The role of a citizen-scientist

So I just got out of a panel discussion that SEBS (Scientists and Engineers for a Better Society) sponsored, of which I am a part of, and it was awesome.

We had Dr. Gavin Schmidt from NASA, who is a British fellow in charge of realclimate.org, and he had a couple of very interesting observations: scientists seem separated from society, not necessarily because they are socially awkward, but because they have this weird relationship in the idea that scientists have values tied to their work. If they make their values known to the public, they’re accused of having an agenda; iff they do not make their values known and try to disclose only the facts, they are accused of having a hidden agenda (which is in some cases, worse). His other main point was that most people do not understand how science progresses—most of the time, two scientists will agree on 99% of the research; it’s the 1% dispute that causes the public to go, “this entire thing is bogus, how do we know what’s right?” Yet science is discovered through that 1% of tugging back and forth, and somehow, arguments and experiments later, we have a possible theory.

Professor Holmes is a biomedical engineering professor here at Columbia, in charge of the ethics class.  His views mostly come from medical science, as that is his background, speaking mostly from the perspective of doctors. One of the most obvious ways science gets a hand in society is through medicine. The problem with politics in the medical community is that most of the decisions are made by people who are not properly educated in science and are easily swayed by lobbyists who “show up at the game.” Most doctors, he says, whine about new legislation after it’s been passed into law, but why weren’t they there in the first place to present their point of view? That is the real problem of science and politics, is that decisions are not made by those most knowledgeable; the scientists view any time spent outside of their lab as “time wasted,” yet all they do is kvetch when there are new policies against them. Quite obviously, the people who show up are usually the ones who win the game.

The third panelist was Cornelia Dean, former Science Editor of the New York Times. She’s now writing a book on how scientific facts can be manipulated to suit an agenda. We had great representation in our panelists—there was Holmes for the biology side (medicine and evolution), Schmidt with the environmental aspect (climate change, global warming) and Cornelia Dean, an expert in navigating and understanding political incentives via science. She mentioned probability in thinking, and how the American people respect scientists so much only because most of them don’t really know the details about it. She also strongly condemned science education—how science teachers don’t even have science degrees anymore, but education degrees with a couple of classes in science.

There was a Q&A among the audience members and the panelists themselves. All three of them discussed scientists’ responsibilities and obligations to their field—it’s not enough to just publish some works in some scholarly journals in a language nobody can really understand (Cornelia Dean recounted a great joke she’d heard—if Paul Revere was a scientist, he would have marched through Lexington saying “A progress of British soldiers has been observed!”) in order to get grant money. People spend billions of tax dollars on scientific research, but for what? We should hold these scientists accountable. We should expect the scientists to tell us what they’re doing and why it’s significant, even though 99.9% of what they do in the lab will not turn out to be the next penicillin. There was a general consensus in the room that scientists should take a more active role in society so they can a) stop whining about terrible legislation, b) bring new relevance to their work. Get people educated and interested. Cornelia Dean mentions that when she writes science articles, she’s not sure what the public knows or remembers. If she were a sports writer, she wouldn’t need to explain third base or a touchback every time she wrote an article. Sports writers would assume that their audience already knows what these terms mean, which makes it easier to the news. The problem with science is that there are so many “sports” and so many “rules”, it’s like watching a soap opera that puts on an episode once a year.

There was also mention about true information and credible scholarly articles versus the majority of “bad” scientific information on the internet. Most of the time, the public cannot tell the difference between what’s “real” and what’s “some dude at Berkley ranting about genetically grown vegetables without sources or citations” (that was by Holmes, by the way).

The panel went magnificently, in my opinion. It could have gone on all night—two hours passed and I didn’t even notice.

I love these seminars / lecture-type things. So far I’ve learned about Making Globalization Work (the problem with globalization is that it widens the gap between the rich countries and the poor countries, but a way to make it work is for the rich countries to ‘help out’ the poor countries — duh), network neutrality (certain information highways being held or promoting one brand or product? no way!), women in sustainable development (women play a huge role in this, most of the issues in Africa and Southeast Asia result from the extra time and effort women must face as a result of being the traditional caretaker. A big part of this is also infant mortality rates and deaths from childbirth), and linguistics and politics (the idea of language polarizing a society is at large, think about Rwanda, then think about Papua New Guinea that has like 3000 languages. The political dynamic is fascinating!)