Adam Smith: Good afternoon everybody, welcome.
My name is Adam Smith and it’s my great pleasure
to be the moderator for this afternoon’s panel discussion on the question of 'Why communicate'.
Now that might seem an odd question.
Isn’t it obvious why we should communicate?
We’re all here.
That’s what we’re doing this week.
We’ve spent the last few days communicating.
But perhaps 'why communicate' is exactly the question we should be asking.
We all spend so much time communicating.
How much time do we actually think about, spend thinking about what we’re doing.
And in that question, ‘why communicate’, there are other questions.
There’s, what are we communicating?
Who are we communicating with?
And how are we doing it?
And the word 'communicate' indicates both the exchange of information by directional flow of information
- such as occurs between scientists at this meeting –
and also the imparting of information, the unidirectional flow of information such as scientists talking to the public.
Now are those 2 things separate, should we think of those types of communications separately
or are they just part of one continuum?
And to consider questions like that we have assembled a really lovely panel.
We have 3 Nobel laureates who by now are well known to you - all Nobel laureates in chemistry.
We have Harry Kroto, one of the 1996 laureates for his work on carbon C60.
We have Ada Yonath, one of the 2009 laureates for her work on the ribosome.
And we have a new laureate, Brian Kobilka, one of last year’s laureates for his work on GPCRs.
We were going to have a fourth laureate, Wally Gilbert but he unfortunately had to leave the meeting early.
Amongst those 3 laureates we have quite different personalities.
We have Harry who, as you will all know by now, is something of a professional communicator.
We have Brian who until a certain date last October probably preferred to stay off the stage,
but now has little choice but to be on it.
We have Ada, well I’ll let you make your own mind up about which side of the fence Ada is on.
(laughter).
I think it will work, it will work.
We’re also very privileged to have 2 non-laureates on the panel.
We have Beatrice Lugger who is Deputy Director of the Institute for Scientific Communication at the University of Karlsruhe.
And she is also the coordinator of the Lindau Nobel online community here.
And we have Simon Engelke, who is a second year’s material student, material science student at the university of Maastricht,
and whose passion for communication has lead him to launch several entrepreneurial ventures already even though he’s only 22.
And I’m sure he’s going to tell us something about some of those things during the discussion.
Now the way this panel will work is that I’ll have some conversation
with the panel and then at various times during the afternoon open it up for questions from the floor.
And I’ll do that several times.
And the idea is to give at least half the time, more than half the time to your questions to the panellists.
The lights are quite bright so when you want to ask a question you just need to hold your hand up.
And especially if you’re in the gallery, hold it up and kind of wave it about so we can see you.
And then I’ll point to you and a microphone will find you.
It’s a pretty broad topic, ‘Why Communicate’.
And so there’s a lot to ask.
But I’d be grateful if questions could be broadly within that subject and not kind of way off in other directions.
And I thought we might try and break the discussion into 2 parts.
Starting with the idea of sharing information between scientists.
And then moving towards the second part of our panel discussion, towards the idea of talking to other audiences,
namely the public.
But I suspect the 2 can’t really be separated.
To start things off I thought I might ask you, Ada,
about what do you think the value of a week such as this is in terms of communication?
And how important it is for the young scientist development to be part of this sort of communication?
Ada Yonath: It’s very difficult to answer.
The young people can tell you how important it was for them.
For me it’s really difficult.
I meet them, I sometimes have enough time to answer their questions - I hardly have time to give autographs.
But I think that whatever happens, if I have time or not, they can be here and absorb what’s going on in science.
How science is done.
What are the scientists talking between them and how we can talk to others?
So I think that this week is important for the young people.
Am I right?
(Applause).
Adam Smith: But if you look back to your own time as a young scientist: I guess there’s always a question,
how much time should you spend concentrating on your own piece of science?
And how much time should you spend talking to people from all other disciplines and getting all sorts of other inputs?
Difficult to answer also but is there an answer?
Ada Yonath: That’s easier for me.
Because you can see from my hair I am not the youngest here.
And when I was a young scientist there were no Lindau’s for me.
There were even not meetings.
The students had to work or maybe even more than that.
And we could meet guests, visitors.
