Kinship With the Stars
by Jared Diamond
little more than a year ago, I participated in a meeting, organized by the
National Academy of Sciences, on the
subject of enhancing public understanding of science by encouraging greater
collaboration between scientists and the media. Most of the scientists
present were members of the academy, which serves both as an elected honor
society and as an official adviser on science policy to the U.S. government.
Across the room I spotted a slim man who seemed somehow familiar. His
deliberate movements suggested an inner passion concealed beneath a subdued
exterior. When I came close enough to read his name tag, I saw that he was
the famous astronomer Carl Sagan, whom I had corresponded with but never
met.
We introduced ourselves and began a conversation that
strikes me now as poignant. Sagan mentioned having heard that I'd developed
a potentially lethal cancer, and he asked how I was doing. I replied that I
had undergone surgery and was now fully cured, as far as I knew. He
volunteered that he, too, had had a brush with cancer. He had been diagnosed
with myelodysplasia, a condition that can develop into leukemia, but he had
received treatment and, he said, been cured. Unfortunately, not long after
our meeting he developed complications from a bone-marrow transplant and
died a few days before Christmas. I wonder, in retrospect, whether he owed
his subdued appearance the day we met to a sense of what was to come.
Later that day, during a group discussion about the
importance of communicating science to the public, I commented on a
disturbing paradox: scientists who do communicate effectively with the
public often find their colleagues responding with scorn, and even punishing
them in ways that affect their careers. My remarks stimulated Sagan to
address the meeting eloquently for 15 minutes. He described how he, too, had
taken flak from other scientists, but—he paused, as if to choose his
words carefully—the disadvantages to him had for the most part not been
serious. As he uttered these words, I sensed my fellow academy members
holding their breath, waiting to hear whether Sagan would mention a stinging
insult he had suffered at the hands of academy members themselves. In fact,
he passed tactfully over the scandal that had unfolded a few years earlier,
when he had become one of the few people in the academy's long history to
have been provisionally elected to membership but then individually rejected
in a special vote.
Sagan's rejection would normally have remained unknown
outside the academy, because members are supposed to keep election matters
secret. Some unidentified members, however, were so outraged that they
leaked the affair to the press. (I have no idea who they were, having missed
that meeting.) Briefly, as described in the press, Sagan had been among many
scientists nominated, his candidacy survived initial screening stages, and
his name was on a long list of candidates placed on the ballot mailed to
academy members. Ballot responses placed him among the 60 candidates
receiving the most votes. These top candidates are usually accepted as
elected, without further discussion, at the annual meeting.
In this case, however, Sagan's provisional election was
singled out and challenged on the floor of the meeting. By academy rule, a
nominee thus challenged is dropped unless his or her candidacy is sustained
by at least two-thirds of the members present and voting. After a heated
debate, more than a third voted to repudiate Sagan's election. That rare
slap in the face ended his candidacy.
Over the last two decades, more than a thousand
scientists have been elected to the academy, but I recall only one other
candidate repudiated and few others even unsuccessfully challenged. Much of
the opposition on the academy floor was framed in terms of procedural
issues, or of Sagan's allegedly deficient contributions to scientific
research. Undoubtedly, some of his opponents did indeed hold a low opinion
of his contributions. However, Sagan's research was well known and obviously
deemed important enough by academy members for them to provisionally elect
him in the first place. He deserved much of the credit for explaining
Venus's peculiar atmosphere, the changes in the appearance of Mars (due to
dust storms, not canals or seasonal changes in vegetation, as previously
assumed), the greenhouse effect on Earth and Venus, the origins of organic
matter on Earth, and the conditions for extraterrestrial life. He also
played a big role in the Mariner, Viking, Pioneer, Voyager, and Galileo
missions that transformed our understanding of all the outer planets.
It may well be that Sagan lost his potential seat in the
academy not because he failed to produce sufficient important scientific
research but because he had too much success as a popularizer of that
research. To the public, Sagan was by far the most famous American
astronomer and one of the most famous American scientists in any discipline.
