Scientists Must Clarify The Societal Relevance of Research

Illustration: John Overmeyer A quarter-century ago, Margaret Mead rose up-wooden staff in hand-at a business meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropology to warn anthropologists that if they fail to put their work on the "coffee tables of America," there would soon be no anthropology. More recently, James McPherson, a professor of history at Princeton University, noted in his book Drawn with the Sword (Oxford University Press, 1996), that the lack of jobs for historians may be related to the obscurity of their work. Amateur documentaries and narratives, he contended, provide most of what the public learns about history. On yet another frontier-that of reinventing biomedical research in the aftermath of health care reform-United States Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala concluded her comments about public policy at the 1996 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Baltimore with the illuminating exhortation that if science is to thrive, "every citizen must be an active constituent of science." The events of the past quarter-century confirm Mead's precocious reasoning that academic scholars and professional societies have unwisely abdicated public education and cultural leadership to others. Putting it less politely, making academic research relevant to the general public is a challenge that cannot be put off much longer. As noted by McPherson, academics seemingly equate professionalism with writing more and more about less and less. However, there are hopeful signs that some in the scientific community are beginning to realize that we do not communicate well with the public that pays our salaries and funds our research. A few scientific organizations now produce educational materials to help media professionals bridge the gap when esoteric subjects, such as the use of DNA chemistry in identification technology, are thrust into the public light. In a bold move to cut laboratory jargon, Tom Brzustowski, president of Canada's Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, recently announced in the council's newsletter that the organization will soon require every grant application to include a summary that the author's "teenage children or parents would understand" (Science, 273:1327, 1996). But the rank and file of scholars and researchers find the thought of writing for the public abhorrent. Outside the confines of campus, we tend to take refuge from the public by seeking the admiration of peers. After all, how can we explain the strategic and practical value of whatever it is that we do to a public that is plainly illiterate about what we do? Furthermore, we engender the ridiculous notion that that's not our job. Has anyone ever heard of a graduate training program that included writing for the public? Wherever we look in academic research, we find taboos about what we call "dumbing our work down" for public consumption. Professional productivity (and, incidentally, earning tenure and promotion) demands a disciplined approach to resolving problems in ever finer detail. We hold tight to these professional standards, even though we typically aren't communicating with-or for-anyone but a small circle of "peers." The fact that high percentages of papers published in professional journals draw little or no attention is something that we choose not to reflect on too often. After all, who knows when the seemingly insignificant may spring into public service, challenge dogma, or reveal new order in the universe? Incredibly, we think that by transferring this knowledge to a handful of students and postdocs, we have fulfilled our missions in education. With only a few exceptions, the culture of high academic scholarship leaves it to amateur scholars and media professionals to synthesize coherent messages, write narratives, and produce documentaries for the domain of the general public. Yet when such amateur efforts gain popularity, professional scholars are quick to criticize their lack of "rigor." This demand for unrelenting professional rigor seems inviolable, so that even professional scholars are not permitted, by some unwritten code it seems, to make information interesting and entertaining. We not only shun the indignity of trying to make the public excited about whatever it is that we do, but also ignore the advice of our own leaders who understand how support is gained through patronage. Margaret Mead understood how anthropology gets funded. The funds may come from federal grants authorized by Congress, but the public provides the money and wants to see some result from the investment on their "coffee tables." Research is not a hobby for tenure-path faculty who would otherwise be bored and idle; it is a public service. Perhaps no crisis in public support and career development is more pronounced than the one illustrated by the lack of biomedical research support commensurate with the pace of discovery. This crisis has been building, first by the sheer rate of growth and now by fundamental questions of relevance to public health policy. In the first instance, biomedical research features a growth rate that cannot be endured with public funds. We who are the second-generation clones of our 1960s mentors and forebears now have tenure and professorships, yet our drive for discovery and creativity appears to the public as a prodigious appetite for more money and more growth that cannot be sustained. Our postdocs and graduate students will, for the most part, never have career opportunities comparable to the ones we enjoyed-yet we keep polishing up new generations of clones. The truth of the matter is that there has been significant real growth in dollars appropriated for biomedical research. We speak of the past two decades as a period of "declining" resources mostly because of our own unmanaged growth in numbers. Typically