The Art of Science

The excitement in our children’s eyes when they looked through a large concave lens to see a furnished apartment transformed into the face of the Hollywood star of yesteryear Mae West said it all. Sure, they hadn’t heard of Mae West – after all she was in her prime in the early part of the 20^th century, a time when even their grandparents were not born. But to see a lens reconfigure an odd assortment of furniture in a room with a shiny wooden floor into a glamorous face was enough to get them thinking about the mysteries of science.

We were at the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, Spain, and the exhibit in question was the famous Mae West Room in the museum. It was created by the enigmatic, surrealist artist, Salvador Dali, who had a deep interest in science. As an education resource at the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia says, the artist “described himself as a fish swimming between ‘the cold water of art and the warm water of science’”.

Art is such a fabulous way to raise public understanding of science, we thought, as we spent an entire afternoon at the museum mesmerised by the thought-provoking art of Dalí. One of the more striking paintings at the museum is the Galatea of the Spheres, an oil-on-canvas work that is, as the catalogue describes it, “the outcome of a Dalí impassioned by science and for the theories of the disintegration of the atom”. There is a sense of awe in this painting – the exuberance of scientific discovery bridled by a sense of its destructive potential captured by the disintegrating spheres that make up the model’s face.

Even before you enter the museum, what catches your eye in the courtyard outside is a sculpture offering Homage to Newton and a motif on the hydrogen atom. Amidst the array of masterpieces inside the museum are many that mesh art and science to create hidden images within paintings – the face of Abraham Lincoln embedded in what looks superficially to be the back of a woman in the nude. There are also precious art works that use holography and a range of optical illusions.

Art and Science have, of course, had close links for centuries. The Master of the Renaissance era, Leonardo da Vinci was both an artist and a scientist, combining extraordinary skills in painting and sculpting with a legendary prowess in mathematics and engineering. In recent times, there has been an increasing push to bring art and science together as is being done by the Catalyst Collaborative at MIT, for example. Also, as the Arthur I. Miller exhibition on Art & Science: Merging Art & Science to Make a Revolutionary New Art Movement in London says, ‘Artists are bringing science out of the laboratory’.

In an earlier blog, we talked about an innovative exhibition of art, sculpture, and narratives on the future at the ASU Art Museum in Tempe that featured ‘a collaborative interaction between art and science, society and academy, the grassroots and the elite.’

                                     

If you have examples of how art is enhancing public understanding of science anywhere in the world, do let us know.

Unseen Treasures of the Natural World

We were in Oxford, the city of Matthew Arnold’s ‘dreaming spires’, recently to talk about our research on building fresh values of citizenship and equity around the uses of new and emerging technologies at an international conference on Environmental Justice and Global Citizenship. For us, as with many other scholars, public understanding of, and engagement with, science and technology is a core element of citizenship.

At this conference, we heard a very stimulating presentation by Alison Pouliot on a crucial domain of the natural sciences that very few people have a thorough understanding of – fungi. Alison Pouliot, who is an independent photographer (the photos on this page are by her) and researcher, is our guest blogger for this edition. Her blog follows:

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Dirt isn’t usually well regarded.  It’s the stuff that we spit on, dig up, wage wars on, bury toxins in, suck resources from and sweep from sight.  Yet the subterranean world of dirt, of soil, often symbolic of darkness and inertia, is in fact a living and astonishingly diverse part of our biosphere.  It is the realm of dynamic webs of relationships of a most curious kingdom of organisms - a kingdom that is little known and largely overseen.  And that is the Kingdom of Fungi. 

Like dirt, the larger implications of fungi rarely enter our minds despite them underpinning every terrestrial ecosystem on the planet.  For some of us, fungi are a delectable culinary treat or the psychedelic culprits that inspired Lewis Carol’s enchanted stories.  Indeed both are fungi.  But mushrooms represent only the fungal fruit body or reproductive structure.  The actual fungal ‘body’ or mycelium is a labyrinthine matrix of tubular filaments called hyphae, hidden beneath the soil.

It is the underground workings of fungal mycelium that provide a vast communicative network, connecting landscapes and kingdoms of organisms, creating soils through the breakdown of minerals and organic matter, enabling plants to access nutrients, maintaining soil fertility, hydrology, climate and sustaining human civilization.

Despite the obvious importance of fungi, they’ve been almost entirely overlooked in global conservation.  Fungi rarely attract the attention of the supposedly more charismatic flora and fauna that dominate the world’s RED lists.  But the survival of flora and fauna is inseparably intertwined with fungi.  For example, over 95 per cent of plant species including those on RED lists rely on mutually beneficial symbioses formed with their subterranean fungal partners.  It seems a rather gross oversight that charismatic organisms are protected while their vital partners down in the dirt are forgotten.

