Contemporary politics,local and international current affairs, science, music and extracts from the Queensland Newspaper "THE WORKER" documenting the proud history of the Labour Movement.
MAHATMA GANDHI ~ Truth never damages a cause that is just.
Sunday 19 March 2017
Alan Alda on the art of science communication: ‘I want to tell you a story’
Deputy Director, Australian National Centre for Public Awareness of Science, Australian National University
Disclosure statement
Will J Grant works for the Australian National Centre
for the Public Awareness of Science, recently affiliated with the Alan
Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University New
York. He also receives funding from the Department of Industry,
Innovation and Science.
Rod Lamberts works for the Australian National Centre
for the Public Awareness of Science, recently affiliated with the Alan
Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University New
York.
Alan Alda is known to many people as the actor in the US television series M.A.S.H and later in The West Wing. But he’s also passionate about science and is the visiting professor at the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, at Stony Brook University in New York. Alan is in Australia this month to help spread his message about
the importance of communicating science and he spoke with Will Grant and
Rod Lamberts from the Australian National Centre for the Public
Awareness of Science at the ANU. Will: Why are you keen to get into the world of science and science communication?
Alan: I think I’ve been interested in science, like
all humans I think, since I was a little boy. I think we all start out
as little scientists trying to figure out how things work and how we fit
in and what we can do with the things around us.
When I was a kid, I used to spend a lot of time doing what I thought
were experiments. I would mix things I found around the house to see if I
could get something to blow up. Rod: Did you succeed? Alan: Thank god, no. Rod: Did you study much science?
Alan: No, I didn’t. My father wanted me to be a
doctor because he had always wanted to be a doctor but then went into
show business at an early age because of the Depression.
Oddly enough, he could make a living as an entertainer rather than as
something more stable. Nowadays, it’s the other way round. You have to
be a waiter so you can afford to be an actor.
He went into show business and didn’t become a doctor, as he had
always wanted, so he wanted me to be a doctor. And when I was in college
he pled with me to take a pre-med course in chemistry to see if I would
be interested in following through and becoming a doctor, and I really
didn’t want to do well in the course. Will: Deliberate sabotage? Alan: I was afraid it would lead to a life of
blood-spattered clothes, talking to sick people. This scared me and I
didn’t want to do it.
I partly purposely did poorly in the course, and partly it was my own
natural incompetence that allowed me to get a final grade of, on the
final exam, I got a score of ten out of a hundred.
I had a very shaky start with science education. It wasn’t until
after college that my curiosity kicked back in again. Since then, most
of the things I read have to do with science because I find it so
fascinating. Will: You’re meant to inspire people to want to
become a scientist or move into this career but you’re saying it’s only
after college that you developed that interest, that’s a failing from
our profession really.
Alan: One of the things that I’m lucky that I have is curiosity plus a healthy dose of ignorance. Rod: You can’t underestimate the power of ignorance. Alan: It’s really wonderful if it’s combined with
curiosity it’s perfect because then you have this empty hole to fill and
your curiosity keeps urging you to pile it in.
I just love to find out what new things scientists are discovering
and, when I find out, I love to tell my friends what I just found out:
“Can you believe this microbe they’ve found?” But I’m so enthused about
it, their eyes don’t glaze over so I’m happy about that.
Do you know about that microbe? They’ve got a bunch of microbes that
expand or contract, depending on whether or not they’re wet. And if you
have a couple of pounds of them, they’re so strong when you wet them
they’d lift the back end of a car. So these microbes could change your
tyre for you. I think that’s just wonderful.
Alan Alda (left) says he loves
talking to scientists. Here he is with physicist Steven Goldfarb (right)
during a visit to the CERN particle physics laboratory in Switzerland
in 2012.REUTERS/Salvatore Di NolfiRod: When did you make the transition to say “I’m involved in science communication” rather than just science in general?
Alan: That grew out of the television show I did on public television in the United States for 11 years, a show called Scientific American Frontiers. I don’t know if it was shown in Australia or not. Will: I think there were individual episodes that came up and were cut into other shows. Alan: It was wonderful. I counted once, I think, I
interviewed about 700 scientists. And I realised that what we were doing
was a different way of interviewing about science. It was just a pure
conversation like the conversation we’re having now.
It was freewheeling, I didn’t have a list of questions. I just wanted
to understand them and there was something about that that was so
personal, that it brought out the personality of the scientists and they
were real people, they weren’t lecturing.
When the show was over, I thought, wouldn’t it be wonderful if
scientists could do that naturally without somebody next to them like
me, drawing it out of them? How could we get them into that
conversational tone?
Whenever I would be at a university where they taught science, I
would try to talk the president of the university into the idea of
teaching communication while they taught science, because if you can
graduate experienced scientists, capable scientists who are also capable
communicators, then the public has a chance to learn something from
them. Rod: Did you experience any particular kinds of resistance to try to sell this message that scientists should communicate more?
Alan: Ten or 15 years ago, when I began trying to
sell this idea, I did get plenty of resistance. I don’t know how many
universities I talked to, it was just a handful, but I didn’t get any
enthusiasm until I talked to Stony Brook University in New York, and
they started the Center for Communicating Science there, which I’m so thrilled is now collaborating with the National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science. It’s like a dream come true, you’re our first international affiliation. Rod: You’re welcome. Obviously there’s nothing in it for us, we’re just doing this out of the kindness of our hearts (laughs). Alan: Ha ha ha, well you’ve got all this experience.
We’ve got some pretty innovative ideas that we’ve been working on. We
kind of use the Stony Brook University setting as our laboratory and we
then spread what we’ve learned around the States.