And I was lucky being in the Weizmann Institute I met quite a lot of guests from everywhere in the world.
But not something like this, a real meeting that we can see and interact and go and eat together and get back with ideas.
Actually in my particular case, one specific lecture that I heard when I was a student paved the way for me
for what I wanted to do in the future.
So this was... at the time there were hardly any structure supporting.
And Sir John Kendall came to Israel and gave a lecture about haemoglobin - now it looks like almost an ancient work.
He even showed that the porphyrin ring is not exactly straight as it was written in the books and he explained how he knows it.
And it opened a whole world for me - not about haemoglobin only but about how much we can understand in life science
by knowing structures.
And that’s why I went on to do structures.
Adam Smith: Thank you.
Harry.
(laughter).
Harry Kroto: What do you want to know?
Adam Smith: Well we know you value communication greatly but have you... the same question basically:
How important do you think it is to the young scientist in particular to be involved in this sort of interdisciplinary meeting?
Harry Kroto: Well I think I come here because I think a significant percentage of the people here
are going to end up in positions of reasonability.
And I feel a burden of responsibility to represent some of the concerns of many of my scientific colleagues about the future,
about the mess that we’ve left for them to sort of clear up.
I think there are concerns, and I think not enough of us are addressing these.
So I come here and I don’t usually talk about my science - which I’d like to do.
But I often address issues which...
about taking a stand.
And that was part of my talk today.
And I think it will be very important in the future for young people like this to think about this very carefully.
And perhaps be somewhat brave about sort of addressing their concerns.
And recognising that they’re going to have to fight quite hard for the things that they feel are responsible behaviour.
I think there are just too few people taking a stand at the present time.
And I think...
you know we see drones, we see this issue with Snowden and interference in people’s private communications.
And I find...
it’s very strange to me that in Britain and America they don’t realise that this is really an anti-democratic issue with the CIA.
And that’s the sort of thing.
And I want them to think very carefully about the world that they’re inheriting.
Adam Smith: And you think it’s important for, in particular, the young scientist who is just busy starting out on their career,
making their name, getting the right numbers of papers in their own disciplines?
Harry Kroto: Yes.
Adam Smith: To be thinking about these things at the same time?
Harry Kroto: Absolutely.
I mean I think science is a way of thinking and not just addressing it to their research work,
but also to all aspects of intellectual environment.
I mean I think scientists like Joseph Rotblat - I was a great friend of his and I’m a great admirer.
He really spent his whole life trying to fight against the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
And that’s why he got the Nobel Peace Prize.
He’s a scientist who decided that was what he was going to do.
But he was a very, an outstanding scientist as well.
And I think you need to marry those 2 together.
Because I think scientists are different from everybody else.
For them the primary attitude is using evidence to decide what is true.
And when there are issues that perhaps don’t have evidence, they will still use rational thought to address them.
So I think...
that’s what I think...
and scientists are only 1% or less than 2% of the community, so I want to alert them to realise that they’re rather special.
But they will have friends on Mars whereas a lot of people won’t have friends on Mars.
Adam Smith: Thank you.
Brian, do you think there’s a danger of getting distracted by this sort of activity?
Brian Kobilka: I think that’s clearly a possibility for some people.
When I think back just starting out, it was a time where I think we were still writing papers with typewriters.
And communication was much more difficult, even over the phone.
Making a long distance call across the country was something we had to do in a very short period of time.
We communicated by letters.
And now it’s amazing how much information we can transmit over a very short period of time.
So I think it may be distracting for some people, just the process of communication.
And yes, I believe it could be.
Adam Smith: Do you think that too much scientific information can also be distracting?
Not, if you like, the process of the communication but the idea that you're getting all this interdisciplinary input –
You know, what’s going on in this field and field and this field, or you're getting a taste of it.
And it all seems attractive and you want to know about it all.
But frankly again you’ve got, you know you’ve got your own work to do.
Brian Kobilka: Well it’s definitely an advantage to be able to see what’s going on in other fields.
And I think it helps everybody to some extent improve or develop new approaches to their own research.
However, it can also prevent you from focusing on what you really need to do to accomplish your research.
Adam Smith: Thank you.
