Page last updated: 7 Mar 2003

About 20 years ago, ABC television was filming a news item about intestinal worms in my laboratory. The worms look like pieces of red cotton two centimetres long. We went to great lengths to establish, for the film crew, live worms in a maintenance medium in a glass chamber in the laboratory.

On the day, the worms were satisfyingly active and the camera came right up close. When the program went to air, the worms filled the television screen. The next day, there were headlines in the paper. "‘Giant worms threaten wool industry’ says ANU academic". Then the telephone rang hot with reporters wanting confirmation of the story and with my colleagues having a field day at my expense.

I tell this story because it was a failure in science communication and it was my fault. Had I thought a bit more carefully I would have put a five cent piece in the tank so that the viewers could judge the true size of the worms.

Professor Trounson’s recent stem cell gaffe is another failure in science communication, that might have been very costly. It was a failure in science communication because a scientist underestimated the capacity of his audience to find out the truth. Trounson made the error of mistaking condescension for simplification.

And finally, an article in the Canberra Times last September reported an Adelaide University study that showed Australians spend about $2.3 billion per year on alternative medicines and therapies. This sum, according to Professor Alastair McLennan, is four times as much as that spent on proven therapies. About 50% of men and women now use alternative therapies. Even allowing for the few alternative remedies that are effective this is failure of science communication on a gigantic scale.

I define science communication as

the processes by which the scientific culture and its knowledge become absorbed into the culture of the wider community.

And what is the wider community? Well one thing we know about it is that it is not homogeneous. I must not expect, if I try to explain something abstruse like electron transport in tapeworms, that my listeners’ mental pictures of the mechanism will be the same as mine. They will construct their own understandings in the light of what is already in their minds. This process is called constructivism, and is poorly appreciated by many scientists, most of whom adhere to the conduit metaphor of communication - the idea that knowledge flows, like water down a pipe, from one brain to another without undergoing change. It is inherent in a phrase like ‘getting the message across’.

Failures in science communication are apparent all over the world. The National Science Foundation (NSF) in the US has been conducting surveys for more than 20 years. In 2001 only 15% of respondents to the NSF survey described themselves as well informed on science and innovation while 35% described themselves as poorly informed. Half the respondents did not know that the earliest humans lived long after dinosaurs, that it takes the Earth one year to go around the Sun, that electrons are smaller than atoms and that antibiotics do not kill viruses

But, you have to ask, does it matter? Not knowing any of these things is not going to affect the way we live our daily lives - even the misinformation about antibiotics should not matter as long as their prescription is in the hands of the medical professionals, whom, we assume, do understand about them. And does it really matter if someone thinks the sun goes round the Earth? The Earth will continue to go round the sun, in spite of what people think.

There have been many surveys like this. If you ask so-called science questions of the public then, unless they get them all right, the conclusion must be that they don’t know as much as they should. Such surveys are designed - advertently or inadvertently - to paint a picture of the public as lacking in knowledge.

A famous questionnaire administered to the British public purported to assess its scientific knowledge (Durant, Evans and Thomas, 1989). The British public did not do well and the results were published in Nature with much tearing of hair.

Much more worrying is the NSF finding that "most Americans, Canadians, and Europeans gave the incorrect answer (true) to the statement:

Ordinary tomatoes do not contain genes, while genetically modified tomatoes do.

Here is something that will impinge on their daily lives.

Genetic engineering has been an object lesson in how not to communicate. The move against GM foods is particularly severe in the UK and caused problems for Prime Minister Blair when he became the first ever ruling Prime Minister to address the Royal Society, in May last year. He got into trouble with both scientists and science communicators when he promised to break down the anti-science fashion in Britain and claimed he would never give way to misguided protesters who stood in the way of medical and economic advance.

The problem for Blair is that he defined science in terms of political outcomes and the economy. The address caused a great flutter on the Internet, with reputable scientists pointing out that because they had misgivings about GM foods they were not antiscience.

However, in September, The Economist ferreted out what is likely to be the real reason for Blair’s conversion. During his trip to India last year, he found that the Indians were delighted that Britain was having trouble with GM crops because they saw it as an opportunity to take the initiative and develop their own capability.

The Green Lobby has, in fact, won the GM crop debate in the UK and is winning in Western Europe. In the UK, once on a par with the Americans in this area, field trials are down from a peak of 37 in 1995 to 4 in 2002. The battle has only just started in Australia.