these resources are the numerous federal programs that provide grants for investigator-initiated research proposals. As principal investigators and their clones have exhausted these sources, we have also overrun the many small, private foundations with good applications that cannot be supported. Altogether, we have so exhausted all viable sources of patronage that the criteria for actually getting a research grant application funded have escalated from rank scores of above average to "excellent" to [now] "outstanding." Presented with the impossible task of deciding which grant applications are "outstanding" and should be funded, and which are merely "excellent" and cannot be funded, we speak often of the crisis in funding biomedical research. I recall with some amusement and astonishment the arrogant cries of "censorship" when the members of another academic discipline first encountered a few years ago-apparently for the first time-the routine rejection of their grant applications for funding. Some academics, it seems, still have no idea about who pays for their work. Public Priorities And Policy Important questions that all of us in academic research will have to consider sooner or later are, "Who is our patron, and what is our public policy for establishing relevance?" Academic scholars are rather na^Õve about public policy. We equate public policy with the orchestrated efforts of our academic societies to flood the offices of key congressional leaders with letters, faxes, and E-mails requesting more money. While such efforts have produced notable gains, the bottom line is that the overall trends for successful funding of any given grant application have remained constantly downward since the academic glory days of the 1960s. Significantly, a dominant theme of the past election year was a sharp reminder that the only money Congress has to spend was taken from someone else. Mead and Shalala both pointed out that if we expect to be granted support for our work with public funds, we ignore the public's priorities at our own peril. The case of biomedical research is an interesting example. Important public priorities that are still largely ignored by biomedical researchers include congressional budget-balancing efforts and the collateral effects of health care reform. While it is easy to understand the sacrifices that will have to be made to balance the federal budget, it is not so easy to address the fundamental value of one's worth to society. Biomedical researchers, for the most part, have not understood that health care reform challenges the cost-effectiveness of the current system for academic biomedical research. In response to this crisis in funding, Jay Moskowitcz (then the National Institutes of Health's deputy director for policy) emphasized at a 1993 American Society for Neurochemistry Public Policy Forum that even with the transition to a Democratic White House (1) NIH funds available for research will continue to fall behind the pace of discovery; (2) scientists will have to learn how to live with growing congressional influence on how NIH funds are spent; and (3) health care reform will have significant impact on biomedical research. It is therefore revealing that three years later, Shalala's primary message at the 1996 AAAS meeting emphasized (1) the need to find "new ways" to finance academic biomedical research; (2) the need for more patient-oriented research; and (3) the need to focus on "prevention" research. All these different voices, from Mead in anthropology to McPherson in history to Moskowitcz and Shalala in biomedical research, seem to sing the same tune: The public has something to say about how its funds are spent. Furthermore, if research is going to thrive, researchers must move beyond such defensive strategies as blitzing Congress with letters and enlist every citizen as an active constituent of learning and discovery. The key is that research funded by the public needs to serve the public, and Congress would probably be delighted to support the growth of discovery in research if the public were excited by it and demanded more of it. Richard C. Wiggins is professor and chairman of the department of anatomy at West Virginia University School of Medicine. The bottom line is that the current system for academic research is not responding effectively to social change-and we are paying the price through heavy losses in career opportunities and funds to support our work. The strategies suggested by Mead and many others in numerous learned professions all center on developing public enthusiasm in support of our work. As scholars, researchers, and professional societies have generally abdicated public education and cultural leadership to others, we have ensured the crises in public support that now cross disciplinary boundaries in academic research and scholarship. What part of our academic culture is it that makes us refuse to take charge of exciting the public about what we do? Whatever it is, we need to reinvent it. The current call for university "outreach" gives us carte blanche to make ourselves visible, relevant, and indispensable to the public. Either individually or collectively through our learned societies, we must take charge of developing our patrons by making them excited about our work. Currently we don't know much about how to do that, but perhaps we can take a lesson from the performing arts: You don't play Schönberg when you're trying to develop new converts to classical music. There's a time and a place to play beautiful music for the public, and there's a time and place to explore theory with peers. Performing artists have figured out how to do both. Perhaps researchers should begin to think of their work as part of a symphony supported by subscribers.

Scientists Must Clarify The Societal Relevance of Research

The Scientist Staff

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