The great challenge for scientists, conservationists and advocates of

fungi is finding innovative and inspiring ways to communicate their  importance, not just for the health of ecosystems, but also for humanity.

The true nature of charisma goes beyond attractiveness to include the exceptional and the extraordinary.  It is perhaps through highlighting these qualities in fungi that their significance could be promoted.  Science has informed us of the astonishing intricacies, complexities and importance of fungi but other disciplines such as arts and aesthetics could provide further conduits to communication, to reconnecting people with their inspirational aspects.  It is indeed challenging to visualise this vast underground network of connective fungal mycelium but the fruit bodies, through their remarkable diversity of forms, bizarre habits and evanescent beauty, could be key in igniting curiosity and advocacy. 

Finding ways to communicate the importance of fungi could not only improve the potential for their conservation but also foster biophilia for all of nature.  Fungi are a fabulous metaphor for the interconnectivity of our world; for the linking of systems, of kingdoms, of timescales, of humanity with nature.  Their potential to catalyse public understanding of science remains largely unexplored.

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We invite people to reflect on Alison’s post and join the conversation on expanding and extending public understanding of fungi.

Nano Futures

Tiny robots with cameras, scalpels, and sensory equipment are already being used by surgeons to unclog, excise, snip, tie, and mend diseased organs of the human body, going by an Associated Press report published worldwide this week, But now medical researchers say that even smaller nanobots that can freely roam around the body, fixing problems as they arise, are on their way.

The AP report quotes Dr Michael Argenziano of New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University’s Medical Center as saying “It won’t be very long before we have robots that are nanobots, meaning they will actually be inside the body without tethers.” In other words, unlike the surgical robots in use today, the nanobots will potentially be free agents that are not remotely connected to an anchor elsewhere.

This is clearly a revolutionary development and the report has been picked up by several science news sites such as Phys.org and has been the subject of intense debate and discussion on a number of social news sites as well (see e.g., Reddit). 

But as with possibly all radical developments in technology, the most significant challenge is to be able to anticipate and understand potential and unplanned consequences. How much public, or even scientific, understanding is there about the uses of nanotechnology, the science of the miniscule, in medicine or other fields? While it does open the doors to enhancing and even prolonging human life, could there be other consequences that are hard to imagine and therefore respond to? 

Science fiction is often something people go to for a handle on futuristic science and this tends to be more dystopic than utopic. We’ve just finished reading Michael Crichton’s last novel Micro in which nanobots, invisible to microscopes, can enter a person’s body and destroy the vital organs with such precision that even those conducting a post-mortem have no clue about the cause of death. This new novel, left unfinished by Crichton at the time of his death and completed by Richard Preston, has a feel for the world of nanoscience and the new frontiers it is reaching out to.

In the world of Micro, devious corporations, ostensibly manufacturing nanobots for medical uses, pillage the earth’s mineral and biological resources by bio-prospecting at a micro level. They even have a “tensor generator” that can shrink humans to miniscule sizes to get closer to parts of the world that humans can barely see. 

Nanotechnology is one of those new and emerging technologies that few people know enough about. And this is what makes public engagement with it very difficult. Among the institutions working on making public engagement on nanotechnology more meaningful is the Center for Nanotechnology in Society (CNS) at the Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, USA. 

One of us was in Tempe recently and got to see an innovative exhibition of art, sculpture, and narratives on the future at the ASU Art Museum called Emerge: Redesigning the Future that provides a glimpse into how people can visualise the future through a collaborative interaction between art and science, society and academy, the grassroots and the elite. The exhibition, on until mid-August, is an offshoot of a path-breaking workshop/seminar/meeting-of-minds get-together of “artists, engineers, bio-scientists, social scientists, storytellers and designers to build, draw, write and play with the future” organised by CNS in March this year. 

Such collaborative endeavours that allow us to envision and create scenarios that anticipate the uses and challenges of new and emerging technologies are perhaps one way of engaging with imagined futures.

Open access to Public Understanding of Science

This post is by the Public Understanding of Science editor-in-chief, Professor Martin Bauer, and managing editor, Dr Sue Howard.

The PCST-12 conference in Florence (17th-20th April 2012) raised the issue of open access, a hot topic at the plenary session celebrating 20 years of Public Understanding of Science, and beyond. The movement for open access is most pertinent in biomedical and natural science publishing, where pricing and profits are in a different league than in the social sciences. But journals like PUS nevertheless need to address this issue. Let us restate the position and contribute to the debate.

Sharing specialist knowledge and critical reflection is our objective and we need to find practical and cost effective ways to do this. At the moment, PUS is a subscription journal. Libraries and individuals have to pay to give access to readers. With the Public Library of Science (PLoS) model of 'open access', the cost is transferred to authors, who pay to publish with readers viewing the paper for free.

