Actor Alan Alda has embarked on an initiative to help scientists in "communicating science." Alda and Howard Schneider, founder of the Center for Communicating Science at the new journalism school at the State University of New York's Stony Brook University, spent a day recently at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) working with scientists.
Alda told a packed auditorium of BNL scientists, according to the Long Island newspaper North Shore Sun, that "nothing communicates better than an authentic presentation of yourself--not hidden by jargon in some cases, or by nervousness and that kind of thing. If you can really be there and communicate with the person you are talking to, then you get something happening between you and that person."
Alda's effort with scientists is an extension of his hosting the PBS series "Scientific American Frontiers." For Stony Brook University, having a Center for Communicating Science connects to its long-time main focus of scientific research and, in recent years, co-management of BNL.
BNL was set up in 1947 by the then U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to conduct research into nuclear science and also develop civilian uses for nuclear technology. It was managed from the start by a group of universities including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia and MIT, but their contract was terminated in 1997 in the face of a public uproar over tritium leaking from a BNL nuclear reactor into the water table below. Long Island, in the center of which BNL is located, depends on its underground water table as its sole source of potable water. The Department of Energy, which replaced the AEC, charged the schools were derelict in their supervision of BNL; the leakage had been going on for years. DOE then gave Stony Brook University and Battelle Memorial Institute the contract to manage BNL.
However, many BNL scientists argued and still maintain that the DOE move was an overreaction, that although tritium is a radionuclide and causes cancer, the substance is widely used in what are marketed as "self-luminous" exit signs. These signs, they've stressed, are common in schools, stores, shopping centers, theatres and other public places. Tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen. It has a 12.3 year half-life meaning it continues releasing radioactivity for more than a century. Among the issues involving tritium exit signs are the dangers of disposal.
To help scientists in "communicating science," to instruct them not to speak in jargon and to be personable, that is fine. There have been great accomplishments in science and getting information out is important.
But, on the other hand, science has become institutionalized over the last half-century and in the name of science some very bad things have been done and continue to be done, a lot of which has not been challenged by media.
Many of us are familiar with President Eisenhower's warning in his farewell address of 1961 about the rise of a "military-industrial complex." What most people do not know is that the original draft of that speech warned not just of a "military-industrial complex" but of a "military-industrial-scientific complex." Only because of the plea of Eisenhower's science advisor, former MIT President James Killian, was the word "scientific" eliminated.
Although allowing the removal of "scientific," Eisenhower went on in the speech with other words on the matter. He said, "Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists and laboratories" and warned that "in holding scientific research and discovery in respect...we must also be alert to the equal and opposing danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite."
David E. Lilienthal, the first chairman of the AEC, used words similar in a 1963 book Change, Hope, and the Bomb. He wrote that "the classic picture of the scientist as a creative individual, a man obsessed, working alone through the night, a man in a laboratory pursuing an idea--this has changed. Now scientists are ranked in platoons. They are organization men. In many cases, the independent and humble search for new truths about nature has become confused with the bureaucratic impulse to justify expenses and see that next year's budget is bigger than last's."
Lilienthal spoke about the "elaborate and even luxurious [national] laboratories that have grown up at Oak Ridge, Argonne, Brookhaven" and the push to use nuclear devices for "blowing out harbors, making explosions underground to produce steam, and so on." They demonstrated "how far scientists and administrators will go to try to establish a nonmilitary use" for nuclear technology.
The press in the United States was envisioned by the founders of the nation as an instrument to check, to watchdog government. A hundred years later, with the rise of huge corporations, the press was flexible enough to expand to not only challenging vested political power but also vested economic power--taking on the robber barons and their corporations during the muckraking era. In our time, the media must take on a new vested power: scientific and technological interests.
Where does the initiative in assisting scientists in "communicating science" stop and public relations and facilitating propaganda begin?
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter1.html
http://www.nucleartourist.com/basics/why.htm
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/may/richter-051310.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZR0UKxNPh8
http://www.pbs.org/nbr/site/features/special/energy-options-nuclear_home/
If it's used by malevolent, selfish people, bad things can result. If it's used wisely and humanistically, it betters our lives. The scientists themselves rarely pose any kind of threat; it's those in power in government and in industry against whom we need to be vigilant.
It is important to distinguish between the scientists who are doing research into areas of nature, and those who are working on new and potentially dangerous technologies. Creating technologies is often more of an engineering role, and happens in the privacy of a corporation. In general the corporations interests are not helped by communicating about the technological developments they are working on - if only for the reason of protecting their intellectual property.
