Journalism was not always specialized. So any journalist interested in the subject or commissioned to do so, wrote about science. For, the fact is, a good investigative reporter can usually turn their hands to anything and write balanced, entertaining copy. But over the last couple of decades this situation has changed.
Increasingly, one finds ex-science graduates and post graduates, many with a biomedical sciences training, as journalists and writers. Either they became bored with the practice of science and sought something new, or they could not find long-term gainful employment in their chosen disciplines (I exclude here career scientists who write in order to popularize their subject).
Some universities now offer postgraduate conversion courses in science communication. In addition, scientists have realized their subjects are perhaps not as well understood as they would like by the general public who, through their taxes, pay for state-sponsored scientific research. This has led to a growing “industry” in the public understanding of science.
There is nothing wrong with that per se. Ideally in any democratic society, the public should be well informed and able to engage with the big scientific and ethical questions of the day (e.g., climate change and stem-cell research). Then through the democratic process they can have their input into political debate concerning the choices that need to be made.
Education has a vital role to play here, but in the last 20 years, there has been serious dumbing down of school science curricula, and evidence that in the developed world, children are increasingly being turned off from science. This may be partly due to fears of real hands on and engaging curiosity-driven experience chemistry experiments in particular, can be dangerous, and parents litigious and that perhaps in their early teens, children tend to be more interested in other things (including each other) than science.
There are also the effects on education of what some consider is a Post-Modernist anti-elitism,4–6 part of whose agenda has been to deconstruct the assumed supremacy of scientific “truth” over other forms of discourse. New Fundamentalists might argue this attitude is at least partly to blame for the current disenchantment with science in the developed world. Thus, instead of being humanity’s crowning achievement or indeed its “savior,” as science was perceived to be back in the 1950s, it could be argued that science has become a slave to the military–industrial complex, globalized (e.g., pharmaceutical) profit, and a corporate arrogance that, for example, regards genes as nothing more than sets of privatizable molecular “Lego®” bricks. Between boredom, raging hormones, and Post-Modernism, is it any wonder the kids are turned off from science?
So, there is a felt need for more and better science communication and qualified communicators. However, in a media age where sound-bites rule, science has to compete for time and space in a crowded and increasingly commercialized media marketplace. Inevitably, this leads to oversimplification of complex scientific issues. Thus, though perhaps a readily accessible and media-friendly version of science, the New Fundamentalists’ naïve inductivism had its limitations pointed out in the 1950s by Karl Popper, not to mention being undermined by Post-Modernism and other philosophical movements.
In all this, it is perhaps easily forgotten that science is not a homogeneous entity, and that its separate disciplines do not all share the same intellectual depth and rigor. For example, compare the largely “belt and braces” empirical approach of biomedicine (which in an accident and emergency setting saves lives, but is not so effective in treating chronic conditions), with the intellectual subtlety and sophistication of quantum physics. Through concepts such as non locality and entanglement, the latter offers a worldview profoundly at odds with the determinism embedded in Western culture since the Enlightenment.
The consequences of the quantum worldview that there is a subtle, indissoluble link between observer and observed, such that the universe cannot always be considered objectively separate from us is an ontological and for some, disturbing conundrum even within the academic teaching of the subject. It is simply referred to as “quantum weirdness,” a telling phrase indicating how difficult the quantum world view is to understand within the confines of deterministic Western thinking. Yet this subtle connection between observer and observed has long been recognized in the social, anthropological, and psychologic sciences. It could well be that it has a much more important role to play in the healing process than is currently admitted to in conventional medicine: Certainly it is beginning to inform nondeterministic explanations and interpretations of how homeopathy/CAMs might work.
By Lionel Milogram, Ph.D., F.R.S.C., M.A.R.H.
