Well, at least, once can hope.
British people are all a-twitter on the TV (oh, sorry- "telly," because I guess the British really like Kojak?). But we won't talk about that business, because the very idea is laughable. British people arguing? How droll.
But I digress, what with my inherent ability to digress. AND DON'T YOU CLOSE ON ME, INTERNET EXPLORER.
Phew, it threatened to do so, but it didn't. Some of you might make some remarks about how I should switch to Firefox or Chrome or what have you, but, man, they've told me to do that before, and it just left me with a possibly viral Skype toolbar that I can't get rid of in the ol' Firefox. And that's the story of Rob using a possibly outdated and inferior browser on his llaptop. You know, it's like a laptop, but covered in nice bits of fur and with the ability to spit with deadly precision.
But hey, on the bright side, I don't have to deal with Firefox's spellcheck watching my every move.
Meanwhile, let's think on what we're going to write today. Toom tiddly toom.
Oh, man. Time is running short. But here's a ferret, possibly plotting the demise of some vegetables or shoes.
Okay, so now that that's been taken care of, I suppose that's supposed to be motivation for me to talk.
And here we go.
As part of med school and grad school, we "get" to listen to a bunch of science lectures from various folks in various fields. In a lot of ways, this is really cool. You can always picture it being like Hogwarts or one of those shows about high school where they've got the absurdly large and nice cafeteria and everyone has "free periods." I don't believe in the existence of such things in public schools, but those wacky private schools can get up to anything, I suppose. But, yeah, in a way, it's really cool. Well, it would be, if so many of them weren't so dreadfully boring. We had one today about a clinical trial of some fairly interesting science that makes a good bit of sense, but have you ever looked at data from a clinical trial? Oh man. "Toodly toom patient 204-5J9-é herpity derp outcome blah blah adverse event," and the graphs aren't much better. Yes, this is important, yes, this is kinda cool, but good Lord man! And then we wonder why people don't like science.
I read an article at some point recently (the source of which I unfortunately cannot remember) that talked about how in the 1950s, science was the BIG thing. You had the optimism of, "'Swounds! Our queen hath split the atom, bitches!" (Okay, it's a bit shoehorned, but I never was good at iambic pentameter.) You had folks like Feynman who were working the room like it was nobody's business.
Things were going pretty great for science. People loved it, and it was COOL. NASA was doing great things, nuclear power wasn't a terrible thing (though, obviously, the weapons were, but we could take those Reds), and things like DNA were jaw-droppingly AWESOME.
At some point, all that changed. Namely, Rob went off to trivia, and he'll be back later to continue this.
LATER HAS ARRIVED.
But beyond going to trivia, at some point, the view of science changed. Part of it was probably birth control, which didn't help the social conservatives get behind science in general, because, after all, those eggheads had violated the laws of nature (that of course state that everyone, well, good and decent people at least, should live in stone/wooden structures with heating from not necessarily fire sources, and also that they should use laptops in bathrooms that happen to be the warmest and best insulated room in the apartment). Meanwhile, the scientists stop staying as active in the public eye, you start getting some religious fundamentalists moving up, scientists retreat further, and suddenly science is basically magic but with fancy Greek letters in it (which makes it DOUBLY pagan).
Fast forward a few decades. Now, we're back to arguments that were settled YEARS ago. Or, rather, by having new and unrelated issues involving them. We're cutting funding for NASA and the NIH. Yes, some of this is coming from outside sources and reasons. Some of this is coming from the stigma of academia as the domain of the left. Some of it is religious groups insisting that science include the Bible, because everyone knows that G=H-TS, F=ma, and the other good ones (I couldn't figure out how to put a superscript in here) were in the Sermon on the Mount.
But maybe the biggest factor? We got lazy. We let religion come to the forefront and start dictating policy in science. Maybe, since communism isn't the main threat to security, our religious leaders have gotten into a dick-measuring contest with other fundamentalists, and by gods (whoops, by God), we are NOT going to fall into a dick-gap. We are going to win the dick-race. We'll have dicks in every home by the end of the century.
Meanwhile, where are the scientists? We've got Bill Nye, we've got Neil deGrasse Tyson, and we've sorta got Brian Greene. Bill Nye still gets regarded as the host of a kid's show (which I honestly never watched, but he seems kind of badass), Neil deGrasse Tyson is great but in astronomy/astrophysics (which isn't super relevant to the public anymore, even though it's pretty cool), and Brian Greene does string theory, which is string theory.
The rest of us sit in universities and laboratories, and we're content to know that we know things that the rest of you don't. You can't know, because you couldn't understand all the complicated reasons that it works that way. First of all, that's a load of shit. Yes, it's hard for people to understand all the reasons that science works the way it does. Do a better job explaining. Trim the equations, even if you have to say, "Well, there's some pretty complicated math with a lot of Greek letters here, and I think you're going to be more excited about the end result." On the one hand, you want to keep it from seeming like magic, but on the other, the first step to doing that is just getting the results across to people in ways that make them understand the idea and why it's important.