Scientists who are working on pure research, particularly for public institutions, sometimes have a need to communicate their important findings to the public. A case in point is the issue of climate change where scientists have been hampered in communicating their findings by an organised and well funded campaign of disinformation. Add to that, the fact that media organisations generally don't employ quality science reporters - and are not particularly concerned about the accuracy of their reports, and you have the debacle that is the current climate debate.
Science occassionally has issues of very real importance to our lives and out survival, to communicate to us. You seem to conflating the issue of this type of communication with the corporations who employ many types of professionals for goals that are not necessarily in the public interest.”
It is important to distinguish between the scientists who are doing research into areas of nature, and those who are working on new and potentially dangerous technologies. Creating technologies is often more of an engineering role, and happens in the privacy of a corporation. In general the corporations interests are not helped by communicating about the technological developments they are working on - if only for the reason of protecting their intellectual property.
Scientists who are working on pure research, particularly for public institutions, sometimes have a need to communicate their important findings to the public. A case in point is the issue of climate change where scientists have been hampered in communicating their findings by an organised and well funded campaign of disinformation. Add to that, the fact that media organisations generally don't employ quality science reporters - and are not particularly concerned about the accuracy of their reports, and you have the debacle that is the current climate debate.
Science occassionally has issues of very real importance to our lives and out survival, to communicate to us. You seem to conflating the issue of this type of communication with the corporations who employ many types of professionals for goals that are not necessarily in the public interest.
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Science is complex.
Scientists are not good communicators.
More and better communication about science allows the community to make better informed decisions about the results or aims of that science.
It is important to distinguish between the scientists who are doing research into areas of nature, and those who are working on new and potentially dangerous technologies.
Creating technologies is often more of an engineering role, and happens in the privacy of a corporation.
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I'm going to stop right there. It sound like someone is trying to write a high school term paper about science in general. Did you copy your child's 10th grade paper?
I notice that all the peaceful uses of nuclear weapons you cite were never used. Perhaps it is good to have scientists looking into everything, not just the things that don't step on your political toes.
For what it is worth, Alan Alda's perspective is just as silly. It isn't stammering and technospeak that causes the right wing to hate and attack science. It's the science. We don't need slick "outreach" by scientists, we need to be foremost on guard against attempts to demonize or discredit scientists. It really doesn't matter if they're lone toilers or organized hoards, as long as what they're doing is science.
Would that we had such a self-correcting mechanism on the words coming from politicians' mouths!
You state "in the name of science some very bad things has been done and continues to be done". Yet, you leave out the great positive things science has done for mankind. It is not the science itself but rather, the greed, foolishness, and misuse of science that plagues mankind. Most of the scientist love the science itself but, it is their financial backer who has the ulterior motive to do what they will with the discoveries. Many times to the detriment of the world.
Just because politicians are evil does not make it right to whine about scientists.
"in holding scientific research and discovery in respect...we must also be alert to the equal and opposing danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite."
That's just direct quotes. The whole tone of the post can be described as "why should we believe anythign scientists tell us?"
"Many of us are familiar with President Eisenhower's warning in his farewell address of 1961 about the rise of a "military-industrial complex." "
Dr. Grossman's at it again, trying to demonize nuclear technology and anyone involved with it.
First, tritium is probably one of the most benign of the radionuclides produced in a reactor. It's low energy beta doesn't penetrate far in matter plus the hydrogen molecule doesn't spend much time in the human body so if you do happen to ingest some, your dose is quite small. The highest concentrations found at leak at the VT Yankee power plant, 1,000,000 pico curries/liter, would give the same dose as eating a Brazil nut if you were to bath in the contaminated water.
Second, he misrepresents the quote by Eisenhower. This was also in the speech:
"A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction."
Dr. Grossman, why don't you focus your journalistic skills on attacking the trillion dollar war on poverty that was "The Great Society" which has created a permanent poverty class in America; promoting a dependence on government services and devaluing the two-parent family?
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:w1I8hLM-ZekJ:www.cerrie.org/workshop/Talk_21.doc+tritium+biological+half+life&cd=13&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
Organically bound tritium is capable of delivering a radiation dose directly to the DNA of a cell, and has a longer biological half-life than tritium itself. Also, once tritium contaminates a water supply, the people who are ingesting the water continously replenish their body burden of tritium. Bathing in tritium contaminated water is not the greatest dosage pathway - drinking it is.
* https://e-reports-ext.llnl.gov/pdf/240430.pdf