Successfully Sharing Our Stories of Science

Illustration: A. Canamucio The ethos of our science was articulated by Leonardo da Vinci 500 years ago: "A bird is an instrument working according to mathematical law." This replaced the medieval mystical view that it was the soul of the bird that embodied the nature of flight. How beautifully the work honored recently by the Lasker Awards mirrors that transition.1 The work of Peter C. Nowell, Janet D. Rowley, and Alfred G. Knudson replaced the mystical soul of the cancer cell with the instrument of physical changes in DNA--a molecule whose structure we know. The many disparate observed causes of cancer--chemicals, viruses, radiation, heredity--causes unconnected by mechanism to the disease--are all comprehensible through the crucible of actual alterations in the DNA. A phenomenon turned into an instrument, obeying rules and becoming not just known but comprehensible. The work of Paul Nurse, Lee Hartwell, and Yoshio Masui told us that the cell cycle, perhaps the most basic and most central process of life, can be studied and dissected and its mechanism elucidated--like the gears and springs of life's cyclic clockworks. For cancer biologists, these two sets of discoveries have, more than most, illuminated the black box of these diseases. Genetic changes alter the mechanisms that govern the cell cycle and the altered cell cycle allows a cell to accept genetic damage and pass it on to its progeny--an intricate and fatal choreography of life's cellular dance gone awry. If we are to continue to support the type of beautiful science we celebrate today and enable the expression of the creativity of the scientists we honor today, it will take more than well-disposed appropriations committees, even more than vocal advocates; it will take a society that truly values the science and the scientists much as Renaissance Florence valued its art and its artists. It will take a society that sees its own historical narrative as, in part, the narrative of its science. A culture, a civilization is defined by the stories it tells and by the narrative it sees itself as creating and transmitting. For us, stories of science are among the most precious and most powerful. For science to truly thrive in a society, the stories of science must be central to how we attempt to understand our world and ourselves. They embody the very assumptions we make about how we come to know things and what we see as progress. Thus, science itself can help us define our sense of identity and our attachments to history--its effects not imposed on us by a mysterious community of distant scientists but part of us. Its progress can mark our culture's passage through time and the footprints we will leave as our history. But do we tell science as true story, as real narrative? Unfortunately, the telling of science is too often lost in jargon, technicality, and obscurity. We fail to share the simple wonder, for example, that cancer, a disease we all at some point, unfortunately get to experience, is due to real damage to the real instructions that guide the behavior of cells--or that the most basic cycle whereby one cell gives rise to two has a real physical mechanism--an amazing machine that we can know. The story is not the names--chromosomal translocations, tumor suppressor genes, cyclin-dependent kinases--but the naming. It is that mystery gives way to manifest beauty and we can actually give name to things that exist in the physical world that we inhabit. We certainly report on science: facts, factlets, information, misinformation. According to the 1998 Science and Engineering Indicators, the American public is exposed to a lot of scientific information, mostly through TV and newspapers. A high percentage of the public expresses a high interest in new scientific discoveries and in the use of new inventions, and this high level of interest is rising. Americans register the highest level of confidence in the promise of science and technology to make life better when compared to the citizens of 13 other industrialized countries. This report emphasizes the powerful connection that Americans make between science and its expected application. This connection is fueled by how science is presented through the media. But reporting about scientific discovery is different from telling great stories of scientific inquiry. It is not surprising that our interest in science stories is so often wrapped in a need to justify the effort. We justify the scientific pursuit by "the discovery" and we justify the discovery by its utility. We thus assign to the science its value and too often miss its riches. The utility of discoveries in science is actually remarkable. We already use the discoveries we honor today to diagnose and classify cancer, to find genes and create genetic tests to help people understand who is at risk for this disease. Our successful therapies seem to work by playing on the altered relation between the cell cycle and DNA damage that characterizes cancer, and we are beginning to design drugs targeted against these cell cycle machines. Despite the marvel of this utility, the real product of science is knowledge and insight, and the bridge between discovery and application is often tenuous. Most often the discovery itself is, in fact, simply the creation of our ability to articulate the newly possible. That is its true and immediate utility; to make the unimaginable imaginable. Many things link scientific breakthrough (a leap in knowledge and understanding) to a medical breakthrough (a true and valuable application)--but most of all time. Herein lies one of the most difficult aspects of the public understanding of science. We are both an impatient and, in many ways, a magical society. Airplanes, computers, television--all fill our lives with amazing technology that few understand. This leads to a sense that anything is possible and that what we can't do is merely a matter of the lack of will to do it. Expectations, especially for medical research, are enormous. I am often asked why we have not won the war on cancer. We have not "won" this war because cancer is an incredibly hard and complex problem, not because of lack of focus or misguided policies. That science is part of a long and continuous narrative is lost in the parody of eureka science and the fantasy of instantaneous application. We must be careful to recognize the human and cultural values of inquiry, of knowledge and of curiosity as both cause and outcome of science and weave them, along with utility, into what gives the stories of science their value. There is one final facet of science that is central to a society being able to adopt it as part of its central narrative. It is what John Gardner spoke of when he called for "moral fiction" in our literature. He wrote not of moralizing sermons but of stories that allow us to sift through competing values and thereby experience which values we want to live with. The real stories of science reflect its set of values--the freedom to reject past assumptions; the possibility that the future is different from the present and these differences are made that way by our own work and by our own knowledge; that power can come from evidence and not authority. These noble ideas play out in the sweat and grime of real human dramas of competition and failure, of frustration and ambition--but most of all--of amazing curiosity. We increasingly recognize that science is inextricably bound up in ethics and philosophy--from the splitting of the atom to deciphering the genetic code to cloning Dolly. Few things better support the argument that science is an essential part of our cultural narrative than the fact that some of our most compelling and pressing ethical and philosophical concerns are now born of our science. In a world of sound bytes and journalistic stories, the need for narrative remains. Today we are fortunate to be experiencing unprecedented public support, at least for some of our science. I worry how deep that support is. I worry that it is not anchored in an understanding of science or in an identification with the scientific narrative as one we all share. I worry that that support exists in a meta-stable state of grace in a society not truly scientifically literate. While we are interested in science, as a society our hold on the nature of scientific inquiry, of the nature of evidence, and of the difference between evidence and belief is tenuous. For biomedical research, the difficult argument between alternative and traditional medical research is a troubling manifestation of this. We love science when it gives us what we want and distrust it when it fails our hopes and expectations. The expectation to deliver and to thereby prove the value of research is because, in part, we do not embrace the full narrative of our science. I have no single answer as to how we successfully share the stories of science, but I am convinced that the scientific enterprise must embrace this challenge. When science moved into institutionalized and somewhat isolated professionalism in the 19th century, its link to the public was altered. Now as we enter a time when science will continue to have an increasing and overwhelming impact on society, science must find ways to connect to the public--not in order to assure short-term support but to be more fully integrated into our culture. The Lasker Awards honor scientists for their work, but we best honor their work if, in addition, we all find ways to teach and to tell the stories of science as our stories--that we will teach them to our children, that they will fill us with pride and that through these stories, we will recognize that the achievements of science are the achievements of our age. Richard D. Klausner, M.D., is director of the National Cancer Institute (www.nci.nih.gov/klaus.htm). This essay is adapted from a speech he gave at the Lasker Awards ceremony on Sept. 25, 1998. E. Russo, "1998 Lasker Award Recipients Honored For Their Groundbreaking Achievements," The Scientist, 12[20]:1,3 Oct. 12, 1998.

Successfully Sharing Our Stories of Science

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