Search for tag: "scientists"

Interviewer: There are a lot of uncertainties in science and that's okay. We'll talk about why it's important to acknowledge that, up next on The Scope.

Announcer: Examining the latest research and telling you about the latest breakthroughs, "The Science and Research Show" is on The Scope.

Interviewer: I'm talking with Christie Aschwanden, lead science writer for FiveThirtyEight. Christie, there seems to be this insatiable appetite for science news, at least on the internet, which you think would be a good thing for science and scientists, but it turns out it's kind of a problem. What's going on here?

Christie: Yeah, I don't know that I would say that it's a problem that there's so much news. I mean, the problem is that we sort of have too much and so it's hard to sort through. But I think, you know, just the fact that there's science reporting isn't a problem in and of itself. You know, that's great. I like science. I'm glad that people are covering it. But I think the problem here is that the way that science is portrayed too often is in sort of a way where it's oversimplified and giving the public sort of a false notion about how it works.

Interviewer: So give me an example of that. How do headlines kind of flip-flop from week to week or month to month?

Christie: Sure. I think that, yeah, the sort of famous ones about coffee, "This week, coffee is good for you." Next week, it's bad for you. Those sorts of headlines are probably sort of the worst offenders here. But it's kind of this idea that gets put up there that science is this magic wand and that a study provides the final word. And here's the Truth, with a capital "T." And so this magic wand of science is eliminating the truth.

And then if another study comes along and overturns it, then it means the first one was terrible. And so it's kind of this dichotomous view where science is both this magic wand that yields truth, you know, everything that it touches. But then, on the other hand, the idea that, well, it's all sort of crap and anything that you're told now might be wrong. And therefore, the whole enterprise is sort of flawed.

Interviewer: So what exactly is the problem with that? I mean, as a savvy consumer of news, I might just assume that it's a little far-reaching to say that coffee prevents cancer, for example.

Christie: Right. I think you bring up a really good point and that is, I think that the public sort of intuitively knows that you can't do one study and then decide for a fact that cancer is healthy or not, that it's oftentimes more complicated than that. And I think the really important and fundamental thing to understand here is that science is sort of a process of uncertainty reduction. So no single study provides the final word. You can never be absolutely certain. But what you can do is take all of the evidence that you have in its totality and that will often yield a very good answer.

And so it's not that you know for sure that the answer is coffee is healthy or coffee is bad, but you're sort of looking at all of the studies. And so, for something like that where it's flip-flopping, the answer may be that, well, there's not a very strong effect. Or if it's there, it's not strong enough to be consistent so it's probably not something to worry about. And yeah, that could give you assurance, right?

Interviewer: So whose responsibility is it to do that? I mean, if I'm looking at the news every day, I'm certainly not going to get that long-term view. Who's going to put that out there? Or how should we be changing how we talk about science?

Christie: Yeah, I think some of it rests with journalists. It also rests with scientists as well, sort of anyone who's communicating about science. And that is the sort of, when we're talking about science, to really talk about it in the context of, "Okay, so here's this new study that we're going to write about, we're going to talk about right now." But instead of just ending there, then saying, "Okay, how does this fit with the other evidence? What does this, add? How is it different? Where does it rest in sort of all of the evidence put together? And what does it tell us? Given all that, what is sort of our over-reaching answer given all of that context?"

Some of it really goes to educating the public and trying to shape and change the way that they look at science so that they're not seeing it as the sort of black and white thing where something's either one way or another, but understanding that it's a process and that there are a lot of uncertainties along the way. But even in the face of those uncertainties, you can make decisions and you can look at the evidence that we have, but not expecting that any single study or any single piece of news will be the "be all and end all."

Interviewer: I think part of what you're saying is that science is very uncertain and that if you have a particular answer this week, that it may change in six months, depending on other factors that you include in your new study or kind of the base of knowledge, how that's changed over time. I mean, I think that's something that we all need to understand, right, that science changes and that's okay.

