the Public Fears Science
In our last issue, we asked you to tell us why you thought the public fears science. Many thanks to our voters. Here are your randomly-ordered top ten responses, in your own words.
1. Science is seen as having much power to change people's lives, but most people understood it poorly. Would you be happy with someone changing your life without you understanding how or why?
2. It gets hard feigning knowing what "pharmacogenomics" is after a while at a cocktail party.
3. At a party, you are introduced to a stranger by the host, and they ask idly what you do. You tell them. You fail to observe your listener's telltale physiological signs. You continue by telling them about last week's experiment. You know, the one that will blow away the current paradigm that rules our understanding of cytokine networks in the immune system. You realize you are alone. Oh, there they are talking to the stockbroker over near the bar.
4. People often fear what they don't understand, and many scientists don't try to reach out to the general public (or, worse, they speak down to them). The public then views "scientists" as snobs who have a storehouse of knowledge that they keep private! And then, of course, there's that Godzilla affair.
5. Scientists are perceived as having greater mental powers than most people. They seem to have greater knowledge and better reasoning abilities. This makes them the modern equivalent of witches and warlocks, and we all know what happened to them.
6. The public fears scientists because we scientists are in fact hell-bent on taking over the world.
7. I don't think the public fears science. They're just jealous of our two-hour workday.
8. Scientists have to be mad to work so many hours for so little pay.
9. In movies, scientists have been portrayed as selfish, short-sighted, pointy-headed intellectuals who pursue pure science without regard for consequences. In sci-fi movies, the scientist always wants to save and investigate the murderous space creature, which then escapes and kills everybody. Or the scientist experiments with new drugs that turn people into killing machines for shadow governments. Scientists often are shown as causing humanity's problems, not solving them.
10. The gratuitous funky soundtrack in the background makes more sense with the maniacal laughing of an Evil Scientist than it does for a Good Scientist participating in peer review.
Julia Kuhl has done illustrations for the New Yorker and the New York Times among others. She now lives in Heidelberg, Germany, with her neurobiologist husband and is working on a comic book - a fulika atra (coot) version of Shakespeare's Hamlet.