What we want to know is: what is the fairest system, bearing in mind the context of PUS?

Let us have a debate online - tweet us, comment, email - we are keen to have your input on whether our concerns about discrimination are irrelevant or empirically unfounded. Let's debate the following motion: PUS believes that paid for open access will discriminate against authors from the developing world.

The current position of PUS with regard to open access is as follows:

1. PUS is not against open access, the promotion of which we consider, in principle, a good idea. It is clearly not conducive to the distribution of scientific knowledge that publishers like Elsevier can reap 37% annual profit from publishing academic papers on research that has been funded by other sources (see Economist, April 14th 2012). We know that social science publishers like SAGE, the publishers of PUS, are not in this league.

2. In early 2010, PUS took a 'wait and see' position to evaluate the situation. We are anxious that open access might interfere with the long term strategy of PUS, which includes two things: a) to broaden its empirical and authorship intake across the world and b) to avoid privileging research with large grants. Scholarship is not the same thing as grantsmanship.

3. Our current position with our publishers is that we are not part of "Sage Choice", their partial open access scheme, where the author decides whether to pay $3000 to purchase open access. We do not want a two-tier system: open access for the rich and subscription access for everybody else. This position was reached after consulting the editorial board, other journal editors in our field and contributors. We consider temporary open access to promote certain papers. We are currently investigating whether this position stills holds with SAGE, who have ceded to requests from a small number of authors applying for open access.

4. We would immediately agree for an open access solution on the opt-in model for PUS if we gained a dedicated fund for the journal either by donations from charitable organisations like Wellcome Trust, or the Ford Foundation. Or we could increase the author contribution for open access from currently $3000 (£1600) to $4000 (£2130) from which we would lift $1000 (£533) into the fund. This would allow us to support 10-15 papers per year from non-funded research or cash-strapped sources.

5. We will make the argument with SAGE to reduce the level of pricing for opt-in Open Access, and to make this more affordable.

Past and the Future

The history of the editorship of the journal Public Understanding of Science was the focus of a special panel at the 2012 convention of the International Network on Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST) 2012 convention in Florence this week.

Our guest blogger Jane Gregory continues her earlier post with this report on a special session at the convention:

Past and present editors of the PUS – John Durant, Bruce Lewenstein, Edna Einsiedel and Martin Bauer came on stage in the main auditorium to talk about the 20 years of the journal. Suzanne de Cheveigne took the chair, and started the event by commenting on the row of green journals that looks good in her office. She noted how, among the plethora of media in which we do our work, journals remain important for our academic work.

John Durant of MIT spoke first, noting that the journal is old enough to have a history that follows trends in our field. He situated PUS research as a second or possibly third order subject, relating as it does not only to science and to society and their relationship, but also to media studies, communication studies and a number of branches of the social sciences, and then to the wide range of practices that sit under our umbrella. Durant argued that a field is healthiest when it retains and fosters close links between theory and practice.

Alongside the descriptive/analytical and evaluative studies published in PUS over the years, there have been important papers problematising the notion of PUS. These papers, John argued, are foundational. But the conception of the ‘problem’ has changed over the years, with the classic description being of an evolution from deficit to dialogue. John drew on the US situation to discuss a further ‘cultural model’ of science in which science emerges in scattered public places such as models, magazines, festivals, cafes, storytelling, stand-up, and new-wave science radio. John recognised the challenges of researching this diversity and stressed that this is one reason why PSCT as a field needs to hold research and practice together.

The next editor, and next at the podium, was Bruce Lewenstein of Cornell University. Lewenstein surveyed the models of PUS – or PEST, PCST or PLUS – and considered the precursor sites, such as the magazine Daedalus and the major science weeklies that have considered PUS issues since the 1940s. Lewenstein also considered the range of ‘sister’ journals such as Science Communication, as well as the parallel literature on science education, formal and informal. He brought the story up to date by considering the prospects of new media and assessing the scope for widening the range of forms of literature, at different speeds and reaching a broader and more diverse audiences, including policymakers and practitioners.   

Editor number 3, Edna Einsiedel of the University of Calgary, showed how during the lifetime of the PUS journal, many other journals have appeared covering various patches of our field. Einsiedel argued for more attention to specific publics, rather than the public in general, and also reminded us that alongside the ‘big’ technologies that attract most of the research money there are many mundane technologies that contribute just as much to the framing of everyday experience of science and technology.

The present editor Martin Bauer asked what a journal can contribute to the technoscientific project. The concerns about the science-society relationship have mobilised resources for actions, such as science communication events, and also for a ‘crew’ for this expedition: not just practitioners of science communication but also scrutineers and critics. The mass media play a crucial role here, which is why media studies are important. The journal, Bauer argued, provides a reflective forum which encourages critical thinking, records empirical results, and links to social analysis.

