Can they afford not to?

I don’t think they can. First, we’ve seen from issues like stem cell research and nanotechnology that federal funding guidelines and regulations are directly linked to the public debates surrounding these issues. And second, if scientists don’t communicate effectively, we’ll continue to have public discourse where interest groups frame the issue very successfully and early on, and science ends up playing a secondary role.

The long-term consequence is that once certain metaphors and frames are established in the public’s mind, those images are quite difficult to counter. If you think about a label like Frankenfood, for example, it’s a very intuitive tool for information processing. People can relate to it and immediately understand its message. Once a frame like that is established in people’s minds, it’s going to be hard to turn the conversation back to science.

The result is that, for fields like nanotechnology, we’re seeing policy debates about regulating certain applications long before we have actually produced the science that would make these applications possible. This is very different in terms of scope and timing from what we saw for nuclear energy or even genetically modified organisms.

But isn’t nanotechnology fairly well accepted by most people?

Lots of people don’t realize that there are 600 nano products that are already on the market, but they’re still overall positive about the technology itself. Our research has shown that this is mostly a function of positive framing in the media early on in the issue cycle. The early coverage has been dominated by talk about the potential of a $1.3 trillion worldwide industry by 2015 and the idea of new scientific frontiers.

So in that case, people are seeing the potential benefits of the science.

Yes, economic ones, at least.

But we often don’t know the benefits of emerging science at the outset. Where’s the line between projecting the potential and engaging in hype?

Scientists always struggle with that. They’ve been trained to be very balanced in presenting their findings and all the caveats that go along with them. That’s an inherent contradiction with how journalists work. They want punch lines that will help them tell stories in ways that make sense to a reader who in most cases has little or no science training. But I don’t think this requires a major shift for scientists. It’s just a matter of telling people why they’re excited about the work they’re doing. What do they hope to achieve?

Do they have to “dumb down” the science?

Absolutely not. It’s just the opposite. If scientists don’t know how to communicate well, their message gets dumbed down for them by other people, who will try to simplify or sensationalize the issue in order to fit their particular purposes.

Good communication is about deciding what you want to say, and then developing and applying the tools to get the message across. It’s about keeping others from politicizing science by making sure that we’re reaching all audiences with scientific information. The difficult part is not to talk about science to a PBS audience—they’re already doing that. It’s making PBS content accessible to an MTV audience.

Most scientists I know would cringe at the idea of talking science on MTV.

Well, it has to be done—not on MTV, necessarily, but in ways that reach audiences who traditionally care little about science. And I think it can be done. If we take an interdisciplinary approach, we can find ways to connect with audiences without compromising the message.

And the fact is that we do this already in the classroom every day. The approach we take in a graduate seminar is very different from what we do in a large, undergraduate class. Am I conveying to them different types of content? Not at all—I’m telling them the same thing, but those audiences have different levels of experience and different goals, and I need to use a different set of tools to engage them. It’s exactly the same thing for public communication. It’s about finding the channel that best allows you to reach your audience and tailoring your message to their needs.

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Tags: Communications, Nanotechnology, Public understanding of science, Stem cell research
Posted in Communities, Fall 2008, Living Science | No Comments »