MY WORD

Does your mother know?A scientist is on a long plane

flight, and the stranger sittingnext to her asks her what she does.She says she's an immunologist. "Ohreally", says her seat mate, "what doyou work on?" "The mechanism ofantigen presentation by class I MHCmolecules", she replies with asinking feeling. "How interesting",he murmurs, pulling a copy of Warand Peace from his bag, and anotheropportunity for spreading thescientific gospel evaporates.

This is not a true story, but it easilycould be. Half the graduate studentsI talk to say that even their parentsdon't understand anything about theresearch they're doing. The languagegap between 'us' and 'them' fuelstwo myths: the public's opinion thatmodern biology is incomprehensible,and the biologist's belief that thegeneral public just doesn't care aboutscience. I strongly believe that bothpoints of view are false. People docare about how they, and plants, andanimals work, and what most of usdo is pretty easy to explain. Thebiggest barrier between us and thepublic isn't scientific jargon, but anunwillingness on both sides to makea serious effort to talk and listen toeach other. To communicate withthe public, we have to practise twoessential skills of the successfultourist: translation, and paring amessage down to its essentials.

The simplest translation is to connectour research to human biology andillness. Lots of experiments areultimately relevant to two pressingquestions: how did the fusion of asperm and an egg lead to me, andhow can I tell if I'll get the diseaseI'm worrying about now? Were youthe hypothetical traveler, you couldsay, "I'm trying to understand why

having measles once protects onefrom ever having it again". Your seatmate may still prefer War and Peace,but there's a reasonable chance hemight ask: "Then how come I get fluevery year or two, but never getmeasles again?", and initiate a dialog.For the Tolstoy fan, the only limitsare his patience and the length of theflight. For you, the challenge is tosimplify, by avoiding most of thesacred details that your work revolvesaround, and by using analogies thatwill explain key principles ineveryday language. For the greatergood of science, you can revel insweeping generalizations that wouldbe unpardonable in a scientific paper.

If you think the stretch from yourwork to your seat mate's health istoo far, think of a cute analogy forwhat you do. If you work on howcells make sure they finish DNAreplication before entering mitosis,you can say you are trying tounderstand how cells make surethey've got their socks on beforeputting on their shoes. Explainingyourself to non-scientists is like ridinga bicycle: almost impossible at first,but easier with practice. Next timeyou're stuck in a boring seminar,concoct a simple explanation of yourwork to try out on your parents.

Why should we take the time andtrouble to explain what we do? For alot of us, Josephine and Joe Q. Publicsupport our research and buy ourgroceries. Our patrons are entitled toknow what we are doing with theirmoney (at least while we're at work).Also, explaining science is fun. Asurprising number of non-scientistsshare our childish delight in figuringout how things work, and theirquestions often force us to confrontunspoken (and perhaps incorrect)assumptions. Finally, explainingourselves should get the public onour side. We all believe that if adultsunderstood how today's basicresearch can be tomorrow's medicineor greener world we'd have better

funding for science, and that if kidssaw the beauty and excitement ofscientific discovery we'd have morescientists and fewer lawyers.

Explaining what science is and whywe do it is the only way to reducethe credibility gap between scientistsand non-scientists. As the secondmillennium approaches, science andtechnology are no longer seen asentirely good things. Significantfractions of the public believe we areup to no good, and that we don'twant them to know what particularsort of "no good" it is. Basic scientistsargue that it's not science but itsapplications that kill people or destroylandscapes. If you don't understandscience you can't understand thisargument. All you can do is accept itbecause you believe people in whitecoats, or reject it because (like manyscientists) you don't buy abstractexplanations from entrenchedauthorities. If we cannot escape fromour own jargon, it's hard to avoid thecharge that we invented it to hideour work from the public behind alot of Greek and Latin roots.

However it got there, the credibilitygap supports two dangerous beliefs:the pessimist's dark suspicion thatwe're out to destroy the world, andthe optimist's rosy conviction thatscience will allow the indefinitesurvival of a civilization that believesthat tomorrow never comes. Theonly way out is to explain to thepublic what we're doing now, tellthem how much we still don'tunderstand, and give our best guessabout where today's knowledge willlead. By fulfilling these obligations,we can show Joe and Josephine thebeauty that captivates us. Moreimportantly, we can help them makeinformed decisions about the socialand political questions that scienceand its applications create.

Andrew Murray is in the Departmentof Physiology at the University ofCalifornia, San Francisco, USA.

© Current Biology 1995, Vol 5 No 4 333