communicating process

In terms of journalism and the challenge of accurately representing science, the thing I struggle with is capturing the process. Too often there is this tendency to say, what makes this science story interesting? What's the payoff? Is there a new drug in the pipeline? Have they published a big new paper in Nature that's going to solve where human language comes from? We’re so focus on the result, on the conclusion, on the abstract of the paper and the last paragraph in the paper, but really what a science paper is is the methods section, it’s the process. And that is incredibly hard to actually translate to the public, partly because it can be pretty tedious but to get inside how a scientist thinks, to show that what makes science such a valuable, essential and crucial modern institution, is that there is this process. Someone had to struggle for years, someone had to sift through, parse through ambiguous data and come up with a good tentative answer, and that's incredibly difficult to translate to the public.

It's not simply that we need more science coverage. Really what we need absolutely more of, starting now, is to give people a better sense of the scientific process. A lot of the scientific illiteracy I see out there and the scientific misunderstanding of the American public, and the reason many people find it so easy to brush aside science or to simply believe that science is unweaving the rainbow, is because they don't understand the scientific process and the struggle and what a beautiful romantic process it often is. What we need more of, and this is a challenge to the writer, is to convey to people the excitement and the drama of a man or woman trying to take these big, big questions and come up with a new answer. It’s a noble pursuit.