Get Involved in Science Policy

I came across this succinct and very well-written plea to non-scientists to get involved in science policy. Science policy is important, both for scientists and non-scientists. In the recent Broad Impacts sessions we've been talking about a scientist's responsibility to accurately communicate his or her work to the public, but non-scientists are largely capable of understanding science and the policy implications of scientific research without being spoonfed blurbs and headlines. Creating a well-informed populace requires effort from both scientists and non-scientists.

Read the short article here.

Recap of Last Thursday's Session

Last Thursday (August 4th) we had a great discussion on the obstacles to accurately communicating science to the public and lawmakers. A lot of good points came up. To name a couple: 

1. It would be a good idea to train researchers in media communication. The University has an office dedicated to this, but many of the career development classes in our graduate programs do not feature a session. Perhaps in a future Broad Impacts session we can invite the Media Office. 

2. The realities of science need to be taught to high school students. Many non-scientists do not understand how long and arduous scientific discovery can be. Furthermore, they can begin to distrust researchers when new explanations for diseases are developed every year. The constantly evolving and self-correcting nature of science should be better emphasized.

If you have other points from our discussion, please post them in a comment for those who could not make the discussion last Thursday. The presentation is available for viewing here, for those of you who couldn't make it. Also, here is the presentation from the first Broad Impacts session. 

We hope to see you at the next session!

Pop Culture: Science Run Amok!

Our discussion last week centered on the communication of science to the public and to lawmakers. It is clear that there are many obstacles to creating an scientifically informed populace. However, what we didn't consider in our discussion is how movies and television represent science. In a recent post over at ScienceProgress.org (a great site for science policy news), author Jonathan D. Moreno writes about Hollywood's portrayal of scientific discovery leading to terrifying doomsday scenarios, particularly focusing on the new film "Rise of the Planet of the Apes".

Read the article here!

Maybe another barrier to the public acceptance and understanding of scientific progress is that the public resists if the research is too futuristic/creepy/engendering-of-word-destruction. For example: cloning? What if someone makes a clone army! Transgenic animals? What if a rogue scientist creates glowing people with four arms and aggressive tendencies! Gene therapy? What if the virus mutates and leads to a zombie apocalypse!

Perhaps it is the job of the scientist to ease the public's worry about these scenarios. For example, each episode of The Walking Dead could lead with a disclaimer: "9 out of 10 scientists agree that there is only a 0.5% chance of a zombie apocalypse occurring within the next 50 years."

Discussion question: do scientists really have it all under control?

HealthNewsReviews

At last Thursday's discussion Mary Butler mentioned a blog that fact-checks popular media news stories on new developments in Health Science. http://www.healthnewsreview.or​g/blog/ is the URL. I encourage you to check out the cartoon about science (from the Electron Cafe blog) as it is relevant to our last discussion and funny!