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| Volume 46, Number 2, Fall 1998 |
by Rick Borchelt
At the 1998 Council for the Advancement of Science Writing’s New Horizons briefing, Jon Westling, the president of CASW host Boston University, told the gathering at the banquet to honor Science in Society awardees that:
“Their science (of science writing)…is to provide just enough context that the scientific content of research somehow slips smoothly into the possession of the untrained reader…”
It’s easy to dismiss lofty comments like this, delivered at a fete for science writers, as just so much polite talk. But in fact, Westling has stumbled on a crucial issue in science communication, perhaps the fundamental question, however politely articulated: How does this stuff “somehow slip smoothly”? What is the effect of this “slippage” on the scientist, on the reading/listening public, on scientific literacy or public support of the science enterprise? What happens to make the slipping “smooth,” and is that the province of the science communicator or PIO? And why is the process anything but “smooth” for those of us involved in science communication?
In many respect, these fundamental questions remind me of the cartoon I see posted on every other lab door here where I work: A scientist is explaining the origins of the universe to a colleague, and has on the left-hand side of a chalkboard an impenetrable but elegant-looking cluster of arcane equations, followed by an arrow to a statement “Then A Miracle Occurs,” followed by another arrow and the phrase “The Big Bang.” His colleague observes wryly that he believes the second part of the process deserves a little more explanation.
Just so with science communication. When it’s done right, somewhere between the lab bench and a receptive public some kind of miracle occurs, something to make the research somehow slip smoothly into other hands. The problem is, we haven’t much of a clue what that miracle is.
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., perhaps takes this curiosity more seriously than most research institutions. Beginning in early 1998, scientists in Marshall’s Space Science Laboratory embarked on a long-term project to set a research agenda in science communication that helps address the paucity of knowledge about how science gets communicated, and to identify some of the best and most innovative practices in communicating Federally sponsored research to its customers. A short course in miracles, as it were.
Working through a cooperative agreement with the University of Florida’s School of Journalism and Communications, NASA Marshall will fund a blue-ribbon committee to carry out this charge, and will sponsor a series of national meetings and workshops to collect and synthesize information about science communication that can be shared with Federal agencies, other research institutions, and other science communicators.
I’ll be chairing the committee, which will operate very much like a National Research Council study committee with a final report or reports. Study director is NASW member Debbie Treise from the University of Florida, and we’re joined by NASW members Deborah Blum (U. of Wisconsin), Lynne Friedmann (Friedmann Communications), Paul Lowenberg (U. of Washington), Rob Logan (U. of Missouri) and Carol Rogers (U. of Maryland). Kris Wilson (U. of Texas), Barbara Valentino (Evolving Communications), and scientists Charles McGruder (Bowling Green University) and Marty Glicksman (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) round out the panel, and two ex officio members of the Marshall Space Sciences Laboratory also sit on the committee: Director Greg Wilson and Science Communicator John Horack.
Together, and drawing on the resources of NASW, research organizations, academia, and the scientific community, we’ve set about trying to map out a future for better understanding of science communication.
We have a generous though not profligate budget, one that will allow us to hold regional meetings a couple times a year for the purpose of hearing from science communicators around the country. The budget also supports our ability to commission some research projects ourselves to address particularly intractable questions. And it will allow us to host two conferences in the year 2000—one on best practices in science communication currently in use at research institutions, and one on setting an agenda for academic research in this field. The results of our work will be completely in the public domain.
Between now and then, we’ve got a lot of work to do—and we need your help.
At our first organizing meeting in June 1998, graciously hosted by The Salk Institute in La Jolla, we defined our task and went about planning the next three years’ schedule and plan of attack. In November 1998, The Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., provided us with the use of their conference facility and those of the National Academy of Sciences’ Jonsson Center in Woods Hole for our second session. That meeting—which focused on the details of which research we should be funding ourselves and ways of obtaining information on best practices in science communication—was greatly enriched by presentations from Nan Broadbent (AAAS), Rick Chappell (Vanderbilt U.), Laura van Dam (Houghton Mifflin) Don Gibbons (Harvard Med School), Roger Johnson (Newswise), Bradie Metheny (Washington Fax), Carol Morton (freelance), and Elizabeth Thomson (MIT). We also received a briefing on our first sponsored research: A first-rate review of the science communications literature for the past 20 years, conducted by U. of Fla. mass communications researcher Michael Weigold.
While we’ve just scratched the surface, we know that some of the most critical questions in our field currently involve the nature of the PIO-scientist and PIO-journalist interaction, particularly in an age of new media that may well fundamentally alter the role of public information practice. Another rich area for our exploration appears to be the connections, if any, between science communication, public scientific literacy, and public support of science funding. These areas will be receiving our special attention at the next few meetings, but there are a host of others raised by Weigold’s literature review and comments from many of you in NASW that we’ve received over the past few months since the committee was formed.
We envision our work as highly interactive, and we’ll be posting material and background on our public web site (http://www.science.nasa.com/scicomm) which will include a listserv to help science communicators keep in touch with our efforts. If the lit review isn’t posted by the time this article is mailed to readers, it will be shortly.
Our plans include visits to Research Triangle Park, Denver, Seattle, St. Louis, Chicago, Atlanta, New York City, Gainesville, Huntsville (Ala.) and DC. We anticipate hearing from many of you at these regional sessions, and invite your comments or suggestions at any time in the process.
Wish us luck—this business of defining miracles is a difficult one!
Rick Borchelt is manager of Media Relations, Lockheed Martin Energy Research Corporation, Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
(l to r) Members of the Science
Communications Working Group: (row one) Barbara Valentino, Deborah
Blum, Marty Glicksman, Debbie Treise, Rob Logan, Lynne Friedmann;
(row two) Charles McGruder, Greg Wilson, Paul Lowenberg, Greg
Wilson, Kris Wilson, Rick Borchelt.