Beatrice you’re in part responsible for trying to keep the meeting going in other ways other than face-to-face communication.
The whole set of tools around the meeting, which enable people to talk to each other in other ways during the week,
and also talk to each other before and after the week.
Tell us a little bit about how you think those enhance the communication experience here.
Beatrice Lugger: Well, first of all I would really like to thank all these people here,
the young researchers that interacted with us now the last days.
So many bloggers, so many of you tried blogging the first time than they never did before.
And this was really amazing.
I’m proud of this movement that happens now, which shows me that you dare to interact.
And that you dare to put a step into the online media and get a voice there.
Because communication means that someone starts it.
And that someone shows up and is present.
And as you started to blog or to tweet with us, you are present.
Someone can try to start a dialogue with you.
And I think this dialogue aspect is a really changing way for our future.
Because in the former times communications were more directed just in one way.
The journalist has written something and it was sent out and that was the end of the story.
Now we have this dialogue format.
And as you did it the whole week long face-to-face, you also did it now and started,
quite a lot of you started to do that also using the online tools.
And this means that we can keep the dialogue further on also after a meeting.
That you can start now with your friendships to interact further on.
And this makes me pretty happy that I saw this new movement in the last years here.
Adam Smith: Thank you.
Simon, you have a kind of a new world attitude to communication.
You use online tools to make connections whenever you need to know anybody.
And I guess that is pretty different from the world that Brian was describing.
Where basically you’ve found that they’ve enabled you to make multiple connections.
Tell us a little bit about one of the ways you’ve done that.
Simon Engelke: There are different things and different ways how you can interact with people.
And I realise as a really young researcher I am lacking a lot of knowledge.
I want to explore, I want to get more insights.
And so what I started, and I really try to connect with people directly.
And for example something we did the last 3 or 4 weeks, we tried to build a fuel cell ourselves as a group of students.
We had this big dream, let’s build a fuel cell in 3 weeks and see how it goes.
And of course that’s a really challenging task.
So for example what I did, I contacted some researchers I already talked to before in Berlin,
if I could fly by and talk to them, get maybe some materials from them.
They were absolutely open for that.
Then I thought, okay but we’re still needing knowledge.
So we went to another place, to another big research centre with a group of students.
They gave us a tour.
And then we had a lot of material and we could build a lot.
And everyone was really happy.
But then for example we still needed some hydrogen, we still needed some materials and our own labs safety didn’t work out.
So what we did, we went directly to some companies and asked them, could we use your labs?
And they said yes.
And I was really surprised by that, honestly.
So I think for me the success in the last weeks and years, I realised if you contact people directly and you can motivate them,
you can show your own passion, people are really helping you.
And that can also be people you have never talked to before.
You have no idea in the beginning even who they are.
But if you can share your passion, people are really up for helping.
Adam Smith: Thank you.
We’re painting a very rosy picture of the scientific world where everybody talks to each other,
shares information and is nice to each other.
And kind of...
it’s a lovely open vision.
Ada, is that a true reflection of how science works?
Are we all nice to each other?
Ada Yonath: In principle yes - at least I think that I am nice to everybody.
But in my opinion - maybe it’s not the most competitive opinion - but in my opinion every piece of information
that is created in a lab or discovered in a lab or discovered by scientists: it is being added to the knowledge of the world.
It is a fantastic thing.
This is what we have to do.
It doesn’t matter who finds this piece of information.
It doesn’t matter how it comes.
It is a piece of information that is enlarging, increasing the knowledge.
Now this is correct.
But if we were angels it could have even worked like this.
We are human beings and human beings want to be first, and more important, and get some benefits from what they added to science.
So sometimes there is competition - I think you all know this, I don’t have to say it.
But competition can be also not only destructive, it can be also influencing higher and higher achievements,
better achievements, more dedication.
Not only trying to be best and first, but getting new ideas by just having somebody that thinks differently.
And this is in my opinion the way science works.
Sometimes we share opinions.
Sometimes we share ideas.
Sometimes we share materials.
Sometimes we share procedures.
Sometimes we publish it and somebody else takes advantage of it.
Sometimes there is a little bit of competition, so what.
We are all just human beings.