That fame arose from his unique skills in explaining science to the public.
When it first aired in 1980, his television series
Cosmos attracted more viewers
than any other public TV series before it, and it continued to hold that
record for years. It did more than anything else to arouse public interest
in astronomy and public support for NASA's expensive program of planetary
probes. But Sagan's communication skills paradoxically provoked a backlash
among many scientists, who refused to believe that he could simultaneously be a
serious scientist and a charismatic TV personality.
What makes the academy's rejection of Sagan so tragic,
and initially so incomprehensible, are all the valid reasons that scientists
themselves regularly adduce to explain why it is so important for the public
to understand science. I see at least five such reasons, and it is worth
detailing them so that we can appreciate why the attitudes revealed in
Sagan's rejection by the National Academy of Sciences pose such a big
problem.
First, science isn't something arcane, intended only for
the few. Every one of us—whether a poet, janitor, or nuclear
physicist—has to be able to think scientifically, and to understand
some science, to get through our lives. Every day we face decisions that
hinge on science, such as whether to smoke, what to eat, with whom to have
sex, and what protection to use (if any). Even for decisions that don't
depend on specific scientific facts, science remains the proven set of best
methods for acquiring accurate information about the world.
Second, some of us end up as policymakers in government
or business. These individuals make decisions that fundamentally affect the
well-being of everyone, and most of them know no more about science than
does the rest of the general public. Yet they are called upon to decide what
to do about (and how much money to spend on) nuclear reactors, global
warming, environmental toxins, expensive space programs, biomedical
research, and applications of biotechnology. It's nonscientists, not
scientists, who have the last word on whether the milk we drink can safely
come from cows treated with growth hormones. To make such decisions wisely,
the decision makers have to be drawn from a scientifically educated
public.
Third, as voters, we all bear the ultimate responsibility
for those decisions, because we are the ones who decide which candidates and
which ballot measures will prevail. We need enough sense about science to
select the decision makers who will make good choices when faced with
scientific questions.
Fourth, even if science were irrelevant to the lives of
ordinary Americans, a strong scientific enterprise is essential to our
economy, educational system, and society. That requires lots of young people
to become excited enough by science that they resolve to become professional
scientists. Good communication by scientists to the public is essential to
spark that excitement.
Finally, scientists themselves should be interested in
promoting public understanding of science for a selfish reason: their
salaries and research grants depend on the nonscientists who hold the purse
strings in Congress, state legislatures, and private foundations. Those
money givers reach their decisions based on how important they think science
is.
All these arguments demanding the public's understanding
of science are ones that scientists correctly lay out, and grasp better than
anyone else. You might therefore expect them to give every possible support
and incentive to those few scientists who, like Carl Sagan, devote much of
their effort to fostering that understanding. Paradoxically, though,
popularizers face widespread indifference, hostility, and penalties, such as
honors and promotions delayed or even denied. Sagan's rejection by the
academy was just a well-publicized example.
As a result, those scientists who do communicate well are
overwhelmingly at a senior stage in their careers. They wait until they have
tenure and are thereby better able to withstand their colleagues' hostility.
Young or nontenured scientists are relatively mute before the public because
they realize that to be otherwise could mean the kiss of death. Yet it is
especially important for young scientists to be effective communicators
because they are the ones most active in research, least diverted by
administrative responsibilities, and the best role models for young people.
Of course, these sweeping generalizations conceal
exceptions. How popularizers are viewed by their peers seems to vary among
fields of science. They are more readily accepted or even admired in
evolutionary biology (for example, Stephen
Jay Gould) and medical science and molecular biology (Lewis Thomas), but
are much fewer in number and more poorly tolerated in chemistry,
mathematics, and astronomy (Carl Sagan). How you do it also makes a
difference: popularizers who vividly project their own persona (Sagan again)
are less well tolerated than those who focus on the scientific discoveries
themselves (for example, Richard Dawkins); those whose intended audience is
the whole public (Sagan again) get more flak than those aiming mainly at
university students (Richard Feynman). But the paradoxical trend remains,
and it demands explanation. Why do scientists exhibit so much indifference
or hostility toward colleagues who advance the interests of scientists as
well as of the public?
