Vikram Savkar on Science and Society

OurBlook interview with Vikram Savkar, senior vice-president and publishing director for Scitable, a free online science library.

With the country embroiled in public debates around health care and the economy ... and upcoming U.S. energy policy ... what problems do the public and experts face in discussing science and statistics? If science can be used, can it also be abused?

VS: Many mass media outlets have cut back significantly on their investment in science journalism. The result is that there is much less well informed reportage on science today across the board than there was even 10 years ago. What remains can be quite good in some quarters, but can also at times be misleading, or poorly argued, and occasionally even sensationalistic. But eliminating discussion of science from political forums is a terrible alternative ... our public dialogue must be based on facts and evidence, not just dogma.

The challenge we face is to keep science front and center in our national conversations about health care, energy, climate change and so on, but to do it in a way that involves clear and reliable presentation of balanced, informed positions ... and all this despite the continuing shrinkage of the press floor. It's not an easy challenge to solve, but it's an essential one. So many of the existential issues we face as a country today intimately involve science. It's more important than ever for the public at large to have a real degree of personal familiarity with the actual scientific research being conducted, analyzed, and debated in our labs and academic institutions.

As examples, can you cite any scientific facts that aren't generally known but would be important in understanding the above issues?

VS: There are many examples of ideas that have been at times widely accepted by one side or other of the political spectrum as 'fact' and determinative of one course of action, but which in fact need to be considered in a broader context, which may suggest very different conclusions about what the right course of action is.

For example, many people initially embraced the use of corn-based ethanol in cars as a necessary partial solution to the climate change issue, because they give rise to fewer greenhouse gas emissions than our current fuels. But from a broad view, the impact of corn-based ethanol on climate change plays out a little differently. The production and transportation of a quantity of corn biofuel sufficient to offset our entire current dependence on gasoline would create new kinds of greenhouse gas emissions. So the net impact on emissions of migrating cars to these fuels is not immediately clear. That doesn't mean that biofuels are 'bad', but it does mean that we need to assess their risks and benefits carefully before putting our weight behind them.

What role does Scitable play in dealing with the public on scientific issues?

VS: We certainly are not the frontline source for information on scientific issues ... most people today still get basic information primarily from television and newspapers. But increasingly people conceive of themselves as active pursuers, rather than passive recipients of news and other information. So more and more people, I'm happy to note, are using the stories they hear on the television or read in the paper as a jumping off point for brief but important deeper research on the topics they find personally intriguing.

Since we launched in January of 2009, we've seen more and more people from outside of the academic world ... ordinary adults in more than 85 countries ... turning to Scitable as a resource to get what they regard as reliable, well-researched information on key science-related topics. Right now, our content concentrates mostly on genetics, so we find a lot of people coming in to read about birth defects, cloning, and so on. As we expand our content across the other sciences, I'm very interested to see what the high-curiosity issues in those fields will turn out to be.

How does science benefit from the public better understanding it and the possible practical consequences of the work?

VS: On a basic level, science requires public funding to thrive, in part because the practical consequences of research may take decades to manifest, which is too long a timeframe for almost all corporations. The more the public understands how science works and what its benefits are, the more inclined we will be to express support for policies and administrations that invest public funds in science, whether through our voting pattern or through our vocal public opinions. Science also requires a constant influx of talented, well-trained scientists, and the more the public appreciates science, the more the younger generation will be inclined to consider it as a career.

There's an aspect of all this that is a virtuous cycle: the more people who understand and are interested in science, the more media outlets will find it worthwhile to invest in science journalism, and the more high quality science journalism there is, the more ordinary people will appreciate science and vote for pro-science policies, and the more government policies are pro-science, the more interesting research will emerge, and there will be more to be excited about and more people to write about the excitement ... and so on.

Finally, the practical consequences of science don't always emerge in predictable ways. Often it happens that one researcher or inventor stumbles upon the work of another and sees possibilities for practical consequences that the original discoverer hadn't even conceived of. Science is inherently a social endeavor, and can only really prosper when there are large numbers of people from different backgrounds and with different goals all connected through common research interests. And that, I think, also requires that the public at large be exposed to science, to ensure that it takes root in as many places as possible.

In a survey of 937 scientists who are members of the Society of Toxicology, the Center for Media and Public Affairs and its affiliate site stats.org found that WebMD is the only news source a majority of them (56 percent) regard as accurate in covering chemical risk. Wiki came in second at 45 percent. Trailing badly at 15 percent were the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. USA Today took the print booby prize at 6 percent, and network broadcast news recorded an embarrassing 5 percent. Why are even the most prestigious mainstream media organizations so mistrusted by scientists?

VS: Part of it has to do with the serious cutbacks that newspapers have made in their science departments. To some extent they are halfway between the model of the past and the model of the future, and it's just not an ideal moment right now. The reality is that Wikipedia, in one sense, has a thousand times as many science PhDs writing for it as the New York Times, so although a formal quality control process may be missing, the raw materials may in fact often be more rigorous.

The older news organizations now have to reinvent what they back up their public prestige with ... it will no longer be only the quantity of staff writers, it will be something else that results in the same level of quality as the old model did. They'll get there. We have to be patient as they work through some extraordinary market changes; but we also have to be firm and vocal in holding them accountable.

If there is a serious problem, how can the media do a better job in dealing with science and statistics?