And this may also be functional for us.
Adam Smith: Brian, let me just ask you,
is there a rule that you can apply about when you should share information and when you should keep it to yourself.
(laughter).
Brian Kobilka: I think the people in my lab would say that we’re pretty good about sharing information.
Even things that, you know, sharing things we haven’t published.
And when we present, when I present at meetings it’s very often unpublished work.
I think that’s important.
It’s partly selfish because I get feedback from the people in the audience.
You know they criticise or they comment that they like this or that.
So I mean, I think it’s important.
Where I find communication distracting, and it’s maybe my own personal problem,
is that just the volume of email is something I have to content with every day.
And it’s getting progressively worse.
And I used to like waking up in the morning and not even worrying about getting regular mail.
It was just...
I spent the whole day in the lab and I didn’t have to answer any emails.
So that’s part of, I think there are good and bad things.
But it has become...
and I would imagine if people not only have emails to answer but blogs to write and comment on, a huge amount of,
or a very large fraction of their time could be spent at a keyboard rather than necessarily thinking about and doing experiments.
Adam Smith: Okay, we’ve opened up a few topics already.
May I now go to the audience and see if anyone has any questions.
I see one straight ahead of me.
There’s a microphone coming.
Question: Hi.
I come from the United Stated where an alarmingly high proportion of people don’t believe in evolution
and don’t believe in climate change.
And I want to put this question diplomatically: Are scientists doing a good enough job of communicating science?
Adam Smith: That’s a marvellous question.
Do you mind if we hold on to that question and come back to it in the second part of the debate?
Because at the moment we’re still very much I think on...
at least I’m trying to steer it towards the idea of scientists exchanging information with each other.
And that public facing question I think is at the heart of what we’re going to talk about in the second part of the debate.
Question: Okay great.
Thank you.
Sorry.
Adam Smith: No, no, no, thank you.
I’m sorry to be, to close down a question but we’ll come back to it.
Yes there in the middle at the back, please.
Question: Hi, my name is Christine and I’m from Canada, from Toronto.
And so I have a question about in terms of when we read the literature as young researchers,
we typically find that the authors describe their results in a way
that always suggest that everything was very successful and very positive.
And this is often due to the fact that we’re limited by the amount of space in a short communication for example.
Do you think it’s equally important to communicate negative results?
Or the pathways that didn’t work, for example?
Because surely enough many scientists around the world are probably doing the same things.
Trying to discover things and are often running into the same problems.
Should we have a journal of reactions that don’t work or things that we shouldn’t do?
Would that help us speed up our process?
Adam Smith: Beatrice wants to address that and so does Ada.
Beatrice first.
Beatrice Lugger: Thank you.
There already exists a journal of negative results, so to say.
You can post your articles.
You can send them there, it’s an online journal.
And there is definitely a debate about this going online.
And I don’t know whether you are aware of this.
There was just recently, half a year ago, by a twitter hash tag.
The scientists shared how they really did it.
And what they wrote in the article, in the paper that it was published, and how it really worked
and why they decided this way for it to be published.
And I think that these things make science a little bit, how to say, it’s not so heavy anymore.
You can talk in a bit more open way.
And I think that's...
these are new options that we have.
Adam Smith: Thank you.
Ada.
Ada Yonath: First I completely agree with the question, with the answer to the question.
I think that what we do in the lab is of importance, no matter where it took us.
If it took us to the result or the discoveries - maybe more important than those experiments that did not.
But also the experiments that did not are important.
And I want to give 2 examples.
One: ours.
After about 2 years that we talked about,
we have crystals of ribosomes - nobody, not nobody but most of the people did not believe.
One of my colleagues told me, why don’t you publish exactly what you are doing?
And then maybe people will be more convinced or will come with ideas how to make the crystals better and so on.
So I worked.
I think I worked a year and a half, almost 2 years to write this paper.
And it had all types of ways until I was more or less happy with it.
Nobody wanted to publish it.
This is a very big problem with the publishers.
Then we found some journal that was struggling and they thought maybe one more paper will be better.
Published it.
I’m talking now about 1982, before internet and before this.
Within 10 days 100 copies of preprints were taken.