And, once again, my segués are unintentionally AWESOME.
We need to stop depending on the physicists. It's hard. Physicists took space and lasers as their playgrounds, and that's TOUGH to beat. I will not deny that both of those domains are awesome, and that a good space program is really good for science in ALL disciplines. But that's what we need to figure out. ALL the disciplines.
The one that comes to mind is medicine (and sure, environmental chemistry, too, but medicine is what I'm going to stick to here). We need a Feynman/Sagan/Bill Nye/Tyson who is as intelligent, well-spoken, and charistmatic as these guys. We need it to be someone who gets the science behind the medicine and can communicate it effectively to the public. Vaccines and autism? We needed a Tyson to say, "What? These are the methods you're using to say that? No. Bad Lancet. Bad public. Here's a clever analogy for what they just did to make those claims. Here's what vaccines do under that same analogy. Understood? Yes? Good. Now let's have a drink or two." Medicine can have so many great developments, and it can be understood by the public in pretty simple terms, but nobody's willing to go out there and say, "Hey. We're doctors. We know what's going on. If you don't want to listen to us, that's your prerogative, but that doesn't change that we know what we're talking about." With the right spokespeople, we could run public health campaigns that would get people to stop smoking, get vaccinated, and understand the big disease du jour.
We don't want to do that, though. Yeah, we'll work with patients one on one, and we might even publish a paper. And, man, we're good at those two things. We can publish the living daylights out of a case study. We can talk to a patient one on one and get them to maybe compromise to cut down on their eating deep fried bacon-wrapped hamburgers on Krispy Kreme buns, because they want to see their grandchildren graduate from kindergarten. But we are TERRIBLE at getting out there and saying, "Hey, here's what you really should do, and" (here's the important part) "here's a SIMPLE REASON why you should do it." Not just, "Well, it reduces the chance of you getting germ-line mutations that predispose progeny to Bloom syndrome." No, we're talking full on sensationalism (but with a positive spin): "Do this, and it will help keep your kids from having a disease that will give them cancer. Remember DNA? Those building blocks of life? This disease causes problems with that. It's bad." It sucks, because everything in medicine is tendencies, so it's hard to say things the way you need to in order to get the public's attention, but it can be done, and it needs to be done by people who actually know what they're talking about. The last thing we need is a flock of evening news anchorwomen talking about things they don't understand based on soundbytes that the media decided to edit to make as crazy as possible and THEN trim down so the anchors could say the words on the teleprompter.
I'm not there yet. I won't be for many, many years. But some of you that read this WILL BE. Get out there. Your research, your work, your practice is AWESOME (or it damned well should be, and if you falsify data, I will find you, and I will shiv you with a broken test tube as a warning to others). Now make people understand why.
Yeah, this is that soapbox I didn't want to get on last night.
British people are all a-twitter on the TV (oh, sorry- "telly," because I guess the British really like Kojak?). But we won't talk about that business, because the very idea is laughable. British people arguing? How droll.
 |
| Yes, quite. |
Phew, it threatened to do so, but it didn't. Some of you might make some remarks about how I should switch to Firefox or Chrome or what have you, but, man, they've told me to do that before, and it just left me with a possibly viral Skype toolbar that I can't get rid of in the ol' Firefox. And that's the story of Rob using a possibly outdated and inferior browser on his llaptop. You know, it's like a laptop, but covered in nice bits of fur and with the ability to spit with deadly precision.
 |
| Don't let its eyes deceive you- it'll make a nasting ringing in a spitoon. |
Meanwhile, let's think on what we're going to write today. Toom tiddly toom.
Oh, man. Time is running short. But here's a ferret, possibly plotting the demise of some vegetables or shoes.
 |
| Yeeeeeeeesssssssssssss.... |
Okay, so now that that's been taken care of, I suppose that's supposed to be motivation for me to talk.
And here we go.
As part of med school and grad school, we "get" to listen to a bunch of science lectures from various folks in various fields. In a lot of ways, this is really cool. You can always picture it being like Hogwarts or one of those shows about high school where they've got the absurdly large and nice cafeteria and everyone has "free periods." I don't believe in the existence of such things in public schools, but those wacky private schools can get up to anything, I suppose. But, yeah, in a way, it's really cool. Well, it would be, if so many of them weren't so dreadfully boring. We had one today about a clinical trial of some fairly interesting science that makes a good bit of sense, but have you ever looked at data from a clinical trial? Oh man. "Toodly toom patient 204-5J9-é herpity derp outcome blah blah adverse event," and the graphs aren't much better. Yes, this is important, yes, this is kinda cool, but good Lord man! And then we wonder why people don't like science.