VS: The people who are best placed to interpret and evaluate science research and statistics are, naturally enough, scientists. They not only understand the technical details of the subject matter, but more importantly they understand how to weigh, question, test, and be skeptical of what is presented to them.

I would say that the media must do a better job of involving scientists in journalism about science-related issues. Not just as interviewees and on the other hand not necessarily as journalists themselves, but possibly as a cadre of technical reviewers, who read and comment on pieces before they are published. This is a lot of overhead ... in time and cost ... and in that sense cuts against the grain of mainstream media, which are often and increasingly focused on efficiency and time-to-market. So certainly it shouldn't be utilized with the same depth with which it is implemented by scientific journals, for which mastery of the process of technical peer review is as close to the heart of their identity as anything else. But some slimmer version of it might be gracefully incorporated into the journalistic process, and it could force a significant improvement in the quality of science reporting.

There are structures in place today to facilitate this kind of process. When journals like Nature, for instance, release information about important new papers we are planning to publish, we place a week-long embargo on it. This embargo is intended to allow journalists to do a good amount of background research ... including reviewing the story with scientists ... without worrying about being scooped by other writers. What's not clear is the extent to which this embargo period is being used in the way it's intended. So part of the solution may be simply to take better advantage of the structures that are already in place.

In recent years, the American public has been told that there is an ironclad scientific consensus that global warming is occurring, that it's an extremely serious problem and that human activity is a leading cause, if not the primary cause. Yet the National Climactic Data Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that the average October 2009 temperature of 50.8 F was 4.0 F below the 20th century average, and this meant "for the nation as a whole, it was the third coolest October on record." Do scientists, as well as the media, have a credibility problem? What is the ethical duty of scientists to the public when totally conflicting information such as this comes out?

VS: On back-to-back days, playing against the Detroit Tigers in July 1941, Ted Williams went a combined 0-5 at the plate. Looking just at that statistic, one might assume that Ted Williams was likely to have had a terrible 1941 overall. But in fact we all know that he hit .406 that year, a mark no one has come close to matching since. Any baseball fan understands how this works: batting average represents an overall measure of a player's annual performance, which includes a number of days when he performed well above his average level and a number of days when he performed well below his average level.

We understand this because sportswriters are often exceptionally knowledgeable about the game, and skilled at explaining it to lay readers in easily comprehensible terms. I can't personally weigh in on the scientific facts behind global warming, but I will observe that I don't see any contradiction between scientists' consensus that the earth as a whole is warming, and the fact that October 2009 in the United States was one of the coolest Octobers on record.

It seems entirely likely to me that within the pattern of overall warming of all regions of the planet over time, one particular region at one particular time might experience unusually low temperatures. Weather patterns are complex and interconnected in unpredictable ways at a local scale. So I don't think that scientists at all have or should have a credibility problem. Rather, I believe that reportage on climate change should aim to be as informed, nuanced and comprehensible to ordinary people as sports reporting, so that it does justice to the extremely rigorous and nuanced research that scientists perform.

Is there anything else you'd like to say about the future of science and its role in the public discourse?

VS: I think there's a similarity between the challenges that science faces today and the challenge that symphony orchestras face. Orchestras are always trying to figure out how to get younger adults engaged in classical music, to ensure that the audience doesn't eventually die out with the older generations. They have special promotions and discounts; they invite pop stars to conduct special concerts, and so on. It's all productive.

But I think the reality is that the best way to get younger generations to care about classical music is to make it a part of their daily lives from the time they are very young. Seventy years ago, ordinary American families listened to Toscanini and the NBC symphony orchestra after dinner; forty years ago, they watched Bernstein. The result was that successive generations of kids grew up knowing Beethoven and Schubert. And when they became adults, they were concertgoers. But nothing like this happens today, for the most part, and I think that that's an existential challenge that has to be attacked at the root, rather than via discounts and pop concerts.

Similarly ... though this is more of an anecdotal opinion than something I have data to back up ... it seems to me there was a time when more kids had a natural, curious relationship with science. Feynman played with radios, Gould sketched dinosaurs, and millions more kids were encouraged to dig around in science on a daily basis both in school and at home. Today, kids play with computers, which is similar but definitely not the same. I don't think that large numbers of children today form a lasting personal relationship with the life and physical sciences from an early age. And the result is that adults at large are, I think, alienated from the basics of science. It seems mystifying and unpleasantly technical. That's unhealthy for our country, for all of the reasons I talk about above ... climate change, energy policy, and so on.

So what I offer as a final word is that I don't believe this gap between the public and the world of science can be fixed purely through exceptionally well formed and well informed science discourse. I think it needs to be solved at the root, when we are all young. I would say, therefore, that if we are concerned about the quality of science media, we must also as part and parcel of that be concerned about science education, in both its formal and informal aspects. Let's make sure that science is taught well in the classroom. But let's also make it more appealing for young kids to just play around with science. How many chemistry sets are sold in toy stores these days? We should find out, and if we don't like the answer, then let's do something about it.

Scitable connects students, educators, researchers, and scientists from all over the globe, utilizing the internet to promote science and higher education through interactivity. The website is hosted by Nature Publishing Group and includes articles from all of their major publications including Scientific American. With more students using Google and Wikipedia as a main research source, Scitable provides access to credible, sourced material.

Prior to NPG, Vikram Savkar held a number of management roles in digital and textbook publishing over a 10-year career at Pearson Higher Education, and prior to that served for three years as assistant to the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra. He received degrees in physics and classics from Harvard.

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