Christie: Yeah, that's right. And I think, yeah, this is particularly important right now. We're sort of in this age of denialism, or in a time where there are a lot of vested interests who really are seeking to exploit that uncertainty as a tool to sort of fan false doubts. And a good scientist is always skeptical. You always want to doubt things and be sure that you're thinking things through.

But what can happen is if the public thinks that science is very, very certain, and that any study sort of provides the last word and that's it and if it gets overturned, it's because science is a horribly flawed enterprise and researchers are terrible people who are just trying to make money, and all of these things, then they're really susceptible to these doubt-makers and these people who are exploiting legitimate uncertainties in many cases to really tarnish whole fields of science.

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Interviewer: A glimpse in Utah's storied history in the field of genetics. Up next on The Scope.

Announcer: Examining the latest research and telling you about the latest breakthroughs. The Science and Research show is on The Scope.

Interviewer: I'm talking with Dr. Ray Gesteland, emeritus professor of Human Genetics at The University of Utah. You know, something that is lore here at The University of Utah is this Alta meeting. Can you talk about what that meeting and why it was so important?

Dr. Gesteland: So I came in 1978 in August and I was busy setting up my lab when The Department of Biology had a department retreat up at Alta. And they had two guest speakers, David Botstein and Ron Davis and Marc Skolnick, who was here at the time, was also at that meeting. And there was a discussion about the possibility of using these DNA markers that are variable from person to person as a way to do a mapping of genes and humans.

Ray White, who was not at the meeting but was at The University of Massachusetts, had done experiments in fruit flies discovering these highly variable pieces of DNA and shown that you could really use these to localize where genes might be on the Drosophila genome. So the discussion that went on at Alta was could this same kind of technology be developed for humans. And at the end of that meeting Botstein and Davis, whom I had known well from earlier years, stopped by my lab as I was setting it up and they were just full of excitement and enthusiasm.

They got up to the whiteboard and were drawing pictures of how it would work and how many markers it would take to map human genes, but it was very clear that that was likely to be a real turning point. Then subsequently Ray White was involved in that conversation and the four of them published a monumental paper that really changed the way human genetics was done.

Interviewer: So the technology is restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP), what did that allow scientists to do that they couldn't do before?

Dr. Gesteland: Before doing human genetics was tough going. So what this allowed you to do was to link a particular piece of DNA to a region of a chromosome from a family that had a particular disease within that family. That would give you an address in a town for where that gene might be. It didn't know what street it was on or what house it might be in, but it gave you a town to begin to look among. So if you could then begin to sort through larger fragments of random pieces of DNA from humans and find a much larger piece that has that one variable piece you're interested in to get you closer and closer to the gene of interest that you're really trying to find. Closer to the street, closer to the house where that gene really resides.

Interviewer: And that's the objective in the end to find that gene, that culprit, of the disease.

Dr. Gesteland: That's right. So you could for the first time have a physical association of something you could have in your hand to a real gene and giving you access to what the mutation might be in the family to cause the disease. A monumental turning point.

Interviewer: Was it embraced by the scientific community or did people start using that right away or...

Dr. Gesteland: That really caught on very quickly. There are places all over the world that immediately launched into that general approach. So there was a big, almost a race, to put markers all over the human genome. One of the fundamental things that made that a more sensible approach world wide was an effort that Ray White and Jean-Marc Lalouel here arranged with the genetic research lab in Paris to settle on a set of some 50 families whose DNA would be made available to anybody interested in mapping human genes.

These so called families were normal families, not with any particular disease or phenotype, but all the people doing genetic mapping around the world agreed to use this set and that greatly simplified the worldwide understanding because everybody was working on the same material.

Interviewer: So what's an example of the useful information they were able to get from these set families?

Dr. Gesteland: One of the early ones was cystic fibrosis. A group here collected cystic fibrotic families and ran these highly variable sequences libraries against these families and found a connection to chromosome 7 and ultimately found the gene that's responsible for almost all cases of cystic fibrosis. So that was an early one. Neurofibromatosis, cancer, was a second one that came along quite quickly and then the list went on and on.

Announcer: Interesting. Informative. And all in the name of better health. This is The Scope Health Sciences Radio.