It means the interest of the scientists was much larger than the interest of the publishers to publish it.
And I think we can talk to the publisher or take your idea of having it online.
But experiments that - of course not every experiment: I dropped the test tube, it didn’t work, this is of no importance - but:
I had an idea, I mixed this, I mixed that and it didn’t work.
I think this is of importance.
And now I want to tell you something that maybe you don’t know because you are so young.
About 50 years ago there was a journal that was called The Journal of Irreproducible Results.
(laughter).
JIR, that was published I think 4 times a year in Israel.
And it died because I think they didn’t have enough money to continue.
But I found this journal very, very helpful.
And hopefully we can come back to this type of sharing - also what didn’t work, not only what worked.
And maybe sometimes if it didn’t work, it can take us to another way which is going to work.
Adam Smith: Thank you.
NATURE incidentally has been having quite an editorial correspondence about irreproducible results,
but on a totally different level.
But that’s just papers that do get published but then nobody else can repeat.
(laughter).
Ada Yonath: This was not my intention.
My intention was: we try to make an experiment.
We thought there will be flames and instead there was a flood.
Something like that.
Adam Smith: Harry.
Harry Kroto: I remember when I started research, I was speaking to a colleague, a post doc,
a fantastically brilliant chap in his science.
And I said, you know 4 out of 5 experiments that I do, I don’t know, I’m going to go into this area, they don’t work.
He said that’s very good.
And so the problem is if you publish all the work that doesn’t work you’ll have 5 times as many journals as we already have.
And so that would be a problem.
But I think what may exacerbate it is the breadth now.
When I started I was in a particular field.
And we had conferences which were quite close and we all knew each other within that field.
And that was where we communicated on the issues that weren’t working.
And I think now because there’s many, many more people doing science and many cross disciplinary issues involved,
it’s much more difficult to actually communicate to all the people that may be looking at that particular problem.
But when I started in which was microwave spectroscopy,
E. B. Wilson who was an absolutely great, delightful guy had what was called Wilson’s Tables.
So all the microwave spectroscopists, they would send...
every year they would send up data on the sort of problems that they were looking at.
And to my knowledge nobody stepped on anybody’s toes.
But I’ve gone out of that field now.
And I don’t see the level of, what’s the word, ethical behaviour
- not that scientists aren’t ethical –
but that was a very good thing.
Because E. B. Wilson’s attitude was, there’s no point in people duplicating the research.
And so this was in there and then there would be conferences.
And you would talk to other people and find out what was going wrong.
Adam Smith: Thank you.
More questions.
Question: My name is Adrian.
I’m from Australia.
So I’m quite interested by the concept of trying to communicate with your competitors directly to then collaborate.
I think there’s a really great example of a mathematician from Cambridge, I can’t remember his name,
but he posted online that he wanted to try and solve a problem.
And said he would post updates with his progress.
And pretty soon all of the other eminent scientists, they realised this was going on and they tuned in.
And they started adding to the discussion as well.
And within about a week he had solved the original problem, which he’d been trying to solve for months.
Not just that.
He’d also solved a number of other ones.
And then they all published a paper together with their results.
And it was very, very quick, within about a month.
I’m sure the people on the stage know the mathematician.
So my point is, does science need a massive change to promote collaboration between direct competitors?
Obviously we have very good collaboration between people who can assist us with our individual work in different ways.
But with the direct people that compete against you,
you obviously publish and we have a very progressive way of communicating together.
Adam Smith: Yes indeed.
We’ve got 2 Nobel laureates on the panel who have been in long
- I was going to use the word fights, I don’t mean that –
competitions with other groups to get to the end point.
And let’s start with them.
Brian, you were in direct competition for high-resolution structure of GPCR, linked to the G protein.
Would it have...
do you agree with that view of how things might change?
Brian Kobilka: I agree that it could definitely facilitate progress.
And I think in my case I have an example where I was really inexperienced
and didn’t know much about approaches to crystallise, crystallise proteins in general.
And one of my competitors, Gebhard Schertler, had more experience in actually the crystallography and crystallisation methods.
We were interacting quite often over the later part of the 1990’s and 2000, and we continued to be friendly competitors.