How did things get into this critical state? I think the history of science communication in the UK in the last thirty years explains much. In 1971, the Duke of Edinburgh and representatives from 80 different organisations set up the Standing Conference on Schools Science and Technology. It defined its mission to ‘excite young people about science, technology, industry and engineering’ and ‘to influence the teaching of science in ways which will appeal to young people aged 5-18’. Over the next 30 years an elaborate nationwide administrative structure was duly put in place to support the public understanding of science.

But what have been the outcomes of all this activity? Here are some recent judgments.

In 2000, the British House of Lords published the findings of a Select Committee on Science and Society. The report begins by stating that "society’s relationship with science is in a critical phase", citing recent developments in biotechnology and the mad cow disease disaster as eroding public confidence and creating public unease. The overall findings of the Committee focused on the imperative for science communicators to build bridges between science and the public. It recommended that all scientists include training in communication and understand the social context of their research.

The connotations of 'knowledge' and 'comprehension of facts' implicit in the public understanding of science is, according to the Committee, problematic. Consider these two sections:

3.9. Despite all this activity and commitment, we have been told from several quarters that the expression "public understanding of science" may not be the most appropriate label. Sir Robert May called it a "rather backward-looking vision." It is argued that the words imply a condescending assumption that any difficulties in the relationship between science and society are due entirely to ignorance and misunderstanding on the part of the public; and that, with enough public-understanding activity, the public can be brought to greater knowledge, whereupon all will be well. This approach [27] is felt by many of our witnesses to be inadequate; the British Council went so far as to call it "outmoded and potentially disastrous" (p 140).

The Report goes on to urge a new term to replace the backward looking vision of ‘the public understanding of science’.

This report was not well received by those in the UK who had been committed to the public understanding of science. Understandably, they considered that their efforts had in some way been demeaned.

In June last year, the House of Commons Report on Science Education from 14 to 19 was published by the Science and Technology Committee The report focuses on senior school science and was equally damning of the public understanding of science movement. Science teaching, the Committee complained, neglects contemporary science and lacks flexibility and, discourages students from thinking for themselves.

So, where did it all go wrong? I think the problem has its roots in a failure to understand the difference between the "public awareness of science" and the "public understanding of science". (This is commonly called PUS!. Somebody once remarked that only a scientist could have come up with a word that had such unlovely connotations.)

The public understanding of science differs from the public awareness of science in that it most usually concerns that part of the public already committed to the philosophies of science, having been entrained by formal means. It is most often seen in the membership of non-professional science-based societies (gemmology or bird watching, for example), the attendees of public lectures or adult education courses and in the enhancement, by professional scientists, of learning opportunities for those pursuing a formal education in science.

This, I think, describes the thrust of the greatest part of science communication in the UK very well. Most of the effort has been directed towards those who already have an interest in science. This isclearly very important, because it is from these groups that professional scientists, engineers and technicians will be recruited. But what of the rest of the community?

The public awareness of science, is a more difficult concept. Stocklmayer and Gilbert have described it as

a set of attitudes based on beliefs and feelings...Accessing scientific and technological knowledge and a sense of ownership of that knowledge will impart a confidence to explore its ramifications. This will lead...to an evaluation of the status of such knowledge and its significance for personal, social and economic life.

'Awareness’ goes further than a mere knowledge that the science exists. It implies that an affective change has taken place in the observer, that he or she feels comfortable with science, may even have a sense of ownership and pride in it. It emphasises the importance of participation.

The troubles in the UK stem from the fact that science communicators ignored one of the two major components of science communication.

On the one hand there is ‘public understanding of science’; on the other is ‘public awareness of science’. The first involves science education, both formally and informally, which leads to a greater level of appreciation of scientific ideas in the general public. It is relatively easily measured. ‘Awareness’ is concerned with encouraging the need to know in the individual or the community, with creating an affective change in that individual or community that favours science.. It is hard to measure, but the best science communicators are able to engender and nurture that change. By so doing, they create a community that is as comfortable with its ‘ownership’ of science as it is comfortable with its ‘ownership’ of art.

UK neglected awareness and finds itself in trouble, in spite of spending $A5 billion of millennium money on the development of science centres and similar establishments.

In Australia, not much has been spent on science communication, in comparison with other countries. Government policies have generally been directed towards ‘understanding’ rather than ‘awareness’, but in the few years that the Centre for the Public Awareness of Science has been established, we have acquired an international reputation in the public awareness field.

In Australia, we are not yet fully committed to a particular brand of science communication. We have a good chance, therefore, of not making the mistakes that have been made elsewhere in the world.