Stop, communicate and listen.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the state of scientific research, both nationally and globally. It is hard to miss the steadily decreasing funding and support for science in Australia. In 2014, the Federal Government cut $400 million from research institutions, placing our scientific climate in its most frozen state in 30 years. In 2015, four Australian Nobel Prize laureates lambasted the national support of science as being poor, with the joint recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Elizabeth Blackburn, commenting that the lack of funding for science in the country is ‘just insanity’. Australia’s Chief Scientist, Ian Chubb, even highlighted the fact that every Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) country except for Australia had an overarching science or technology strategy, designed to co-ordinate national research priorities. We are now in 2016 and although the Turnbull government has promised to invest $1.1 billion into national STEM initiatives, it does not negate the irreparable damage caused by years of cuts to scientific jobs and research funding, which has resulted in overall instability and distress to core scientific institutes, such as the CSIRO. It is hoped that this investment will also translate into higher numbers of grants approved by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), as only 15% of grants were approved last year. Unfortunately, as the projected 1% yearly increase in the NHMRC’s Medical Research Endowment Account (MREA) falls short of the 1.3% inflation rate (functionally resulting in a cut to funding), this is unlikely.

However, this is only the start of our problems. Not only are scientists less able to provide the world with cold, hard evidence for some of life’s mysteries, we still haven’t dealt with the increasing problem of self-appointed sceptics injecting fear into the masses for things we already have evidence against. Sceptics come in many shapes and sizes, although scepticism itself is not bad. We have the sceptics who say that every preservative is toxic and should be banned, without considering or knowing that some of the earlier forms of preservation involved everyday products such as salt and vinegar. We now have celebrity chef, Pete Evans, using his large social media following to tell people that sunscreen is full of ‘poisonous chemicals’ with very little factual evidence. Let’s not forget Jenny McCarthy, former Playboy Playmate and figurehead of the ‘Anti-Vaccine Movement’, who claimed that her undiagnosed son had become autistic from being vaccinated. McCarthy then leveraged her celebrity and notoriety from the controversy into a position on the talk show, ‘The View’, gaining access to an audience of 2.7 million viewers. Although a little scepticism is good, these people don’t apply it properly at all. These are the same people who question the veracity of scientists who they regard as ‘shills’, but will then turn around and unquestioningly accept the truths spouted by those they idolise.

From seeing all of these issues facing science, I had to wonder – is there a common factor tying them together? Well, for one, in all cases there is a total underappreciation of science. It seems a strange concept that a field providing so many answers is given so little credit. You could almost say that it is only common sense to see the value of science. However, what we must remember is that common sense is not so common. Now, that is not a dig at the sceptics– it is merely an observation that we all tend to take our own skills for granted and assume that they are ‘common’, when in fact, they are not.

Scientists are particularly guilty of assuming that everyone has the same ‘common sense’ skill set that they do. I know this because I am a member of this guilty party. I realised this after having lengthy discussions with fellow scientists about the ‘stupidity of people’ who believed that the Andrew Wakefield paper suggesting that vaccinations lead to autism was accurate. I was angry that the public did not know that Wakefield’s paper was complete hogwash – that it did not have proper controls, that it was functionally a smear campaign against a pharmaceutical company or that the article was retracted by the journal (for more information on the paper, please see this link:
(http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(97)11096-0.pdf).

However, what I did not realise at the time was that I knew all of those things because I had completed a degree which taught me how to scrutinise research, how to differentiate between reliable and unreliable results, and how to find the answers to my questions. What I thought was common sense, was in fact a specific set of skills that I had acquired over ten years.

This brought me to realise that perhaps the reason that government bodies do not see science as important enough to fund and sceptics do not see scientists as reliable enough to believe is that we as scientists are failing as communicators. We expect non-scientists to have skills that have taken us years to refine and understand research that, in most cases, even we do not completely comprehend. Perhaps the way for scientists to get more funding and credibility in society is to become more accessible by finding ways to explain complex research in simpler terms. Rather than telling a business investor how we are going to perform an intricate set of experiments to study the effect of a mutation at a certain point in the genome for an abstract result, we tell the investor how our research may ultimately benefit society, relating this to their goals and needs. Perhaps we needs to apply this on a much broader scale in communicating our science to the masses. Essentially, we need to meet the public on their terms, rather than cloistering away with other scientists through gruelling grant applications.

This includes equipping non-scientists with the information and tools necessary to make a well-informed decision on matters relating to science. This means giving them more access to scientists and websites with more accurate scientific information. Right now, the public has more access to wildly inaccurate Jenny McCarthy propaganda and sites allowing people to self-diagnose rare, exotic diseases that they are unlikely to have, than sites that provide accurate scientific information for anyone to access. If we want everyone to adopt a logical way of thinking, we need to stop locking our information behind a plethora of paid subscriptions and passwords.

Let’s make science communication more common, make science less scary and perhaps in the long run, increase funding for scientific research. Dream big!