Emily Coren is a science illustrator in California. She has a BS in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from UC-Santa Cruz that led to a position making transgenic butterflies at SUNY Buffalo. She graduated from the UC Santa Cruz Program in Science Illustration and drew bugs, plants and dinosaur bones at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural History and developed educational content for Walden Media in Los Angeles. Her goal as a science illustrator has always been to use popular media to make science accessible to people with non-science backgrounds. Current project for connecting is WalkaboutEm.com and can be found at on Twitter as @emilycoren.
I want to express my appreciation to all of the scientists and science communicators who have spoken up before me. There have been some wonderful issues raised in June’s Soapbox Science #reachingoutsci series, and I hope my ideas continue the discussion.
I think we agree that:
Research is publicly funded so it’s necessary to put it in a format the public can access. The UK Parliament session ‘Voice of the Future 2012’ hosted by the Science and Technology Committee on March 14, 2012, is a great demonstration of how policy and government reflect both the input from public opinion and values as well as information from science advisers. Politicians have an incentive to meet the requests of their constituency if they want re-election. The session clearly demonstrates why it’s so important to put science communication into a format that improves science literacy.
Science literacy would be improved by teams of people working with scientists creating content which is accessible to the public. I agree with Shaaron Leverment when she said, “Reaching out to people where they are is a very important part of what we do” and with Jeanne Garbarino when she said, “I hope that we can figure out a way to expand science communication efforts from research institutions by having a dedicated team of people who work side by side with scientists.” We need to integrate science into popular media.
I don’t expect scientists to be able to or have the time to do this, so hire science communicators! Many of us come from science backgrounds and really want to help you get your work understood by the public so that you continue to have public support and funding. As Kalliopi Monoyios so perfectly put it, “Dun-duh-nuh-NUH!!!!!! ENTER: The science communicators! (“We are here! We are here!”)”
Using mass media for science communication is more important now than ever because we have so much new information coming out each year. Thanks to new technologies, the rate of data accumulation has increased dramatically, even in the last 50 years. If we expect the public to keep up with that then we need to come-up with new strategies for science communication.
My solution to science communication is:
Use mass media to communicate science to the public. We have science research generating vast amounts of new information about our world, and an entertainment industry producing huge volumes of content that is consumed by the public collectively creating our culture. Why not start pairing them to work together?
This can be fun. Sexier than Bill Nye and sillier than Myth Busters.
Put science content into formats already being used by people who are uninterested in science. Let’s meet the public where they are at. As I’m writing this, IMDB informs me that three of the most popular television shows at the moment are Game of Thrones, True Blood and Breaking Bad. Breaking Bad at least has some chemistry in it…
Did you know there’s historical precedent for this kind of content? My dad is an Archivist at the National Archives, and as a kid visiting him for “Take Your Daughter To Work Day,” he showed me The Winged Scourge, a malaria vector control propaganda piece produced in 1943 in collaboration between Disney and Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. There are many more great examples of science integration into pop culture, such as Animaniacs – Yakko’s Universe (1993), and Animaniacs – Be Careful What You Eat (1993). I have to include both because they are so much fun. A recent addition includes (A Biologist’s) St. Patrick’s Day Song by Adam Cole at NPR. This a great start! I’d say it’s likely though that the target audience for this is biologists who like to drink. What about creating a cross between this and content with a target audience more like the viral Narwhals video my husband’s friends are passing around at work.
There is an issue of scope to what I’m proposing. Sending graduate students to talk to an elementary school class does not have the same reach required to educate a whole population. As a community, let’s start thinking bigger.
I’m looking to achieve cultural integration of science. For example, let’s do science placement in TV and movies the same way that you would do product placement. We can write TV shows about scientists the way we do with doctors and lawyers, like Scrubs but with a set of incoming graduate students, instead of medical interns. Most importantly, integrating content for long periods in narrative programming allows for maintaining audience interest long enough to communicate complex ideas.
And words aren’t enough. You have to use images and music. Ever seen a Coke ad without the artwork?