I read an article at some point recently (the source of which I unfortunately cannot remember) that talked about how in the 1950s, science was the BIG thing. You had the optimism of, "'Swounds! Our queen hath split the atom, bitches!" (Okay, it's a bit shoehorned, but I never was good at iambic pentameter.) You had folks like Feynman who were working the room like it was nobody's business.
 |
| And with that, my female audience triples. |
At some point, all that changed. Namely, Rob went off to trivia, and he'll be back later to continue this.
LATER HAS ARRIVED.
But beyond going to trivia, at some point, the view of science changed. Part of it was probably birth control, which didn't help the social conservatives get behind science in general, because, after all, those eggheads had violated the laws of nature (that of course state that everyone, well, good and decent people at least, should live in stone/wooden structures with heating from not necessarily fire sources, and also that they should use laptops in bathrooms that happen to be the warmest and best insulated room in the apartment). Meanwhile, the scientists stop staying as active in the public eye, you start getting some religious fundamentalists moving up, scientists retreat further, and suddenly science is basically magic but with fancy Greek letters in it (which makes it DOUBLY pagan).
Fast forward a few decades. Now, we're back to arguments that were settled YEARS ago. Or, rather, by having new and unrelated issues involving them. We're cutting funding for NASA and the NIH. Yes, some of this is coming from outside sources and reasons. Some of this is coming from the stigma of academia as the domain of the left. Some of it is religious groups insisting that science include the Bible, because everyone knows that G=H-TS, F=ma, and the other good ones (I couldn't figure out how to put a superscript in here) were in the Sermon on the Mount.
But maybe the biggest factor? We got lazy. We let religion come to the forefront and start dictating policy in science. Maybe, since communism isn't the main threat to security, our religious leaders have gotten into a dick-measuring contest with other fundamentalists, and by gods (whoops, by God), we are NOT going to fall into a dick-gap. We are going to win the dick-race. We'll have dicks in every home by the end of the century.
 |
| Enough with the pinko dick jokes, son. |
The rest of us sit in universities and laboratories, and we're content to know that we know things that the rest of you don't. You can't know, because you couldn't understand all the complicated reasons that it works that way. First of all, that's a load of shit. Yes, it's hard for people to understand all the reasons that science works the way it does. Do a better job explaining. Trim the equations, even if you have to say, "Well, there's some pretty complicated math with a lot of Greek letters here, and I think you're going to be more excited about the end result." On the one hand, you want to keep it from seeming like magic, but on the other, the first step to doing that is just getting the results across to people in ways that make them understand the idea and why it's important.
And, once again, my segués are unintentionally AWESOME.
 |
| It will go DOZENS of miles per hour. |
The one that comes to mind is medicine (and sure, environmental chemistry, too, but medicine is what I'm going to stick to here). We need a Feynman/Sagan/Bill Nye/Tyson who is as intelligent, well-spoken, and charistmatic as these guys. We need it to be someone who gets the science behind the medicine and can communicate it effectively to the public. Vaccines and autism? We needed a Tyson to say, "What? These are the methods you're using to say that? No. Bad Lancet. Bad public. Here's a clever analogy for what they just did to make those claims. Here's what vaccines do under that same analogy. Understood? Yes? Good. Now let's have a drink or two." Medicine can have so many great developments, and it can be understood by the public in pretty simple terms, but nobody's willing to go out there and say, "Hey. We're doctors. We know what's going on. If you don't want to listen to us, that's your prerogative, but that doesn't change that we know what we're talking about." With the right spokespeople, we could run public health campaigns that would get people to stop smoking, get vaccinated, and understand the big disease du jour.
We don't want to do that, though. Yeah, we'll work with patients one on one, and we might even publish a paper. And, man, we're good at those two things. We can publish the living daylights out of a case study. We can talk to a patient one on one and get them to maybe compromise to cut down on their eating deep fried bacon-wrapped hamburgers on Krispy Kreme buns, because they want to see their grandchildren graduate from kindergarten. But we are TERRIBLE at getting out there and saying, "Hey, here's what you really should do, and" (here's the important part) "here's a SIMPLE REASON why you should do it." Not just, "Well, it reduces the chance of you getting germ-line mutations that predispose progeny to Bloom syndrome." No, we're talking full on sensationalism (but with a positive spin): "Do this, and it will help keep your kids from having a disease that will give them cancer. Remember DNA? Those building blocks of life? This disease causes problems with that. It's bad." It sucks, because everything in medicine is tendencies, so it's hard to say things the way you need to in order to get the public's attention, but it can be done, and it needs to be done by people who actually know what they're talking about. The last thing we need is a flock of evening news anchorwomen talking about things they don't understand based on soundbytes that the media decided to edit to make as crazy as possible and THEN trim down so the anchors could say the words on the teleprompter.
I'm not there yet. I won't be for many, many years. But some of you that read this WILL BE. Get out there. Your research, your work, your practice is AWESOME (or it damned well should be, and if you falsify data, I will find you, and I will shiv you with a broken test tube as a warning to others). Now make people understand why.
Yeah, this is that soapbox I didn't want to get on last night.
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