Now we will be sharing it with you and we hope to get your
innovations and ideas, and help to share them because we now have the
network that’s growing. Every month, it gets a little larger.
We have 17 universities and medical schools and institutions in
America that are hooked into this network. We’re going to be sharing all
the things, all the creative ideas that come out of each of these
places.
That really appeals to me because the people who really want to see
communication thrive, the communication of science, they get so enthused
about it. It’s hard to get them to stop working night and day on it
because you see the results blooming and it makes me very happy.
Alan Alda at the official opening of
new Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science
(CPAS) facilities at ANU in Canberra, March 8, 2016.AAP Image/Lukas CochWill: Do you think you can go too far, where the
scientist gets so enthusiastic that people start to run away or turn
away or indeed trivialise the communication enterprise?
Alan: What we try to teach is, first of all, not
dumbing down the science. Science is exciting and it doesn’t need to be
dumbed down, I’m sure you agree with that. Rod: Yup! Alan: What we really look for is clarity and vividness. Will: Vividness, it’s a great term. I mean clarity comes up a lot in these circles but vivid! Alan: And to be vivid, to me, is to show us how it affects our daily lives, what the stories are that led to these discoveries.
There’s a very interesting example of that.
There’s a scientist in the States who discovered the world’s thinnest
glass. It was only one atom thick and it was referred to as
two-dimensional glass because the top layer of it is the same atom as
the bottom layer of it, so it’s, in a way, two dimensional. It had never
been seen before.
So he wrote about it, he and his graduate student who discovered it together, wrote about it in a science journal and it got a little attention.
Then he took our communication course, he did a workshop with us, and
in the course of that, he reminded me later – I don’t remember saying
this to him – but he reminded me that I said to him: “Wait a minute, you
just said that you discovered this by accident, that’s a fascinating
thing for lay people to hear.”
The story is the important thing. We need to hear stories.
He then started, when he talked about it to the press, he led with that story and it turns out news of his work started to spread in newspapers and blog posts all across the United States and the United Kingdom. And it was because he used a story. Rod: I think that it’s kind of frightening, the idea
that they have to somehow be able to tell a story. And coming from
someone with your background that can be quite confronting I imagine?
Alan: One of the things that I try to do is, try to
spread the idea of what a story is. If you’re not accustomed to telling
stories, sometimes you can reduce everything to the final, the bottom
line thing, there’s not much of a story in that. Will: I’ve always thought, everyone is used to
stories in the sense that everyone hears stories all the time. We watch
TV, we read books, those kinds of things, so we’ve got an implicit
understanding of it but it’s a very different to tell the story. Alan: Yes. An example is what we’re doing at the World Science Festival in Brisbane. We combine art and science as much as we can, including story telling. Brian Greene,
the physicist, is doing a show that tells stories of Einstein and I’ve
written a theatre piece that covers Einstein’s letters to his two wives.
It shows him as a human.
I think when we see scientists as human beings, the door is open for
us a little bit, we can go into their lives. They’re not the
white-coated gurus on the mountaintop.
Brian Greene and Alan Alda discuss Einstein at the 2014 World Science Festival in New York.World Science FestivalWill: In terms of your Center for Communicating
Science at Stony Brook, what’s your dream scenario in five years or ten
years’ time? Where do you want science and the world to be?
Alan: What I hope is that we have inspired every
university in the world that teaches science to also teach the
communication of science.
In my opinion, communication is not something you add onto science
like icing on a cake. It’s the cake itself, it’s of the essence of
science.
You can’t do science without talking about it to other scientists and
if you want funding you’ve got to talk about it to the public, and to
the policy makers. Nobody is going to give you money if they don’t
understand what you’re doing. So I’d like to see it spread all over the
world. Will: It’s a practical vision as well. Embedding
communication in the teaching program for science students. This is a
thing that’s integral to what they are doing, it’s the cake, as you say.
This isn’t some airy vision of “okay, I just want things to be better”.
This is a practical step that universities around the world can really
get involved in. Rod: When we first started, one of the very senior
scientists who was aware of us was concerned that our kind of research
and our kind of teaching would water down the science degree, so it’s
interesting in how far it’s come in 15 to 20 years Alan: I see that too. Now, rather than people
needing to be sold on the idea that communication is important in
science, now they’re knocking on our door. We have more requests to
affiliate with us than we can handle at the moment, we’ll have to
reorganise in the next couple of months. Will: What kind of questions do you wish people would ask you more?
Alan: I think everybody asks good questions.
Something that they probably don’t think to ask is why it seems to be
good for the public to hear about science through good communication.
And it seems to be helpful that good communication helps the funding of
science. But what does it do for the scientists?
That wouldn’t have occurred to anybody, it certainly wouldn’t have
occurred to me, until scientists who took our training started to tell
us that they actually were doing better science.
They were thinking about their science better the more they learned
to focus their description of their work. Because once they’d got used
to distilling the message about their work, they looked at their work in
a more focused way. And it actually helped them think more clearly
about the things that they were doing in the lab.
I never expected that to happen and I think it surprises them too. Will: That’s a real contribution to the world of science, to have people doing science better. That’s a really important thing. Alan: And the other way they do it better, of
course, is that if two scientists meet to collaborate but don’t speak
the same language, it’s only if they are good at communicating that they
can actually collaborate in the same language. The full conversation between Alan Alda, Will Grant and Rod
Lamberts is available here, including more on science communication, and
his thoughts as a actor on the difference between playing the good guy
or the bad guy in any drama.
No comments:
Post a Comment