The journal is publishing around 70 papers a year and has a rejection rate of just over 60%. The space for publishing has grown as has the number of issues. Bauer’s goals for the journal in the coming years are to globalise the coverage, in terms of topics and issues, and to internationalise the authorship. He also is aiming to reduce the time to publication from 12 months to 6 months. Bauer thanked the authors of PUS for their continued commitment, as well as acknowledging the work of referees in the peer review process. The readers complete the process, carrying the results of others’ research into their research and teaching.

Discussion in the hall addressed the problems of embracing new media and getting the results of scholarship to places where it can make a difference, while at the same time meeting the academic criteria by which careers thrive or fail.  

Pouring out into a rare burst of sunshine, the conference then headed for a palace in the heart of old Florence, where delegates enjoyed Tuscan delicacies amid the frescoes and marble.  

Under the Florentine Sky

The International Network on Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST) began its 2012 convention in Florence, Italy, this week. The PCST is an important network of scientists working with communities, science journalists, academics, communication professionals working with science and technology institutions, and others involved with science and communication. 

Our guest blogger for this edition is Jane Gregory and here is her first despatch from Florence:

Florence is the perfect city for PCST. In Florence, layers of history lie in strata, some of them exposed and protected as heritage and setting high standards for one of our conference themes, the expression of beauty; and some of them neglected, decaying under the weight of subsequent development (to give it its positive spin, can we call it ‘innovation’?). Narrow streets designed for no more than a handcart are blocked by noisy cars, impeded further by the pedestrians who step off the pavement oblivious to everything except the distant voice on their mobile phone.  Aerials and belltowers bring their different geometries to the sky which, reluctant absentees may be cheered to note, have been relentlessly grey. Whenever a drop falls, entrepreneurs appear from every alley to sell umbrellas. Perhaps because of the rain, or perhaps because of its historical patronages, Florence appears as a private city: its riches are on the inside. In the conference, it is sometimes hard to look at the speakers or focus on one’s colleagues, when there is so much to be seen on the ceilings. 

In PCST our new ideas also get stuck in narrow well-trodden paths. It is not clear whether we retain a fond attachment for the works of the past, or whether we just temporarily forgot them, because we routinely revisit and recognise our old friends during these meetings. There is value in feeling ‘at home’ amid one’s residual culture. At the same time, PCST is about some of the most important problems on local and global scales in the present and in the future. So let’s look there.

On this first morning in one parallel session the notion of citizenship was problematised through various efforts to open up spaces in which it can emerge. Gwendolyn Blue from the University of Calgary, Canada, described the Canadian arm of a global public engagement on climate change in advance of a high-level conference. She identified a persistent dichotomy which associates scientists with facts and laypeople with values, and she argued that this is surely up for negotiation.  For the social contract between science and society to be renewed, the question must be asked of who has epistemic agency in society: who are the knowledge workers in these debates? In a democratic society, laypeople and scientists who aspire to scientific citizenship will have to challenge a system that tethers the public to scientific authority.

Padraig Murphy (Dublin City University, Ireland) commented on Gwendolyn’s global map of participation in engagement about climate change and pointed out that what constitutes ‘citizenship’ surely varies in such widely distributed parts of the world.  Someone who is locally an active or effective citizen may still feel ill-equipped or unwelcome in a global engagement – an event which would be, to some extent at least, vulnerable to the homogenising effect of even the best efforts to respect global diversity. 

In his own presentation, Murphy noted the many factors that frame engagement, and the ways in which these factors can divert it into unexpected outcomes. Events that become popular with children tend to assume a fun aspect and lose their politics; and the economic problems in Ireland mean many engagements about science are oriented towards positive economic outcomes on which everyone tends to agree, in the circumstances, organising the people behind a national agenda.  Murphy noted that as an Irishman and as a science communication specialist, he looks forward to the inevitable debate about the genetically modified potato.

Around the conference centre, sessions are under way in astronomy, on children, on art, music, evaluation, journalism, controversy and science shops. A fascinating session organised by PhD candidate Sebastian Olenyi from the University of Delft probed the concept of sustainability. With contributions from industry (Elise Kissling from BASF) and a lobby group (Nina Haase from WWF), among others, Olenyi positioned the word ‘sustainability’ as a boundary object at which groups with differing agendas can interact. He noted that the growth of the use of the word (as measured in Google books) implies that it will appear in every published sentence by 2100! 

The contributors also explained how sustainability works to align internal agendas in their organisations. The discussion also identified some problems with both the word and the concept: for one thing, its overuse makes it meaningless or unremarkable; but also it is held up as a gold standard which may not be achievable. The contributors suggested that there are times when the best we can do is a responsible solution to a particular problem, rather than a sustainable one.

 Aha! The sun came out! OK, it went in again. We will once again seek illumination indoors.