And eventually, we ended up getting together and solving a problem that we both came at from different directions.
So it’s definitely worked.
But I still think people are a bit afraid to give too much away, because it’s a very competitive business.
So it would be great if it works, but it requires everybody to play fair.
Adam Smith: Do you think such a fundamental shift as was suggested could be achieved, is desired?
Brian Kobilka: I think it depends on the personalities involved.
And I really think scientists are a very diverse group, just as are any group of people.
So I’m not sure that it would always work.
I think there would be people who might be taken advantage of.
But I think in general it would be a good thing.
And I think science would move forward faster.
Adam Smith: Ada did you want to speak to that?
Ada Yonath: Why do you think I had competitors?
(laughter).
Adam Smith: You’re a lamb, yes.
Ada Yonath: So about over 15 years I was called the crazy, the dreamer, the fantasist, the village fool, the ... you name it.
And people sometimes ask me why did I start this project.
I told them that I had a bicycle accident and afterwards a brain concussion and they say this explains.
(laughter).
And I was really, really laughed at by the world.
I think that they had good reasons not to be able to follow our slow but progress.
After about 15 years we were able to show the feasibility, to demonstrate the feasibility.
We published everything.
It worked or didn’t work.
We published.
I just told you earlier and we did.
And one of the prominent scientists in the world said, why did you publish all this, we could repeat it?
You know I almost kissed him because I was not anymore the liar and the fantasist.
Somebody could repeat it.
For me it was very good.
Actually, this group started it, started to go on the same waggon and some others.
They used our procedures, but they also had their own ideas.
And for us it was fertilising.
I’m not sure that without this we wouldn’t get to where we were.
But it didn’t disturb, the opposite: it pushed us - not fully but a lot.
But one thing that did happen to us which was...
maybe it’s an anecdote that was very important for us.
Saying 'ribosomes' when I went to meetings that were not on ribosomes.
And saying ribosomes in Israel, what is that, what are those?
One of our competitors was a much better PR person.
He really called CNN and New York Times and all this great media and told them,
the world will change when we solve the structure of the ribosome.
All of a sudden I became important.
I was in CNN, indirectly, thank you.
Adam Smith: Thank you.
Simon you wanted to talk about this fundamental shift.
Simon Engelke: I think that’s our time now, that collaboration is so much easier.
You can contact everyone on the planet as long as you can find them somewhere online.
So I think there’s this one really great opportunity we have here.
And I think a lot of examples where it was really beneficial when people worked together,
like the competing groups kind of work together.
And what I think personally is so amazing about science is that it’s a group of people who want to create something new.
They want to find out something new.
And if you have this idea of progress, if you believe in progress as a scientist and you want to get further,
I think then it’s the way to go, to share and to work with others, because then you can enhance that.
So I think you have to decide for yourself if you want.
If you have this goal of getting the fastest and the best somewhere, then you say,
okay I work together with other people, because that’s the way to go.
If you have more perspectives, you have I think faster progress.
Adam Smith: Thank you very much.
Thank you.
So many questions.
Yes please, here.
Can we have the microphone here?
Okay, yes, great.
Question: Hi I’m A.J. from Harvard University.
And my question is, we’ve talked about how we communicate science through publications,
and this spirit of sharing and collaboration.
But one of the other barriers to publications is access.
And many times, even at Harvard, on a daily basis I run into an article that looks interesting.
I click on it to access and it’s behind a pay wall.
I can’t access it, even with my own university’s access.
And I was wondering if you could comment on how that may have changed throughout science,
when you’ve been through your careers.
Has it gotten more expensive?
Has it gotten harder to access journals?
And what role is there for open access?
Adam Smith: Beatrice do you want to go first and then Brian?
Beatrice Lugger: You named it.
We have this great movement to open access.
And more and more journals are going this way.
Even the established ones, editors-in-chief say that on the long run they also will become open access more or less.
And you get really very good access today to lots of papers.
And if not directly then there are other ways to go there.
Or you can read lots of literature on other ways.
Such places as Mendeley which share a lot of literature and give you also recommendations for other articles
which have been recently published in your field or site you like and so on.
There is a really huge movement only focusing on this sharing of literature, sharing of knowledge.
