science communication

Public trust in science is a fickle creature. Surveys show a clear majority of Americans believe science has positively impacted society, and they’re more likely to trust scientists on issues like climate change and vaccines. On the other hand, surveys also find that factors like politics, religion, age and race can greatly impact the degree of that trust. It presents a delicate challenge for agencies that depend on trust in science to do their jobs. “Trust in science is high, but it’s not unanimous and it’s not completely unquestioned — and nor necessarily should it be,” Joseph Hilgard, an…

I recently finished a 2-year stint as an American Society for Microbiology Distinguished Lecturer. It's an excellent program--ASM pays all travel expenses for lecturers, who speak at ASM Branch meetings throughout the country. I was able to attend Branch meetings from California and Washington in the West, to Massachusetts in the east, and south as far as El Paso, Texas, with many in-between. Each Lecturer selects several topics to speak on, and the Branch chooses from those which they want to hear. Mine included basic research (zoonotic disease, antibiotic resistance) as well as science…

A claim that scientists need to quit making: I've written about these types of claims before. The first one--a claim that antimicrobial peptides were essentially "resistance proof," was proven to be embarrassingly wrong in a laboratory test. Resistance not only evolved, but it evolved independently in almost every instance they tested (using E. coli and Pseudomonas species), taking only 600-700 generations--a relative blip in microbial time. Oops. A very similar claim made the rounds in 2014, and the newest one is out today--a report of a "super vancomycin" that, as noted above, could be…

The impetus for the creation of this blog, lo these 12+ years ago, was growing alarm at the rising tide of pseudoscience then, such as quackery, antivaccine misinformation, creationism, Holocaust denial, and many other forms of attacks on science, history, and reality itself. I had cut my teeth on deconstructing such antiscience and pseudoscience on Usenet, that vast, unfiltered, poorly organized mass of discussion forums that had been big in the 1990s but were dying by 12 years ago, having turned into a mass of spam, trolls, and incoherence. So I wanted to do my little part (and I'm under no…

Despite a greater percentage of people knowing about (and agreeing with) scientific issues, denialism remains a powerful political and psychological force that threatens to have its heyday under President Trump. As Peter Gleick writes on Significant Figures, "good policy without good science is difficult; good policy with bad science is impossible." Peter asks: what is the best way for scientists to engage the republic? Through testimony? Social media? Pop star status like Sagan, Bill Nye, and Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or is the open letter an effective form of public outreach? Meanwhile, on…

The news over the past 24 hours has exclaimed over and over: HIV's Patient Zero Exonerated How scientists proved the wrong man was blamed for bringing HIV to the U.S. Researchers Clear "Patient Zero" from AIDS Origin Story H.I.V. Arrived in the U.S. Long Before ‘Patient Zero’ Gaetan Dugas: "patient zero" not source of HIV/AIDS outbreak, study confirms HIV's supposed "Patient Zero" in the U.S., Gaetan Dugas, is off the hook! He wasn't responsible for our outbreak! This is presented as new information. Gaetan Dugas, from Wikipedia. It is not, and I think by focusing on the "exoneration" of…

Long-term readers of the blog know of my interest in HIV denialism, especially as it is maintained and spread via the Internet. In my online travels, I recently met John Strangis via this blog post. John has an interesting story to tell regarding his experiences with HIV denialism and subsequently, his turn to patient and science activism. Many thanks to John for sharing it here. John with his wife and son. TS: Can you tell the readers a bit about yourself? JS: My name is John Strangis. I was born in the United States from Italian parents but lived for fifteen years in Italy…

The Hot Zone was first released in 1994, the year I graduated high school. Like many readers, that book and Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague* really sparked my interest in infectious diseases. In some sense, I have those books to thank (or blame?) for my career. But I'm still going to criticize The Hot Zone, because as a mature infectious disease epidemiologist and a science communicator in the midst of the biggest Ebola outbreak in history, The Hot Zone is now one of the banes of my existence. A recent article noted that the book is back on the bestseller list, going as high as #7 on the…

Peter Krause, the ever-friendly and patient press officer for ESOF, says the best thing about the organization is that it began ten years ago as a grass-roots idea: scientists who wondered why Europe had no equivalent of the AAAS and decided to create one. Since then, it has grown in all directions, but it still retains the flavor of scientists creating spaces for scientific exchange on  a pan-academic level. That feeling was certainly present yesterday evening, at a session on science communication. The speakers were three communicators in very different fields. The first, Angel Rodriguez…

A very good video on the gulf that exists between the climate science experts and the general population in terms of awareness and alarm regarding anthropogenic climate change: (from a comment on a P3 thread) The essence of this impending calamity is, more than anything else, a story of betrayal: betrayal of a naively trusting population by its political leaders and even more by its news media.   When the denial of this crisis is finally seen to be as implausible and ludicrous as it already is, it may be too late.  It may be too late already to avoid truly terrible consequences, but we must…