For one thing, communicating to the public and to one's
fellow scientists requires very different styles. When we write research
articles for our colleagues, we are trained to avoid simplification; to be
precise, using technical terms, inserting all appropriate qualifiers (if,
but, maybe), and supplying all relevant details; to avoid vivid, poetic
language, which suggests that we seek to convince by slick words rather than
by correct arguments; to write impersonally, replacing the first person ("I
did the experiment") with the third person ("The author did the experiment")
or the passive voice ("The experiment was done"), because science is
supposed to be about the truth rather than about one's ego; and to give
exhaustive credit to colleagues, lest we seem to be claiming undeserved
credit.
Naturally, if we were so foolish as to submit an article
written in that style to a magazine intended for the general public (like
Discovery), it would go straight into the wastebasket—and for
good reason, because it would be boring and hard to understand. Instead
scientific explanations aimed at the public must be succinct, direct, and
vivid. When we write for a popular audience, we must use nontechnical
language and speak in the first person, simplifying if necessary to make our
points clear. It's hard for us scientists to reverse a lifetime of
programming and applaud a colleague who writes in a way that we may have
worked long and hard to suppress. It inflames us to see a colleague
violating all these rules of academic writing and getting away with it.
Scientists, being human, are also understandably jealous
about all the attention that effective popularizers receive. As Carl Sagan
put it, "A scientist who devotes his life to studying something arcane like
the hyperfine structure of the molybdenum atom, and whose work is ignored by
everyone except the world's three other experts on molybdenum, naturally is
jealous and outraged to see reporters hanging on me for my latest
pronouncement about the possibility of extraterrestrial life."
Finally, scientists tend to assume that any colleague who
does stoop to explain his or her work to the public is all washed up as a
serious scientist and is doing this because he or she is no longer capable
of doing real science. It's true that popularizers do tend to be older
scientists, but again that's because younger scientists fear career ruin.
Public puzzlement is not the only unfortunate result of
scientists' aversion to writing and speaking comprehensibly. There is
another tragedy, one that has received much less attention: most scientific
writing is incomprehensible even to scientists, except for specialists in
the author's narrow field. Let me illustrate this with a typical example
involving just one recent research article. I selected it almost at random
from hundreds of thousands of research articles published each year. I
picked this particular one because it's from one of the two most influential
scientific journals in the world, supposedly devoted to wide communication
among scientists. That's the journal Science, the weekly publication of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, the umbrella
organization of all American scientists from physicists to psychologists).
Science publishes articles spanning the whole spectrum of fields.
According to the masthead, "Its [AAAS's] objectives are to further the work
of scientists, to facilitate cooperation among them…and to increase
public understanding and appreciation of the importance and promise of the
methods of science in human progress." Science's instructions to
prospective contributors state, "Submitted manuscripts should be
intelligible to readers in a variety of disciplines."
I opened a recent issue of Science and arbitrarily
chose an article halfway through the magazine's 15 research reports. The
table of contents gives the title: "Activation of SAPK/JNK by TNF Receptor
I Through a Noncytotoxic TRAF2-Dependent Pathway." In that entire title the
word noncytotoxic is my sole clue as to the subject of the article.
Cytotoxic means "poisonous to the living cells that make up a plant's or
animal's body." Hence I am now confident that the field within which the
article's subject falls isn't physics or psychology but cell biology. Since
I have been a professional biologist for 39 years and my research fields
include cell biology, I am much more likely to be the article's intended
reader than most other scientists. Nevertheless, I have never even heard of
SAPK, JNK, TNF, TRAF2, or their receptors or pathways, so I have not the
faintest idea what the article is about. The title gives me no reason to
suspect anything interesting, important, or relevant to my own work.
