One of the privileges of living long enough is watching a child you once knew become an adult. For teachers, that moment often arrives through former students. For me, it came when I realized that the middle schoolers featured in the 2017 web docuseries “Finding Your Roots: The Seedlings” are now old enough to drink alcohol, vote, and move through the world as grownups. I served as the teacher in that series, which asked children to explore their genetic, genealogical, and intentional selves using an array of methods, including genomics. Nearly a decade later, what stays with me is not simply the passage of time but the clarity of what I saw: Young minds can appreciate complex scientific ideas, even when those ideas are presented outside the usual confines of the classroom. The project was my first real encounter with science communication as a medium, and it changed how I think about my day job as a basic scientist.
The phrase “science communication” encompasses a movement of creators, writers, and scientists who aim to turn the products of science — discovery, theory, technical innovations — into more digestible forms. This includes science writing in public-facing venues (trade books, newspapers, magazines, blogs), in multimedia (TV, film), and increasingly on social media platforms. The movement has created a new professional class. Science communicators host television shows, direct short films, do stand-up comedy, make music, and utilize the visual arts. They win major awards and attend conferences.
While this is all very exciting, I argue that we must not allow science communication to be pushed to the margins. Instead, the authors of rigorous science communication products are conducting an essential activity of formal scientific practice, charged with transfiguring complex ideas and bringing them into the homes and minds of many. And in this sense, the best science communicators are working like many science luminaries from the past, such as Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday, and others. Consequently, their products can be considered as central to scientific practice as the average peer-reviewed manuscript.
We need to live with the discomfort that we’ll never have a neat answer to what a scientist is and what a scientist does.
Of course, there is merit to drawing boundaries around what qualifies as appropriate scientific practice. Philosophers of science have asked these sorts of questions for centuries. Do credentials make you a scientist? Does an academic position? Publishing in peer-reviewed journals? The answers might be myriad, but a distinction is relevant. Medical snake oil factories are built by dishonest characters who often claim that they’ve stumbled upon a secret of the body using scientific methods.
No, not everyone is a scientist. And not everything that sounds scientific is a product of science.
But is every person who publishes in a peer-reviewed journal a scientist? Piles of cases of scientific malpractice tell us otherwise: Many people with the credentials perform work that I believe to be unscientific quackery.
We need to live with the discomfort that we’ll never have a neat answer to what a scientist is and what a scientist does. The true definition is closer to that of an artist than of a physician or therapist, who are usually licensed by some municipality based on how they perform on tests of their knowledge. A degree or scientific pedigree does not make you a scientist. Rather, it is participation in a rigorous process for understanding how natural systems function and change.
The vagueness of this definition is a challenge. In recent years, politicians have leveraged public frustration with higher education to attack scientific institutions and attempted to mainstream fringe ideas about health that are without empirical support. Now is the time, more than ever, for defenders of science to tell real from fake, and to expose those who peddle nonsense and threaten the great knowledge creation machine that is our scientific enterprise.
This process of exposing bullshit is precisely where the weapons of science communication can be activated. Overall, the tax-paying public’s views of higher education — the institutions where many scientists work — have been growing more negative. Why would we think it is anyone else’s job to solve this conundrum? The act of doing so would not be a political act. Rather, some of the best people to convince the public that what comes out of our laboratories is meaningful and worthy of support are the ones who do the research, collect the data, and can tell those stories.
Many might say that writing for the public shouldn’t be on par with publishing a manuscript in a scientific journal. Surely, they are not the same sort of work. And some might add that the latter is more of a technical endeavor, as such writing is usually reviewed by subject matter experts prior to publication. But this perspective is hamstrung by a lack of imagination. For one, even within the strict definition of “technical” work, scientific products can look far different — perspective articles and reviews are different from standard research articles, and theory articles often look nothing like experimental articles. And no, not all articles in prestigious academic journals are peer reviewed.
The work of clarifying, contextualizing, and defending knowledge is as much a technical endeavor as anything else.
More importantly, the ability to publish a manuscript in a peer-reviewed journal requires many different skills, some no more technical than a journalist who must report on a new pandemic virus variant. The strong journalist understands the basic science that they report on, is familiar with who the influential figures are, fact checks their points, and synthesizes the products of many studies into an interpretable form. Compared to journal peer review, I can report that the pedantic newspaper or magazine editor is at least as discerning as the hopelessly distracted academic scientists who review manuscripts. The latter problem is made worse because the institution of peer review is built on tradition, in which we do not formally incentivize the hard work that it takes, in any way. That the average product of science journalism doesn’t contain effect sizes or mathematical proofs doesn’t make it any less scientific than the research articles that it often mentions.
What is at stake, then, is not whether science communication is pleasant or useful. The much more provocative tension lies in recognizing that the work of clarifying, contextualizing, and defending knowledge is as much a technical endeavor as anything else. If we undervalue it, we should not be surprised when the public grows alienated from the institutions that claim to speak in the name of truth.
But if we consider the notion that explanation is not separate from discovery, but one of its highest forms, then we might begin to rebuild a culture in which science is not merely produced and archived but understood and made durable in public life. That is not a decorative add-on to the scientific enterprise. It is one of the ways the enterprise survives.