This is the future definitely, this won't stop, I think.
Adam Smith: Brian.
Brian Kobilka: I think pretty much in the future we’re going to be, even if we don’t want to,
we’re going to be required to by funding agencies, we must make things available.
And I think it’s great that that happens.
It’s now I guess within a year, but soon I think that we might even move it up to something like 6 months after publication.
So you have to realise that things are much more available now than they were 5 or 10 years ago for sure,
where you actually had to go to a library and photocopy something.
So this is, it’s still wonderful the world you’re living in in terms of availability of these publications.
Adam Smith: Where does the responsibility lie for pushing more to get access to a wider public, a wider public as scientists.
Brian Kobilka: Well, I’m not exactly sure how to answer that but I think the funding agencies say this has to be made available.
Otherwise it was the journals that would protect it for financial reasons I guess.
Adam Smith: But does the responsibility lie with the scientists themselves to insist on publishing only in places where...
which offer open access?
Brian Kobilka: I’m not sure it’s their responsibility but I think it’s certainly their right to do so.
And I would think that they would want to, everybody wants to have their research available.
So I don’t see any disincentive for the scientist.
Ada Yonath: Open access is very important.
We all want to know what everybody else does.
And the publishers are suffering because of it, or maybe suffer because of it, because they want to maximise their profit.
So even the open access now makes the scientist pay.
Somebody pays, either the reader or the writer.
And the payment is not negligible, not every type of funding allows that.
So I think that there is a problem and we have to think about, maybe your way, to communicate between us:
bypassing the financial problems of the publishers from one side and of the granters from the other side.
But in my opinion it’s very, very important.
Adam Smith: Harry did you want to speak on this?
Harry Kroto: Well I think we’re all facing a big change in the publishing of papers.
And I now, if I see they are charging $36 just to look at a paper, I don’t do it.
And I try to find some other way of finding it.
I think I have for many, many years been very disturbed about the way that scientific publishers just assume
they can take the copyright of our work, all the hard work that we put into it.
It’s something that we’ve gradually over many years, 50/60 years, got into.
And I think if you look at the cost of all the research that’s been carried out - it’s phenomenal.
It's something like, I don’t know, $30,000 per paper, some phenomenal amount of money.
The publishers just now assume that they have the right to charge $36 10 years later.
And I think that has to change.
And I think the open access infrastructure on the internet, it will change it in time.
You know there are some disadvantages and advantages, but it has worried me for a very long time.
But I think now there’s a very different structure in publishing than there was when I started.
And I think if I face it I would go for open access, very much so.
Adam Smith: Thank you.
So the last word to you, last quick word to you.
Simon Engelke: To answer the question, who should push for it?
I think that’s the people who want to use it.
So as a young scientist you don’t want to pay.
And if you realise that, you should find a way how you can publish your own results in a cheap way
so that other people can access it for free.
For example recently I just tried it out to found my own journal, which is called International Journal of Energy Storage.
I put this online and I got a lot of replies already, although we just have 2 drafts online now.
Then we figured out, ok but there are thousands of journals, so we are just one of them.
But lots of them they disappear after a short time.
Because a little journal that doesn’t have the time or the people behind it or doesn’t have the time or the money anymore,
they just shut down the website.
So the knowledge is gone.
So I started something as well which is called the Open Access Journal Archive,
where we start now to get all the other open access journals to send their submissions and their articles to us,
so we can save them forever.
That’s just a prototype, we just sat together some students.
And I think, I hope some other will jump on it.
But I think what is the key of it is that you push it.
As long as you bring it further, you progress it and you do your own thing, the big journals will jump on it as well.
Adam Smith: I thought something that was interesting about your journal launch was
that you launched a journal on your own, on the web.
And then publishers started expressing interest in it.
Simon Engelke: Yes.
Adam Smith: So you immediately got something that became more solid than you had originally intended.
Simon Engelke: We directly got submissions from professors, for example in there we got some,
and then a major other publisher asked one of our students who is now also in second year to co-author a book on nanomaterials.
I was quite surprised by this because it just brought its own review.
But it’s amazing.
I think you know you are so present if you are online, because nobody will go to the library anymore to get the journal.