It's time again for John Bohannon's annual "Dance Your Ph.D." contest. This year, in my opinion, there are even more high quality entries than in previous years! (I was one of the judges who did the first round of choices...the "winners" were then chosen by a panel that includes several professional dancers (for several years it has been members of Pilobulus)).  And they are all now posted online ("winners" at the link above - all the videos are posted here - because really they are ALL winners in my opinion. And if you can come up with more difficult ways to try to explain science - we could…

This post was co-authored with Eric Berger, science writer at The Houston Chronicle. It's been nearly two decades since Carl Sagan, the great science communicator, died. Since that time public trust in science has eroded, and no one has emerged as Sagan's clear successor. At the same time popular culture is littered with faux science ideas, from anti-vaccination fervor to documentaries on mermaids and mega-sharks. What the world needs, then, is a great communicator of science who can connect with large audiences, liberal, moderate and conservative, to help explain what science is, and the…

As you may or may not know, I'm currently at work on a book called How to Think Like a Scientist. This raises the fairly obvious question in the post title, namely, why should people think like scientists? What's the point? In a sense, this is (as Ethan Zuckerman pointed out at lunch the other day) the underlying question at the heart of the whole endeavor of science communication. I mean, I've written two books about modern physics for a general audience, and when I have time, I write this blog aimed at non-scientists. What's the point of doing all that, anyway? What is it I hope to achieve…

I have a post up today at the Scientific American Guest blog, discussing how an earthquake and denial led to prairie dog plague. It details an outbreak of plague in Victorian San Francisco--the first time plague hit the United States--and the many downstream consequences of that outbreak (which began in 1900 and wasn't really contained until 1908). While the story is over at SciAm, here I wanted to talk more about why the outbreak became such a public health disaster. The outbreak was first recognized by Dr. Joseph Kinyoun, a bacteriologist who had been, until his transfer to San Francisco,…

Readers may be familiar with Matt Damon's charity work with water.org, an organization he co-founded. Water.org seeks to raise awareness of the lack of clean water by almost a billion people on earth, and lack of toilets by almost 2.5 billion--and more importantly, they work to remedy that situation by providing sustainable, local solutions. His new video brings awareness in a rather unorthodox manner: he's refusing to go to the bathroom until everyone on earth has access to clean water and toilets. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jQCqNop3CIg

Ivan Oransky and I moderated a session last week at ScienceOnline, the yearly conference covering all things at the intersection of science and the internets. We discussed the topic ""How to make sure you're being appropriately skeptical when covering scientific and medical studies." We started out discussing some of the resources we'd put up at the Wiki link. Ivan teaches medical journalism at NYU, and noted that he recommends these criteria when evaluating medical studies. I noted I use similar guidelines, and as a scientist, think about papers in a journal club format before I cover them…

It's that time of the year. Spots for ScienceOnline are a hotter commodity than Justin Bieber concert tickets amongst the pre-teen crowd; The Open Laboratory 2011 has just come out in print; and academics are discussing the utility of social media in full force. This topic has long been an interest of mine; with Shelley Batts and Nick Anthis, I even wrote a peer-reviewed paper on the topic way back in 2008. And it's fresh on my mind, as last week I braved the world of the University of Iowa's Internal Medicine Grand Rounds to discuss "Social Media and Medicine," evangelizing for social media…

Science denial, I fear, is here to stay. Almost half of Americans believe in creationism. Anti-vaccination sentiment is going strong, despite record pertussis outbreaks. Academics are even leaving their jobs, in part, because of the terrible anti-intellectual attitude in this country. It's depressing and demoralizing--so what does one do about it? Shawn Lawrence Otto's "Fool Me Twice" offers an analysis. Otto's book is good stuff. He devotes the first quarter or so of the book to understanding how we got to where we are regarding science denial and anti-science attitudes. It's a nice…

This post was co-authored by Natasha Bahrami, a foreign policy researcher, and Ali Arab, Ph.D., an assistant professor of statistics at Georgetown University. Last month, a young American woman was blocked from purchasing an Apple product at a local store in Alpharetta, Georgia. After overhearing her speaking Farsi, the second generation Iranian-American was informed that selling the product to her went against the company's policy. Apple's export compliance policy states that direct or indirect sales of Apple goods to any embargoed…

Dr. Jim Walsh     The imagination reels.  Five dinners with Iran's President Ahmadinejad.  What would you discuss?  What would be your top questions? MIT alumnus Dr. Jim Walsh did just that, and will report to us via an interview on Monday, June 4 via a live chat.  From the announcement: My Five Dinners with Ahmadinejad: Discussions on Iran, North Korea, and the Nuclear Age Jim Walsh PhD ’00 is an international security expert and a research associate at MIT’s Security Studies Program. He is one of a small number of Americans who has traveled to North Korea and Iran for talks with…