When I first landed in Australia from Europe in 1964 I was struck by a song performed in the same droll manner as "The pub with no beer." It was about Billabong Bill The Whinger, who "wrote the whinger's book, when everything was going well--he'd say it's going crook!" Since then I've been intrigued to note that the Australian verb "to whinge" has gained international currency. Margaret Thatcher used it in her book, The Downing Street Years, and during her promotion of the publication. It was clearly a term very much needed by the world because it means to complain, to whine or to grizzle that no progress has been made.
I believe that immense progress has been achieved in the coverage of science around the world, both in print and in the electronic media, yet still we hear the old chestnuts about boffins being ghastly communicators and science being too arcane for the public. They are not and it isn't.
When I started broadcasting science in Australia in 1972 there were two and a half radio programs and no television programs about science. Coverage in the press was occasional and of one of two kinds: either galumphingly simplistic or regally austere. Now, at the end of 1993, we have over five hours of coverage on Radio National alone (general science, health, environment, food, history and philosophy), plus a top-rating magazine Programme on ABC Television, loads of natural history programs, special documentaries and, on commercial television, the Beyond 2000 phenomenon, which goes to 87 countries. In print we have New Scientist (published in Melbourne), the regular appearance of science reports on the front pages of newspapers, major science sections in most newspapers, plus several Australian science magazines with fair circulation.
The situation is similar in other counties (though not on radio and television in the USA), even in Britain, where I heard massive whingeing at the (1993) last British Association Annual Science Festival about science on television. "But wait," I said to the whinger, "last Sunday evening you could have watched science continuously from 7 p.m. to nearly midnight, with a discussion about the Human Genome Project, then Roger Penrose on consciousness, followed by the dramadocumentary Life Story about DNA." "Oh well," shrugged my whinger, "that was unusual." I don't really believe it is. It's simply traditional to whinge.
The same can be said for the poor boffin. Do you remember the poem by Louis MacNeice, Portrait of the Scientist?
A little dapper man with shiny elbows and short keen sight
He lived by measuring things
And died like a recurring decimal, run off the page
Refusing to be curtailed
There may be scientists like that, semi-autistic uncles laboring in back rooms to make mischief despite our pleadings. They may also be unable to marshal language like the rest of us because of their addiction to caveats and obscure verbiage. But if there are still such creatures, there are probably no more of them than there are language crushers from economics, politics, sociology, education, commerce or philately. If scientists really were such dweebs how on earth would we manage to make so many hours of broadcasting with them? Yet people, particularly youngsters, continue to see scientists as nerds and losers.
I recall, again at the British Association, when the BBC Science Unit, before recording a programme in front of an audience, naughtily played tapes of supposedly hopeless jargonpeddlers. The first voice recognized immediately. 'That's my old mate Bob May' I said afterwards to the MC, 'The Royal Society Professor at Oxford. He is often brilliant on radio'. 'Well, yes', he confessed sheepishly, 'that was extracted from an otherwise exemplary interview which went to air'.
Some scientists have the potential to broadcast and write. They practice, get good at it and may even, like Stephen Jay Gould, become famous. Without practice hardly anyone succeeds. Even Winston Churchill stood for hours in front of mirrors learning lines and gestures which he would later apparently ad lib in parliament.
So, just as scientists may be formidable as popularizers, so too are the public keen on the product, as any glance at programme schedules, news-stands or bookshelves will testify. As surveys in Australia, ... Britain and the [United States] attest, the readers, watchers and listeners say science, technology and medicine are their preferred subjects if they are given a choice. This preference has been valid for at least 10 years, to my knowledge.
So, if the scientific talent is there, the product is there and the audience is there, what's the problem?
I do believe there are several problems: (1) the tendency to see science as being in crisis; (2) the tradition of talking it down; (3) the crucial misunderstanding that there is only one sort of science when there are in fact two; (4) the ghetto effect in journalism; and (5) the catastrophe effect in electronic media.
The crisis
Many complain that research is underfunded. Leon Lederman says even in the USA the budget should be trebled. John Major, in Japan, admitted that UK funding has long been inadequate; in Australia, Bob Hawke confessed the same in 1989. We could argue about real costs, how instrumentation and techniques have become five times more expensive since the Second World War, how new fields have exploded and about how many more recruits there are; but the impression given to the public is of a profession almost out of control trying to manage a genie that's escaped. Dr. Frankenstein has made his monster and become redundant, and the monster is coming your way. We all know that most science isn't like that. We all want more funds, but in the meantime (especially where I work) we adopt Rutherford's dictum: We don't have the money therefore we must think.
The conclusion is that the crisis may not be what it appears to be to the public, but they want answers as well as problems. If scientists don't provide them, they will continue to appear to be on the margin, whingeing.
Talking down
This follows obviously from the above, but the problem is more than one of seeming to be on the margin and in crisis politically. Even my old friend Lewis Wolpert, who has taken over from Walter Bodmer in the Royal Society as advocate for COPUS, the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science, appears to be saying that science is too difficult. In his book The Unnatural Nature of Science, in claiming that science is counterintuitive, he seems to be saying that therefore it is too difficult for most people and easy to underestimate. He says that if a scientific principle conforms with common sense, then it's probably wrong. Ohm's Law and Hooke's Law are exceptions, but gravity, evolution, natural selection, relativity, quantum mechanics, the pillars of our age, are utterly alien to normal intuition. Lewis also deplores his colleagues' abilities to put over these ideas. He seems, in company with others, to be putting Science back into its ghetto; but he wants to say the opposite: It's not that science is too inaccessible, but that we should not plunk it thoughtlessly in front of the innocents as if any old clot can comprehend it. We should help, in other words. Lewis Wolpert is pleading for more skillful, considered popularization. The implication of what he says is that we need even better writers, talkers and techniques, otherwise we shall do the ideas a disservice as well as losing the attention of our audience.
