Scientists Should Spend More Time Communicating With The Public

"If it blows up, it's chemistry. If it dies, it's biology. If it doesn't work, it's physics." These immutable truths seemed to govern classroom science in my high school, and they drove me to become an English major in college. I went reluctantly. As a boy, I had collected insects, fossil seashells, and just about anything from nature that didn't emit foul odors and annoy my mother. But in classrooms, my fascination with the natural world slowly withered as my science teachers recited only the bare facts - units of neatly packaged knowledge, purged of any of the agonizing and exhilarating detective work that produced it. And I couldn't seem to do the canned experiments or dissections right. Disappointed and bored, I knew by age 16 that whatever I did in life, it would be as far from laboratory science as I could get. Ironically, after going all the way to a Ph.D. in literature, I'm back in my science briar patch. During my years away I devoured popular science articles in newspapers and magazines for recreational reading. One day it struck me that the best science writing was every bit as edifying and exciting as the poetry and fiction I was teaching. I left teaching literature, and I'm now teaching scientists to write for the public. Actually, I'm just teaching scientists to write for me. As a layman interested in science and in good writing, I edit their stories until they not only tell me what I want to know, but delight me. No story is finished until it does both, I tell my students, because the nonscientist must be entertained while being enlightened. Without delight, to borrow from Robert Frost, there is no wisdom. But I train only 10 students a year. That's hardly enough to satisfy the public's intense hunger for information about medicine, science, and technology. What's needed to satisfy this hunger is not merely more science writers, but more scientist writers - physicists, biologists, astron- omers, and other specialists willing to share their knowledge and discoveries with a lay readership eager for answers and explanations it can readily understand. The main reason scientists should make time to communicate to the public is that U.S. citizens get up to 90% of their information about science from newspapers, magazines, and, to a lesser extent, television. As producers of scientific knowledge, scientists are in the best position to use the media to teach the public what it wants - and needs - to know about developments in medicine, science, and technology. Scientists, more than anyone can improve the public's understanding of the world around them just by writing a letter to the local newspaper. Writing for general audiences needn't be seen as pure altruism. A democracy requires an informed electorate to function properly. In any case, the better the average person understands the open-ended process of science, the more willing he or she should be to spend tax money on research. Another reason scientists should write for the public is that their words will be seen by bright young people who may have no other access to science than dreary textbooks and uninspiring teachers. Finally, this sort of writing offers scientists the chance to give the world something unique. Unlike scientific work, which may eventually be done by someone a scientist's writing for the public belongs exclusively to him. Nevertheless, my scientist colleagues offer plenty of reasons for not writing for lay audiences. They remind me, for example, that the university reward system ignores popular writing at promotion and tenure time. In fact, they point out, publicly acclaimed academic scientists - even the most distinguished - can become the object of ridicule among their colleagues. Carl Sagan, they say, may have lost more ground with some astronomers after his record-setting "Cosmos" series than he gained with all his research in planetary astronomy. Other eminent scientists whose public statements sometimes undermined their professional reputations are Linus Pauling, William Shockley, and B.F. Skinner. Yet some scientists manage to write for large and enthusiastic lay audiences without getting under their colleagues' skin. Stephen Jay Gould, James Trefil, Lewis Thomas, Freeman Dyson, and Stephen Hawking come to mind. Their examples would suggest that as long as a scientist writes only about what he knows, he won't go wrong. These scientists doubtlessly have their private reasons for writing for general audiences. But it is probably safe to say that they all share the belief that what they write will make the world a better place. For example, Dutch animal behaviorist Franz de Waal, whose Peacemaking Among Primates won the 1989 Los Angeles Times Book Award in the science and technology category, writes, "My main purpose [in aiming the book at a general audience] is to correct biology's bleak orientation on the human condition. In a decade in which peace has become the single most important public issue, it is essential to introduce the accumulated evidence that, for humans, making peace is as natural as making war." Professor de Waal, like most of his scientist-popularizer colleagues, clearly isn't doing it for the money. Writing for the general public has other rewards, however. Among them is the gratification that comes with educating the electorate, building public support for science and recruiting talented young people into the field. Moreover, scientists who write for a lay audience are helping to reintegrate science into American life at a time when scientists and nonscientists are in danger of drifting out of one another's sight. John Wilkes is director of the Science Communication Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Scientists Should Spend More Time Communicating With The Public

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