Did just reading that first word either make you shudder a little because of memories of fourth grade science tests? Did it make your eyes start to glaze over, until you read the part about free money? If either of those is true for you, you’re in good company. If you hand most people an article on some science-y topic, they will either assume that they can’t understand it (because they “aren’t good at science”) or they will think “what does this have to do with me?” and put it aside.
So…a couple things: you are NOT “not good at science” (forgive the double negative). If anyone, especially a teacher, ever told you that (and particularly if you are a female beyond a certain age, it’s pretty likely someone did), they were wrong. NOBODY is inherently bad at science or scientific thinking, and variations in aptitude for science certainly aren’t determined by gender. Humans are born scientists, and you need look no further than a baby to prove that. Watch a baby for a bit. Put something in a baby’s hand. What happens? The first thing that will happen is that she will put in in her mouth. Why is that? The reason babies put everything in their mouths is because their sense of taste is their best and most reliable sensory mechanism. A baby’s world is pretty simple. If it tastes good, it’s good and if it tastes bad, it’s bad. In addition to being a way to experiment on their environments, that also serves a survival purpose—most poisons taste bitter and if a baby puts something bitter into his mouth, he will, almost inevitably, spit it out.
Unfortunately, we start trying to beat the experimental nature of children out of them, almost as soon as they start. In our homes, if a child picks up something and starts to put it in her mouth, someone will probably grab it and tell them “NO!”. We’re trying to protect them, but part of what they are learning is that investigating their world is a bad and dangerous thing. When kids get to school age (and this is changing, as our understanding of learning and teaching methods improve), we often force them into unnatural roles for the sake of classroom order and of our chosen lessons. If you were to pick two characteristics that are unnatural for a seven year-old kid, those characteristics might be “quiet” and “still”. When thinking about an elementary school classroom in the 50’s or 60’s or before, it is amazing to most modern educators that anyone ever learned anything. The point of all this is that humans are BORN scientists—all of us—and that only changes when things happen to convince us that we aren’t.
As for the “what does this have to do with me?” question—the answer may be “a lot” or it may be “maybe nothing”. The thing is, you often can’t tell if it is directly important to you and your life, or not. Think of it from this perspective: you (and it doesn’t matter whether you are a coal miner or a neurosurgeon, living in a fully automated house or a studio apartment) are almost totally dependent on science and technology every second of every day. The clock that wakes you up, the food you eat, the water that comes from your tap, the clothes you wear, the gas in your car, the traffic signals, the roads, the electricity that charges your cell phone, the medicine that keeps you alive, the research that is going on in a laboratory in Italy that may save the eyesight of your grandchild, the electronic records that make your ATM card work—the list is, literally, almost endless. You are, personally, and we are, as a society, completely dependent on science and technology and most of us understand almost none of it. If that doesn’t bother you, it should. We all agree that literacy—being able to read and write–is a good thing, even a necessary thing, in our world today. But what of scientific literacy? Shouldn’t everyone have at least a basic understanding of the science and technology that shapes their lives and the society in which we live? Everyone doesn’t need to be a scientist, but everyone needs to understand just enough Chemistry, enough Biology, enough Physics, enough Information Technology, enough Biomedicine to be able to understand what’s happening around them, and even more importantly, to understand when someone is trying to tell them things that are not true. For all of human history, our science and technology, however primitive it might have been at the time, had the power to change the way we lived—to make our work or our lives easier or better. I would submit that our relationship with science changed, in a very fundamental way, on July 16, 1945. On that day, science took on a whole new level of importance in human society. On that day, science went from being a force that impacted (usually for the better) the way we lived, to being a force that could end life on Earth. July 16, 1945 was the day of the Trinity test, when the first atomic bomb was detonated. That was 1945. It took millions of years of existence for our science to get to that point, but, I would submit, there have been in the less than 80 years since then, at least three or four other scientific advances that potentially have that same power—the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953, leading to the field of genetic engineering; the field of artificial intelligence, grounded in the work of Alan Turing and others in the 50’s and 60’s; and possibly the potential of stem cells in biomedicine, which started in the 50’s but really took off in 1998 with the first isolation of human embryonic stem cells. It is the responsibility of all of us to understand enough science that we can understand changes like these, and to participate in the discussion about how we are going to use our scientific prowess. Because if we do not determine how to control where our science is going, it is, for certain, going to control us.
So, to help further that goal of raising the level of scientific literacy (and lessening the fear of science) I’m going to write a series of articles on various topics in science. It might be something from the news, or it might just be about some topic of general scientific interest. I’ll try to make sure it never gets scary or boring, and I’ll try to write it so everyone can understand it, no matter what your educational background might be. If you choose to read it, I promise that you will come away with a little bit better understanding of the world you live in—a little step on the road to scientific literacy. I’m shooting for “Wow! I never knew that! Cool! I need to go learn some more about that!” I’ll settle for “Hum. How about that?”
If there is anything, in particular, that you’d like to read about in future articles, please go to the “Contact Us” page and I’ll try to address your topic..
By the way, there is no free money. I just put that in so you would keep reading.