Two sorts of science
There are two sorts of music. One is performed by my friend Daniel Barenboim, who can read all those funny dots on the page and do astonishing things with his fingers on keyboards. The other sort of music is my sitting, listening, oblivious of his techniques (and the counterintuitive nature of the dots' connections to the sounds) enjoying a Beethoven sonata to a level that makes my life more worth living.
One science is for the profession, the other is for everyone else. Yet it's usually only the first that we are taught at school and thereafter. We are schooled from a very early age as if in 30 years we shall become professors; we set out on an obstacle course with likely failure at each hurdle, as if we want to end up as professionals, not as members of a culture that's largely scientific.
This is a problem even at a rarefied level. Professor Chris Llewellyn-Smith, when running the Department of Physics at Oxford University (he's now at CERN, the European Council for Nuclear Research) told me his undergraduates could no longer handle the course because it had become too tough. The course was therefore made more general, based more on ideas than on advanced concepts. Would the potential professors suffer? Not at all. They would zip through the course anyway and tackle the hard stuff as postgraduates. The others would receive a solid grounding which they could then take to their non-physics jobs after university.
The other sort of science is simply any considered involvement in matters pertaining to the natural world. I say "considered" because, as Lewis Wolpert implies, there is a great deal of misapprehension, and there is a difference between astronomy and astrology, for example, and between scientific medicine and quackery.
What does this have to do with reporting science? Well, it addresses the paradox between the popularity of the programs and publications on the one hand, and the march away from science in schools and the antiscience in some of our cultures on the other. If you ask people in the street what they think of this thing called science they immediately think of the classroom, of difficulty and failure, and they say they're against it or just plain uninterested. If instead you ask them if they like David Attenborough's films, the stars, hedgehogs or wombats, volcanoes or coral reefs, they say, "Oh yes, that's for me."
The lesson is to treat science squarely as part of everything else, not to put it in the ghetto (however erudite that ghetto appears), and to convince editors that science is always mainstream. Also, we should get scientists into schools and schoolchildren into laboratories, so that children can see what science is about. And what about a scientific soap opera? The most successful soap operas are set in situations where different people come and go--hospitals, police stations, courts, and the like. One of Marcel van den Broecke's science shops would be an ideal setting.
The ghetto effect
Editors are like politicians: They rarely have any scientific background whatsoever. Worse still, they may be lawyers or accountants. They will see every reason to put science and technology in quarantine, as a supplement, preferably with the word computers on the front so they can score lots of advertising. They will say they support science writing but, outside great newspapers like The New York Times and the UK's The Daily Telegraph, they will rarely offer the space or career structure for journalists to grow. So science is, along with the police rounds and covering the courts, a beat journalists do on the way up...or down, just like ministers in government.
I myself am offered the most delightful compliments about the quality of my programmed air-time I've kept hold of tenaciously for decades. But when I try to place material on other programs or in general magazines, it inevitably gets shuffled into dead airtime or to the back of the book. Editors like politics, lifestyle, disasters, royalty in leotards, film stars in car crashes. However, as I implied at the beginning, there is headway, and it will increase: it must, as our world becomes more aware of scientifically based change. Editors need to be continually reeducated about the vital frontpage importance of science
The catastrophe effect
Lots of us are worried about our radio and television programs. It's not that we see anybody conspiring against science broadcasting, as such. I'm sure 'they' hardly give us a thought. But the massive changes in technologies and transmission mean that those of us in radio and television stand to be wiped out if we are not very very careful.
The point is that, with very rare exceptions, the only science broadcasting in the world comes from long-established science units like mine, in staterun public broadcasting institutions, institutions that are nowadays most under threat. Like science itself, as Attenborough says, we need critical mass, we need skills that are nurtured over a long time. We are seeing the peak of the wave of achievement in countries such as Canada, Australia, Britain and Holland, and Sweden too, but as catastrophe theory will show, the wave could crash, leaving little but detritus. How else do you explain the negligible science broadcasting on commercial electronic media? One idea I have had is for science programs to be put on the school curriculum. The children could then be asked questions in exams such as: How well have science programs dealt with global warming? They could be asked for critical comment rather than masses of facts but would still have had to watch or listen to many programs to do well. This might protect specialist programs and units against catastrophe.
Please don't try to tell me that narrowcasting and cable will answer the call. That's another ghetto. I want mainstream culture. That's where science belongs and all the surveys show that's where it should and must be. The way forward is to recognize this genuine turning point in the history of broadcasting, and address it, then to make sure, as all good surfers do, that you're on the following wave after the first one collapses.
Of the importance of science communication there is no doubt. Our age is so full of innovation and global scientific issues that there is no escaping the reporting of it all. The point is that it should be done well.
Youngsters must also understand that they will be unable to deal with the 21st century world, will not be an effective part of it, without some considerable appreciation of science. Even the unemployed will need a scientific understanding if they are to withstand the daily pummeling of bad environmental news we already endure. Those in good jobs will be twice as effective, whatever their calling, if they are scientifically minded.
The science communicator's role is therefore set to explode. As someone who prefers to eschew whingeing, I'd like to see the explosion as that of a supernova, supplying new elements, higher ones, to a waiting universe.
A paper read at a meeting on "The Role of the Media in Science Communication" in Stockholm, 7-8 December 1993. Reproduced from The Role of the Media in Science Communication, published by the Ciba Foundation, London, Editor, K. Ackrill. Copies of the booklet are available free of charge from: The Ciba Foundation, Information Services, 41 Portland Place London W1N 4BN. Fax: +44 (0)171 637 2127.
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Robyn Williams is a broadcaster with the Radio National Science Unit of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Sydney.