Another brief despatch from the Physiology 2010 meeting.
Last night I went along to a really excellent public science lecture by Nancy Rothwell – or Professor Dame Nancy Rothwell FRS, to be more formal about it – on “Tracking down killers in the brain.”
These public lectures have been a feature of the Phys Soc’s main Summer meetings for the last five years, or rather four of the last five years, since there was a gap in 2007. The full list of speakers is as follows:
2005 Bristol Julian F R Paton
2006 London David Attwell
2008 Cambridge Peter Weissberg
2009 Dublin Stephen O’Rahilly
2010 Manchester Nancy Rothwell
I have been to four of the five public lectures so far – I missed the 2008 Cambridge meeting due to it clashing with the birth of our second child – and they have have been uniformly first-rate. The major effort the speakers had put into making them comprehensible to a non-specialist audience was clear, and all the lectures had something individual about them to savour. A special mention should probably go to Julian Paton for doing the first one – always difficult to work with essentially no precedent to go on! – where he actually managed to include a live demonstration of the “diving reflex.” I also have fond memories of David Attwell’s 2006 lecture, which included several flim clips from the Star Wars franchise (chosen to illustrate the theme of cellular metabolism underlying nerve transmission), and concluded with a brilliant extended question session in which David fielded nigh on half an hours’ worth of questions from an enthusiastic audience of schoolkids.
Now, I won’t bore on too much about the importance of public engagement here, as it hardly needs saying (at least in my opinion) that it is critical the future of science. And I am definitely not talking here about the strictures from funders about “impact”, and the much loathed “how will you disseminate your results?” boxes on grant application forms. I am talking about the imperative to explain to the public what we do, why it is worth doing, to demystify it and to encourage people to see that it is NOT something totally distant from their lives. It is also important to demystify scientists, in part to encourage people to see that they can be one too, if they want to.
And if you don’t think this really needs doing, I suggest you read this.
Let’s tell, and show, people why we do science
A central point, in my view, should be to put across to the wider public the basic reason scientists believe in science – it helps us to understand the natural world better, it works its way gradually towards better answers, and it is a communal and individual endeavour, carried out by people who are not special and weird. Well, not all that much. Or at least not all of us.
This is not something we should be doing because Universities or funders tell us to.
We should do it because it should be – is – part of what being a scientist means.
I think personally that all scientists – at least the publicly-funded ones – should participate in some sort of public engagement, thought obviously not all to the same extent. The key to this “mass participation” by the profession, it seems to me, is to have a diverse range of ways to do engagement.
The commonest reasons I hear from academics as to why they don’t do any engagement stuff are “no time” or “I never get asked” and “I wouldn’t be any good at talking to non-scientists”.
Now, the first of these is common to everything these days, and there are other issues behind it – but I find it hard to believe that people couldn’t find the equivalent of a couple of days a year.
As to the second and third reasons, the point is that engagement has a multitude of ways you can do it. Public lectures are one. But there are many others.
And I can’t believe there is any scientist out there that couldn’t manage to do any of them.
So you just have to find the thing you can do, and do that.
For instance: school visits are another way. Science “fairs” for schoolkids, which were discussed in an interesting lunchtime workshop yesterday, are another, and have the benefit of involving many people at once but for a “defined” time investment, e.g. a day or two a year. Of course, you do need an organiser, but we know Universities have people who can organise.
– Cafe Scientifique-type talks to the public are another way.
– Supervising undergraduate students going into schools to do science teaching projects is another.
– Writing letters to your local paper, or MP, is another.
– And blogging, I would argue, is another.
In the end, if you are going to do public engagement (in its widest sense), it has to be something you, personally, can get enthusiastic enough about to do it. And the key to that is you being able to do the kind of public engagement that you like or are good at.
This freedom to do what you want is actually the best thing about engagement. it is your enthusiasm, and your individual knowledge and persona – your “engagement” – that people will respond to. At bottom, engagement is about people, not about institutions – though institutions can help by creating the conditions to allow people to do it, like the Phys Soc setting up a public lecture, videoing the lectures, and disseminating them.
So – everyone can do something. That is the bottom line, And I will close out by saying that, while I have met scientists who aren’t all that good at talking to non-scientists, I have rarely met a scientist that could not write lucidly about what they did.
So if you can talk, talk. If you can write, write. If you can blog, blog. If you can build a scale model artery out of toilet rolls, build.
Better to get on and do it, than to spend the same time telling people why you can’t.
