 am
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What is Science?
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March 12, 2007
by Andrew McGregor
In the film “Goodbye Lenin” the protagonist’s mother suffers a stroke just before communism falls in East Germany and he tries to maintain her perception that communism has not ended. One of the ways he does this is by playing old news broadcasts because in communist East Germany the news never changes.
That moment was funny and interesting but it also sheds light on journalism everywhere. If someone were to randomly be given a newspaper with the headline “SEX SCANDAL ROCKS CAPITOL HILL” they would be hard pressed to determine exactly when that headline was written. Mark Foley, Bill Clinton? Who? When?
Science journalism is different because when a story is reported the category of science gives the article validity not possessed by other kinds of journalism. For example, the headline “FIRST TEST TUBE BABY BORN” is an important moment of scientific progress: a headline that stands alone in history.
The session this morning very much dealt with such issues as luminaries from around the nation debated the nature of science writing, starting with such fundamental considerations as asking, “What is science?”
Dialectical opinions about what to do with science journalism were expressed, but the salient issue became the problem of science and belief. Donald Kennedy, the editor-in-chief of Science Magazine gave an example by dropping a pencil on the floor as an example of people believing in gravity. He contrasted this with a belief in evolution, stating that only about half of the American population believes in evolution.
This statistic belies the seminal role of science in terms of cultural and journalistic importance. While journalism in its idealized manifestations is supposed to be fair, objective, and balanced. What science journalism states is perceived as being true by the public. This is part of the uneasiness faced by science writers as they must be both educators and reporters; forcing science writing outside of the traditional tropes of journalism.
In terms of journalism it is interesting to contrast science reporting with political reporting. People expect politicians to lie on some level. This cynicism gives itself to different styles of reporting where George Bush says A and Nancy Pelosi retorts with B and that can be a complete story.
Science journalism is held to a different standard commensurate with the way science is perceived not as another story, but as something true.
Science writers and scientists themselves will not tend to argue that their research is a unifying and complete theory of life. However, the perception is there as scientists are expected to provide missile defense shields, cures for AIDS, and a narrative for the creation of existence.
It is this expectation that makes science journalism an intrinsically difficult and important part of contemporary culture.
By Andrew McGregor, 03/12/07 at 9:59 am
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Science journalism
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