18th Jun 2008
Science and Communications
I have been asked to speak at a Royal Irish Academy seminar on geoscience tomorrow in Parliament Buildings which is being led by Garth Earls, the Director of the Geological Survey of Northern Ireland, and have been canvassing expert opinion on how to best illustrate the gap between many scientists and the press. Dr Marie Cowan, the British Geological Survey’s communications manager pointed me to a very useful report on science and society which was published earlier this year by Research Councils UK.
I’ll be using some of the findings in my presentation but was taken by the positive trend in public perceptions of science. Through the 1990’s and early noughites public scepticism of science was at very high levels. Fueled by Chernobyl, Foot and Mouth and the perception that science had become too close to business many scientists and institutions responded by distancing themselves from public debate and the media in general although this trend is slowly changing.
My research for tomorrow’s speech threw up another great story, that of Carl Sagan, which highlights the internal barriers to communication within the scientific community.
In 1992, the astronomer, author of twenty books translated worldwide, an enormously successful television series and a Hollywood film, was denied membership to the National Academy of Sciences.
In fact he was not able to raise the required two-thirds vote from its members. Director of the Laboratory of Planetary Studies at Cornell University, Sagan had distinguished himself for the calculation of the greenhouse effect on Venus, for his studies on the surface of Mars and on the oceans of Titan, Saturn’s large moon. Too many colleagues turned up their noses at his tireless activity in spreading scientific news, which had made him, perhaps the most famous scientist in the United States, and one of the most vibrant defenders of science in the world.
Two years later the National Academy of Sciences reconsidered its vote, honouring him with the Public Welfare Medal. Sagan had brilliantly challenged two important prejudices which besiege scientists that choose to communicate with
the general public: the idea that scientists who do are distracted from their “real” work – research – and the idea that scientists are not able to express themselves clearly, as if their mental universe were so far from the common man that at the very least they need a “translator”.
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