THE FACULTY AND THE FUTURE OF
SCIENCE COMMUNICATION IN JAMAICA

by Mark Thomas
Department of Life Sciences

Scientists must communicate. Many of the great scientists knew this. Faraday was such a good communicator that huge numbers of lay people flocked to his lectures. He was the Elvis of his day.

With popularity came power. And with power came efforts to institutionalize science, to make it more professional.

Professionalization brought specialization. Chemists formed societies that contained only other chemists. Physicists began communicating only with other physicists, not with biologists.

Communicating with other scientists in one’s narrow discipline even became the foundation for science’s reward system. Publishing papers full of molecular biology jargon became the way molecular biologists climbed he career ladder.

Scientists now had nothing to gain from communicating with the public. Giving public lectures became a chore. Communicating with the public became an unnecessary distraction.

Times have changed. Today, science is so expensive that scientists often seek public funding for their work. Public funding requires public support, but this is often very difficult to come by.

Today’s science does not have the squeaky clean image it once had. Science, after all, gave the world the atomic bomb. It told the world that pesticides were safe, and then – after much damage to the environment – changed its mind.

Still, many scientists continue to live in an intellectual ivory tower. These scientists look down on communicating with the general public. And when they do communicate with the public, the communication is always one-way: from scientist to lay person. Furthermore, the language these scientists use is often almost as dead as the Latin that preceded it.

For the public perception of science to change, scientists must change. They must come down from their ivory tower and learn to communicate more effectively with the average Joe.

Jamaica is at a crossroads. The only way it can solve its economic problems is by developing new products, or by finding new ways to do old things more efficiently.

This cannot happen if the next generation of Jamaicans has no understanding of science. Even tourism-based economies need scientists to preserve the environment that lures their visitors.

Yet the public funding available to produce Jamaica’s future scientists and scientific developments is under threat. This threat will not disappear until a public that appreciates science – and that is excited by science’s possibilities – forces the hand of the politicians. Ultimately, the responsibility for exciting Jamaicans about science rests on the shoulders of Jamaica’s scientists.

In other words, the responsibility is ours. We in the Faculty of Pure and Applied Sciences must produce Jamaica’s great science communicators. These science communicators will understand how to tell science stories in the media. And they will know that these stories must be in narrative form – with a structure that is more beginning, middle and end than introduction, materials and methods, results and discussion.

These science communicators will know that science on television must possess the qualities of good television, not just of good science. They will understand that underestimating the intelligence of the audience is a bigger sin than overestimating it. And they will know that big words are not needed to explain big concepts.

Most importantly, these communicators will know how to make science fun – how to make science as beautiful and poetic on television as it is in the minds of scientists; how to make the audience feel that they are working things out for themselves rather than being force-fed.

If we build these communicators, the public will come. And then, sure enough, the politicians will follow.

Imperial College, London, runs a Science Media Production programme that hopes to produce the science communicators of the future. I attended this programme, and have learned many of the principles that are now being applied to science television around the world.

The science TV of today and tomorrow cannot be like the science TV of yesterday. Audiences are now exposed to much, much more media than we were. They are more media-savvy. They are far more competent at constructing – and deconstructing – narratives than we were. Their new, enhanced cultural conditioning is always with them; they do not put it on hold just because the programme they are watching is about science.

At Imperial College I was taught the techniques used by the makers of narrative, fictional TV programmes: what makes a good story; what makes a good story resolution; how to construct memorable, pleasurable plots. And I was taught how these techniques can be used to spice up science documentaries. This knowledge could be passed on to the next generation of Jamaicans.

Jamaicans are naturally good story-tellers. It is time that they started telling great science stories – stories that will, ultimately, produce a happy ending for their homeland.