Message from the Director
Blogging Science
Huntington F. Willard, PhD
I'm starting to think this internet thing might catch on after all.
I'll admit that a few years ago I didn't know what a blog was. And I certainly never imagined I'd ever find myself in Chapel Hill addressing a packed house of science bloggers, laptops at the ready, on the challenges of communicating science to the public.
"... I was amazed to find how many had posted comments about my presentation and, frankly, how many had done so in a thoughtful, civilized, snark-free manner"The folks there couldn't have been nicer or more passionate about what they're doing, but I confess that, as I was being introduced, my first thought was, "What have I gotten myself into?" And so I stood in front of the science bloggerati and talked about how my research and my views have been received by the public over the years while they "live-blogged" my remarks.
They listened politely and few,either to my face or on their blogs, disagreed too much with my comments about public engagement in science and the difficulties of getting a scientific story straight.
One such story: a decade ago my lab published the first demonstration of a functional human artificial chromosome, that is, a tiny synthetic chromosome that travels inside the cell alongside the 23 pairs of normal human chromosomes and can carry, at least in theory, whatever bits of whatever genome one wishes.
The New York Times immediately latched onto our concept as a novel approach to gene therapy and gave the story prominent placement. And although the gene therapy angle was speculative and not what I had emphasized in my conversation with the Times reporter, the story was picked up around the world and emails began pouring in by the hundreds. One couple offered to fly their ailing son to the lab so that I might cure him. No amount of reasonable explanation, it seemed, would convince them this wasn't worth trying. They did not, it turns out, have the luxury of waiting decades for basic science to turn into medicine.
Case #2: a couple of years ago a colleague and I published a paper describing the diversity in gene expression among female X chromosomes. Suddenly I was being quoted in Maureen Dowd's Times column and our work was broadly cited as evidence that every woman is as unique as a snowflake while all men are dull, boring and utterly predictable. Somehow, I found myself talking about Venus and Mars, or at least their genomes…In any case, for a few weeks, people were talking about genes and genomes and found a reason to be interested in the topic. That alone, I would contend, was worth the effort.
Science tends to be a methodical, meticulous process, and any good ideas, to say nothing of significant findings, are going to be thoroughly vetted by funding agencies, editors and reviewers, on the basis of the data (at least one hopes so). The argument I made to the bloggers in Chapel Hill is that many scientists, hardened by the tough selection process that accompanies hoped-for success in science, will be ill-equipped to deal with the rapid-fire, unpredictable public reaction to their work, let alone the instantaneous global broadcast of it by bloggers and their accompanying hyperlinks, commentary, dialogue and debate, both informed and otherwise.
But, notwithstanding our lack of comfort, I would say emphatically that this is not the bloggers' problem. It's ours, that is, the scientists'.
Here's why: in another story I told the bloggers, I likened the Genome Revolution to the Space Race of several decades ago. When I was in school, my friends and I — not to mention the rest of the country — were captivated by every space mission, from the first orbits around the earth to the moon walks and beyond. Did I understand rocket science? Absolutely not (not then, not now). But it didn't matter: we were interested. People flying around in space and walking on the moon: how could we not be enthralled? Public support for science requires public engagement before public understanding.
Similarly, while I might wish that my neighbors understood the science behind epigenomics, microarrays, SNPs or whole-genome association studies, I know that that's not realistic. They want to know about diagnosing and curing disease. Short of that, their interest in genomics will be, at best, on a more visceral, "hey, that's cool" sort of level.
And that's where bloggers come in. Despite my anxiety at being live-blogged during my talk, I was amazed to find how many had posted comments about my presentation and, frankly, how many had done so in a thoughtful, civilized, snark-free manner. I can't say how many others will read those posts, but the point is, the information is there for anyone who wants it.
Blogging will never be a natural form of expression for many genome scientists, any more so than giving public lectures is. But the larger message is that if we want the public to buy into and support what we're doing, then it's incumbent upon us to tell them what we're doing and why. Simply keeping our heads down and publishing scientific papers read only by our peers will not accomplish that.
Blogging, however,just might. Especially if this internet thing turns out to be more than a passing fad.
Huntington F. Willard
Director