Viewpoint

LV Martin or Doting Aunt Annie?

Many people don't know their ascus from their elbow, nor can they distinguish a meson from a moron. Some of those people make decisions which affect scientists: on funding levels, on organisational structures, on areas for priority investigation. The politicians, who must manage the country, and the people, who elect and monitor them, can not know the details of scientific discoveries. However, also they, by and large, do not know the process of science. Being ignorant of how science is carried out leads to frustrating communication between public and scientists.

The French Academy of Sciences claims that the National Assembly, by its decrees on the language of science, reveals that it has no idea how the scientific community works and is putting French science in danger. In discussing, in New Zealand, the possibility of a peculiarly Maori science [Maori Science?, May], it has been noted that construction of a body of beliefs is strikingly different from the process of accumulating scientific data.

Part of Society

Science is part of our society and the relationship of people to it is an important social component. The influence of science is everywhere. Consider Barbie dolls. Undeniably, the industry is important to modern society. Ask grandparents and toyshop owners at Christmas time if life without plastic would be the same. However as the engineers were devising high-pressure reaction equipment and chemists at ICI were cursing the waxy solid which was coating the inside of their tank, there was no thought of Barbie and Ken, of Lego blocks and sticker books, of food wrap and lunch boxes, carpets and car parts, rockets and robots, each to be dependent on plastics.

More directly, medical developments have affected people. The contraceptive pill has altered the way families and communities are configured. Histologists of last century knew the ovary changed during the ovulatory cycle. When chemists, investigating molecules and their properties, extracted some steroids from reproductive tissue they were poking around as scientists do. Physiologists, in other laboratories, wondered what these new substances were there for. Eventually, contemporary reproductive endocrinology developed and biochemistry changed society.

Sometimes Slow

Because science has such forceful strength, it has acquired the task of solving many of society's problems. People sometimes wonder about the unevenness of the triumphs. If science can transport people way way way up into the sky, if it can produce power enough to kill with unimaginable ferocity, if it can know about such strange and inaccessibly erudite things such as black holes, viral membranes, the pigments of butterflies, then why doesn't science solve all the questions people ask and produce universal happiness? Why is it that the public cannot say to the scientific community, as if they were writing an order to LV Martin, "Please send a solution to the problem of cancer, the weather patterns and earthquakes, or AIDS"?

There is some suspicion that science is controlled by frauds who have been seduced by money and popularity. People would be less impatient with the, sometimes hesitant, evolution of ideas if they understood that it is because scientists are ignorant and confused that they are sometimes a bit slow. Being flummoxed by these questions of Nature does not imply a lack of effort or some prejudice. Of relevance is not what scientists know but rather what they don't know, and often they aren't sure what they don't know. There is, in the ether, an extensive array of abandoned hunches.

Scientists, mistakenly, often overemphasise their potency. Sometimes they are forced to a claim of modesty. In support of French physicians convicted for their part in the supply of HIV-contaminated blood, 97 researchers and others wrote, "Humility...obliges us to recognise that...the power of medical science is still less great and less immediate than popular hope and imagination would care to acknowledge".

Nevertheless assuredly the reason for the difference between the lives of our great grandparents and ours is science. The authority of science is recognised by those accurate mimics of opinion, the advertising agencies. They reassure us that the formula for Pert shampoo has been checked by "scientists and researchers", MQ Optimum hair care formulations have been "scientifically developed".

Unpredictable
Capriciousness

New discoveries continue to emerge. Journalism tells us about them, and performs a useful function. These however are the eventual end products of a series of unpublicised experiments. Programmes such as Beyond 2000 and Quantum catalogue success stories. However beyond the cathode ray tubes, in their laboratories questing for further knowledge, the scientists often don't know what they are doing. Much of the effects of science have been accidental, occurring rather in the manner of a cat who, when dragging some chicken skin across a bench, knocks over a bottle of cream.

The common form of science journalism misses the unpredictable capriciousness of science and in doing so does scientists a disservice. The public and the distributors of political funds prefer identifiable targets, but only sometimes does a scientific problem yield to a trigonometrically aimed volley. The routes scientists follow to a solution are dislocated because scientists are not smart enough to know which way they should go. There are few discussions about the uncertainties preceding a discovery, and so there can be little understanding by the public of the usual method of progress.

The surprising sources of contributions to a conclusion are rarely explained when the spectacular discovery is revealed. The chemists who noticed that carbon atoms could be joined together into chains did not realise the finding would be fundamental to the proliferation of certain sorts of educational and recreational aids in classrooms. Oral contraception was not on the mind of van Leeuwenhoek when he invented the microscope, or Virchow as he developed histological stains as a tool of pathology; but without the knowledge gained, the ovulatory cycle would not have been observed. Oxygen was found, many years ago, to be important to human metabolism, and later that it could be stored in containers -- space travellers were very grateful for the discoveries.

Many problems besetting scientists have been solved in unexpected ways. Biologists were for some time frustrated at being unable to readily measure substances which seemed important. Now immunoassays in various forms can seemingly measure just about anything accurately and sensitively. This came about because Yalow and Berson who knew antibodies had been induced accidentally in human diabetics by treatment with insulin from animals, turned the annoyance to their advantage.

The modular nature of science and its uncertain directions are thus well-illustrated. It is accepted that answers to several associated questions are a prerequisite to understanding a topic -- to know about cancer, knowledge must be assembled on membrane communications, receptor activation, growth factor chemistry....

Much of the information is exposed by investigators studying something else. The way studies interact is documented in the reference lists at the end of papers in which other people's ideas are incorporated or used in support. Eventually information is synthesised into a coherent theory. It is only this last step which reaches Beyond 2000 or the science section of the Press. The process is ignored. Understanding the process is important for the public to empathise with the beleaguered practitioners. It might be an instructive, and tantalisingly addictive, television serial to relate, as they are happening, the investigations of scientists.

Change of Image

The image of scientists should change from being an LV Martin, from whom a particular commodity can be ordered, to a "doting aunty" who gives a gift at unpredicted times and of uncertain value; an aunty who, like my Aunty Annie, among the presents which were not quite so great, now and then gave a real humdinger.

The erratic process of science must be explained, the gathering of data, the guessing and hoping, the way information from a multitude of experiments done in different places is bonded together, the trials and their errors, the confusing surprises and the exciting identifications. "The practice of science," proposes K.S. Thomson in Nature, includes "false starts, mindless repetition, faddishness and clannishness". Scientists need the public to know that a problem, although neatly defined, is not solved in isolation from history by a single breakthrough. Some problems will yield more easily than others for reasons not able to be foreseen. Scientists need the public and its politicians to have expectations which are sensible.

We should consider telling people not only how clever we have been, but also how fascinatingly stupid we can be. The ignorance of scientists is one of their strengths; discovery is foreshadowed by a confrontation with the unknown.

Dr John Evans is in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the Christchurch School of Medicine.

Dr John Evans is in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the Christchurch School of Medicine.