Lantz-Gefroh: The question of what harm does it do if scientists don't communicate, I think this is a really important question.

Announcer: These are the conversations happening inside health care that are going to transform health care. The Health Care Insider is on The Scope.

Interviewer: Valeri Lantz-Gefroh is the Improvisation Coordinator at the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University School of Journalism. The first question, what are some of the common problems that doctors and scientists have when it comes to communicating what it is they do?

Lantz-Gefroh: That scientists often don't make adjustments for the audience that they're talking to. They have so much information in their heads, and the focus is just getting that information out in a factual way, in an accurate way. That's important. We don't want to dumb down science. We don't want to make it something other than what it is. But every audience is different, and needs to hear that information in a way that makes sense to them. It has to be a two-way street.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Lantz-Gefroh: A lot of times communication is . . . Alan Alda calls this "lecture mode", when a scientist is so concerned about just getting it out there that they're stating everything that they know with no regard to the other. What we're trying to do is get scientists out of lecture mode and into conversation. That's a process that is learned through improv and through playing these games. The other thing that we're kind of leaving out that is hugely important to us is getting the scientists connected and engaged with the thing that they think is important. Everything about science is distancing the self, so that your emotional being doesn't influence the data. I mean, we don't want that to happen in science. But what we need to get back to in the way that we're communicating science is who that human being is that's going through that journey.

Interviewer: So really, it's kind of a cultural thing? The culture of science is that, that you remove yourself and you give the facts and figures, and you don't really put yourself into it. You're suggesting that maybe scientists should a little bit?

Lantz-Gefroh: I'm saying that when they communicate it's a different thing than when they're doing research.

Interviewer: Okay. I mentioned a story a little bit earlier. It seems to me that when I interview scientists they forget about that journey, and that's something that everybody loves to hear. "Here is the obstacle. Here I am, and this was the thing I was trying to accomplish. But man, I ran into this obstacle. But here's how I overcame it, and then there was this other obstacle."

Lantz-Gefroh: Yeah. There's nothing more exciting. I mean, the stories that these scientists have that they keep to themselves, this is what we need to be let into. There are different stories for different audiences that would make sense and resonate.

Interviewer: Do you have any final thoughts, or is there anything that I forgot, or anything that you just feel compelled to say?

Lantz-Gefroh: The question of what harm does it do if scientists don't communicate, I think this is a really important question. We have such profound misunderstanding of science, and so much on the Internet that it's just not factual. It's dangerous, I think, because we're being led to believe misinformation because there are passionate voices behind that misinformation. The issue of vaccinations . . .

Interviewer: I was just thinking that. How did you know?

Lantz-Gefroh: There is an example. I was raising my son, I had just had my son when this whole vaccine scare was kind of coming to the forefront of the public eye, and there was a lot of fear. I had many mothers talking to me about, "Don't vaccinate your kids," and showing me videos, and all of these other things, and it's a very scary idea. I went to my doctor, and I talked to the doctor, and I did vaccinate my kids. But there were many who didn't, and we have so many examples of that in health and in global warming. I mean, you name it, we have example after example of the public hearing from sources who really don't know.

Interviewer: And that are outstanding communicators.

Lantz-Gefroh: Exactly.

Interviewer: I mean, actresses and people that really know how to muster up that emotion. Then, we as a scientific community kind of respond in our very removed sort of way.

Lantz-Gefroh: Right, exactly. When faced with passion with no facts, or all the facts with no passion, we're always going to side with passion. It's just who we are as social beings. So it's really important for the people who know to step up to the plate and get these skills together so we can hear the information correctly.

Interviewer: So they can be the passionate communicators of truth and fact.

Lantz-Gefroh: Exactly. Because the reality is, the thing that I've come to learn in the last 5 years of working with scientists, I worked with probably 1,000 scientists in the last 5 years, they are passionate people.

Interviewer: They are. You're so right.

Lantz-Gefroh: This is a really, really engaged, charged, passionate group of human beings. If they could just bring all of that to the microphone, we could change the world I think.

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