Why Public Engagement in Science is More Important Than Ever

I recently returned from the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting #AAASmtg in Austin, Texas, an event I have been attending for the past 28 years. As always, I left inspired with renewed purpose in my role as a champion of science. Why? Because #AAAS underscores once again the critical importance of engaging the public in science.

As a society, we seem to have a love-hate relationship with science and technology. On one hand, science and technology represent hope for a better future and better health, and progress for society. At the same time, science and technology can evoke fear, as in the case of genetically modified foods, gene-editing, artificial intelligence, and humanized robots.  When public opinion clashes with scientific evidence, it typically comes from an inherent mistrust of the information, the medium, and the source - something I spoke on at the AAAS session Exploring Public Fears and Myths: Vaccine Hesitancy, Food Safety in Fukushima, and Bacteria. In fact, in today’s world of “fake news”, public trust in both science and journalism/media seems to be at an all-time low. So how do we work together re-build trust in science? 

1.      Relevance: As Mark Ferguson, Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government of Ireland said at the panel, “Trust is not given, it is earned.” And building trust takes time.  In part, mistrust in science exists because scientists have not left their ivory towers to engage with the public. Science is often shrouded in mystery—even the image of scientists, in white lab coats and safety glasses, working behind the protected walls of a lab, makes science seem clinical, distant, inaccessible, unrelatable and not relevant to people’s daily lives. So it seems the public largely ignores what happens inside the lab until one day, it does become relevant to our daily lives, and depending on how, the public may protest. To build trust in science and technology, scientists need to engage the public from the get-go on the relevance of their work on society and the ethical, legal, social implications of transformational innovations.

2.      Accessibility: Science is still seen as a largely cerebral discipline—filled with charts and graphs and facts and figures and evidence—all very important to making science credible. Yet public engagement rarely happens without emotional engagement, and public opinions are rarely changed by facts and figures, but rather by engaging hearts and souls of people. As Maya Angelou has said, people will forget what you told them… but they will remember how you made them feel. We need to make science simple, human, memorable.  In this respect, science needs an image makeover. Movies, media and entertainment continue to propagate the image of scientists as nerdy misfits, or as the mad scientist cooking up ways to do something destructive. How can we ever hope to change that image? Well, Matt Damon in the movie The Martian was a start; and in fact, that movie broke all stereotypes, with Jessica Chastain playing the role of Commander, with a diverse crew that included African American and Hispanic astronauts. We need to engage media and the entertainment industry to continue to portray a more diverse and inclusive image of science in popular culture, and engage more people through telling stories of science, not just communicating the facts.

3.      Inclusivity and Diversity: Science remains an exclusive discipline—a world of haves and have nots, the privilege of a few who understand the language of science, but it's not accessible to all. Science needs to become more inclusive, not only in terms of gender and ethnic representation, but also in terms of being an inviting discipline for the public, engaging people’s curiosity and desire to learn, and being attractive to the next generation and to young people. This is especially important in today’s post-internet world where information has been democratized and more inclusive, where community-based media and communications platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are far more popular and hold more credibility than the one-way communications of the past--from those who have knowledge to those who don’t.

These themes emerged repeatedly throughout this year’s AAAS annual meeting and will likely be the focus of continued dialog at the Next Einstein Forum #NEF18 and European Science Open Forum #ESOF2018. The dialog is important because innovation without public engagement is like a kite without wind. The good news is that many people are working to address this challenge.  But we need to do more. If you have examples or ideas on how to increase public engagement in science, please share them! #ChampionsOfScience