Ordinarily, I would skip such an incomprehensible article.
I turned to page 200 and read the report's first
sentence: "Interaction of the p55 tumor necrosis factor receptor 1
(TNF-R1)-associated signal transducer TRADD with FADD signals apoptosis,
whereas the TNF receptor-associated factor 2 protein (TRAF2) is required for
activation of the nuclear transcription factor nuclear factor kappa B." That
sentence introduces more unfamiliar terms (p55, TRADD, FADD,
apoptosis—most remaining undefined throughout the article). It contains
a string of nine nouns and noun-adjectives (p55…TRADD) in which I have
difficulty figuring out which noun is being used as an adjective to modify
which other noun, and another string of five nouns and adjectives (nuclear
transcription factor nuclear factor) about which I am in doubt whether the
repetition is intentional or a printer's error. I finally realized that
definitions of the acronyms TNF and TRAF are buried within the sentence (try
to find them yourself), so I went on to read the rest of the short report,
but in the end I still didn't know what it was about.
I am not singling out this report to ridicule it or to
brand it as exceptional. Most reports in almost any other scientific journal
would have made my point equally well. Instead I cite it as a completely
typical example of that second tragedy—that even scientists can't
possibly understand most articles written by scientists. Perhaps the
SAPK/JNK report reveals something that would let me make a breakthrough in
my own research. But I would never know it unless I made a time-consuming
effort to understand the report (for example, by asking a colleague to
explain it to me, or by reading a lot of background material in textbooks).
I'm not going to spend that time, because thousands of scientific reports
are published every week, and I can't afford to waste more time on this
particular one. Instead I move on in search of something that I can
understand and whose possible relevance to my interests I can recognize.
Unfortunately, great scientific advances come especially
from applying discoveries in one field to another field entirely. If atomic
physicists hadn't taken their discovery about the instability of carbon
atoms with an atomic weight of 14 and applied it to ancient Egyptian
textiles, for example, we wouldn't have the radiocarbon dating method.
Research described incomprehensibly loses much of its value because people
are likely to overlook possible applications of it outside the immediate
field.
It's sad that scientists erect such enormous obstacles.
It would be so easy to solve the problem—for instance, we could publish
20 percent fewer reports but increase their comprehensibility 10,000 percent
merely by devoting 20 percent of the length of each published report to
defining terms and introducing the subject for scientists from other fields.
Nature, the British equivalent
of Science, recently ran an editorial addressing the readability
problem and recommending just these sorts of solutions. Authors, wrote the
editors, might ask colleagues outside their fields to read their articles.
"They should at least respond positively when Nature's editors prod
them to remove the nth unexplained acronym in their first paragraph."
Carl Sagan would have done better at explaining SAPK/JNK
activation, whatever it is. As Lewis Thomas showed us, it's as feasible to
explain things clearly in cell biology as it is in astronomy. But virtually
every American scientist learned of Sagan's rejection by the National
Academy and of other consequences of popularizing science. Every scientist
is capable of recognizing the obvious implications for his or her
self-interest.
As a result, the task of explaining science to the public
has been largely delegated to science journalists who are not practicing
scientists. Even Science uses journalists to explain recent
scientific advances to scientists, in an introductory section termed
Research News. Yet journalists, no matter how gifted they are, can't replace
scientists themselves as role models for young people contemplating a career
in science, or as advocates before Congress at times of budget hearings, or
just as the people most knowledgeable about their subjects. That takes
someone like Sagan.
Of course, there will never be another Carl Sagan, and
his loss seems doubly painful because we so badly need scientists with his
skill. Just one would not be enough: we need thousands. But we are never
going to get them—not until scientists and their organizations
drastically change their behavior.
[ Jared Diamond, "Kinship with the Stars"
Discover 18 (May 1997): 44-49. ]
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