A recent survey found the public expects the impossible of scientists. But are scientists expecting the impossible of the public? From Media Monitor, Geoscientist, June 2001
Believing that what everyone thinks impossible might just be possible is generally held something of a virtue in scientists. After all, the Earth is round. Space is curved. Continents do move. And we know that because someone once had the courage to believe the impossible.
It isn’t always like that. Sometimes the impossible really is impossible. For example, ichthyologists are almost unanimous that yoga breathing techniques provide absolutely no protection against shark attack. Behavioural ecologist Erich Ritter, 43, a Swiss researcher based in Miami, has a different view. He has long espoused the method that all his colleagues pooh-poohed as impossible. And he is now recovering in St Mary's Medical Centre in West Palm Beach, Florida after an adult bullshark, unimpressed by the yogic inhaling, took a chunk out of his leg.
Dedication to proving sincerely held theories - to the point of folly and beyond - is one of those thing for which the public admires scientists. Stories of them risking their lives in the pursuit of truth do scientists no public relations harm, even when they are spectacularly wrong – which I offer as some slight consolation to Dr Ritter in his convalescence.
However, concern about the image scientists have with the public – once so much the vogue – has now taken on a more serious cast. Scientists today seem to have given up worrying about how to combat unhelpful media clichés and the like. In the wake of foot and mouth, BSE and all the rest, the big issue of the moment is - public trust.
So serious is this situation thought to be that The Royal Society dedicated its very first National Science Forum to examining the subject (Do we trust today’s scientists? Royal Society, March 6). Several of MM’s media and media relations colleagues spoke at it. There was, apparently, a debate with non-scientists. There was a panel of the great and good, who were going to answer questions from the floor. There were regional versions too. All in all, it was quite an effort.
I regret to say that MM did not attend, having been that day contacted by an experimental ophthalmologist (and believer in the impossible) who thinks he can cure astigmatism by acupuncture. Choosing between a debate about public trust in science at the Royal, and an afternoon in Crouch End having red-hot needles stuck in his eyes was not difficult.
The trouble with the "public trust" debate is that it rarely honestly conducted. When scientists ask "why does the public mistrust us?", what they really mean is "Why does the public not trust us implicitly?". Thus if anyone dare suggest that the right answer might be "Yes, you should trust scientists, but no more and no less than you would trust anyone else, so use your common sense" their view tends to be regarded as in some way less than satisfactory.
After a while one begins to wonder how much of this alleged problem resides only in scientists’ minds. The recent Wellcome Trust/Office of Science & Technology survey Science & the public – a review of science communication and public attitudes to science, reported at length in this column (
Oh no, they love us after all, Geoscientist April 2001) showed clearly that the public does trust scientists - up to a point. They trust university scientists more than government scientists, and government scientists more than commercial scientists, because it seems obvious to them that anyone who pays the piper gets to call the tune. Most folk would say this was an eminently sensible attitude. To expect more (as many scientists seem to) would surely be believing the impossible…
Concern over paymasters’ influence on science was also borne out in a MORI poll commissioned to coincide with the Royal Society’s Forum. Of those questioned, 55% agreed (28% strongly) that science funding was becoming too commercial. This might be encouraging – it suggests we are witnessing not a failure of faith in science itself, but merely the public’s suspicion that filthy lucre and the heavy hand of Government are corrupting it. Would the belief that scientists are too pure in heart to yield to the allure of money and the approval of the powerful, constitute "believing the impossible"? MM believes it does. Yet that would appear to be what many scientists want to see in the adulation they crave.