I had a professor in college, Andrew Szasz, who taught an entire class on why disposable plastic water bottles are an environmental catastrophe. This is what’s selling those plastic water bottles. Where’s our ad/tv placement equating bottled water as “dirty” and showing sexy young, clean people enjoying drinking tap water? Why does our anti-plastic campaign look like this?
Want the public to know that evolution is a fact, not a belief? I agree with David Wescott, “The smarter approach is the long term one – win 30 of the smaller battles, and the larger one will be easier to win.” Don’t like the trend of teaching creationism in schools? Let’s create 30 smaller campaigns showing how we know what we know about evolution but never use the words evolution and creationism (they are polarizing, and distracting from the evidence). Then, after the public accepts some of the smaller pieces we can start tying them together. This, for me, is about creating a cultural shift. First we have to meet them where they are at.
Let’s put the Arts back into the Arts and Sciences. Even if that means more dancing narwhals.
My question to the science communication community is, How are we going to find funding to accomplish this?
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Do you consider the possibility that art and sex may be last century’s marketing and generally that linear models of communication are rather limited in their potential?
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Thank you for this article! I am totally and completely blown away by the contrast of the plastic videos you posted. Yes… I knew we were in a dire state of science promotion videos, but that was a no-hiding, this-is-the-actual-state-of-where-we’re-at example. I’m actually in state of shock.
As for a making a change – One of the first big steps is exactly what you’re doing – bringing up the conversation with science communicators and asking us to push our limits, push our teams (if we’re in universities, labs, magazines, online publications) and strive to the level of a Jennifer Aniston viral video. I’ve worked as a science communicator in a lab for 4 years now—I have a journalism, not science, background—and I am always blown away by our researchers to participate in new and creative ways to communicate.
We just need a bit of dedication, some creativity—and funding, yes, but it is amazing what you can do with a limited budget. It really is a shifting conversation and dedication to creativity. I challenge everyone (including myself and my teams) to push our limits and reach higher! We can do this!
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I agree with you, Emily, but only to a point. Many times I think we as scientists get so excited and carried away with every aspect of our science that we end up hurting ourselves with the public because they don’t understand or care about the details of our quests for knowledge. To put it simply, I think we share too much too soon. We’re like chefs running out of the kitchen all excited because we put a pinch of oregano in the sauce. And the people look at us strange and say…“yeah…that’s great….when do we eat?”
A perfect example of this was the partially tiled Hi-Res images from the Mars Curiosity rover. As scientists we’re all excited and gooey-eyed over the incomplete tiles which put together a mosaic view with big black lines that looked like a redacted document. And so that’s what the non-scientific public assumed…that we’re hiding something or blacking out information.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia16051.html
It’s also hard for us to imagine that anyone wouldn’t be as excited as we are about our science. My wife reminds me often of her indifference to the happenings in my lab. “That’s nice, honey” and she goes back to her episode of So You Think You Can Dance. LOL
It’s all how we present ourselves. We have to find better ways of condensing months and years of our passions into a paragraph of about 5 sentences with a link that says “read here for more information” and breaks it down for them, step by step, and very slowly, while not boring them to death with the details we find so irresistible.
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As a practicing scientist, who believes it is imperative that we learn to communicate science to the public, I applaud your article. I was taught how to give scientific presentations, full of data slides, to other scientists. However, I was never taught to give an entertaining and thought-provoking presentation to non-scientists. I believe that graduate schools are doing a disservice to students and lay persons by not fostering the intermingling of these two groups. I propose that professors at graduate schools develop courses where their students are required to give presentations at venues such as Café Scientifique. Requiring graduate students to give presentations at these public venues costs nothing and integrating this into courses should be very cheep. I think that scientists must start the campaign to bring science to the masses. They can do this either by becoming better communicators or by hiring trained scientific communicators. Becoming a better scientific communicator starts in graduate school. If there is not a program at your university, then ask that one be started. If the program cannot be started, for one reason or another, then join a Café Scientifique or Toast Masters and learn to give engaging scientific presentations. We are responsible for our own lack of ability to communicate science effectively.