You go online and as long as you are present there and you do good stuff other people like, you will get found.
And I think that’s really the future that things will be accessible, and as well for free.
Adam Smith: I think that co-authoring thing, that raises a whole different set of worries about publishing.
But we won’t go there for now.
Harry Kroto: Something that happened to me with regard to publishing, which really infuriated me.
I wrote a book, one book, and had the copyright and I gave the copyright to Dover Publications,
because I wanted this book to be very inexpensive, a few dollars, $7 or $8.
I mean I didn’t care about getting in the money.
But in fact what happened a few years ago was that Dover then seems to have changed hands, that's something I just didn’t foresee.
I basically almost gave it away, you know it was 3, 4 years of work, every night of the week
and all day on Saturday or something like this.
And then they changed hands.
And then this book that had previously been less than $10 so students could actually pay that,
suddenly became the Phoenix edition for $75.
And there was almost nothing I could do about it.
And I think that is a sort of thing that really was infuriating.
And I couldn’t even get into company to do it.
So things are changing - hopefully for the better.
And I’m aiming to put my book online so that they can have it free.
And then they can sue the guy who wrote it as far as I’m concerned.
(laughter).
Adam Smith: Goodness, so many questions.
Ok one from the very front row.
Could we have the microphone down here?
We’ll try and speed up the cycle a bit so.
Question: Thank you.
I’m Kathleen Raven.
I’m one of the bloggers covering the conference for Lindau.
How do we keep the quality of science high with this abundance of free information?
Do you worry that the current scientists out here in the audience will face an environment where science is devalued
because it’s free and available?
Harry Kroto: I think that’s something you don’t need to worry, I feel not too much,
because peer review will bring the cream to the top.
In the sense there are bad books and good books.
And in my view, I mean it’s something I’ve thought about.
But if you think about it.
Everybody can write a book and they’re published in Mills & Boon books in the UK.
But what happens is that there are reviewers and the great books of Kafka and Dostoevsky,
they come to the top and they will be there.
And the garbage is always going to be there.
But it usually won’t go much further than calf level.
But there’s not a lot you can do about it.
And I think such things as Wikipedia, I would say, is one of the greatest contributions to education since the printing press.
And that has of course an inbuilt feedback mechanism to ensure that it’s reliable.
And in the sciences they did a test, I understand, someone told me a few weeks ago, and they changed something,
just some real errors.
And within like hours it was back corrected again.
So there are...
the way it is there are people who are passionate about making sure
that that material is reliable - in the sciences.
There are other areas where it’s more of a problem.
But yes there’s going to be rubbish.
And if you have a look at the garbage that’s out there.
There are bad films and there are...
but the great films gradually will get there.
And even if the reviewers don’t think it’s good, there are people out there who will say,
you know this is a great movie.
I don’t think it will be a big problem.
But garbage will always be there.
But it will never get...
it will disappear I think.
Adam Smith: Brian did you want to say anything on that?
Brian Kobilka: Well I guess it’s just that there's material out there that’s not peer reviewed, maybe read by a lay audience.
And if it’s not high quality, if it’s not wrong and maybe misinterpreted as being real science, I think that’s the danger.
Ada Yonath: This happens in the newspapers and in the journals, not scientific journals.
And more or less what we just heard about public.
So I agree with Harold: the good stuff will float.
Harry Kroto: There’s great line from Pauli, where it is a problem.
He came out of a lecture, "And the worst thing", he said, "it wasn’t even wrong." (laugh).
Adam Smith: Next question.
Question: What do you think we should be doing about this crass publication bias that’s prevalent?
Especially say in the field of medicine, where its positive results are getting published,
maybe 6 times more than negative results.
And the negative results are often not even available.
There’s a lot of real examples out there, like for the heart medicine lowering blood pressure
that has killed about 400,000 people in the US in the ‘90’s and 2000’s.
Where the information was there, it was just not published - they knew it.
And there’s many examples like that.
So what can be done about this?
Adam Smith: So I guess we already addressed one question about publication of negative results.
Maybe we could change that question a bit.
It’s also about the message that science sends out by publishing positive results, which is that science works.
And then that connects with the public face of science.
So maybe we could just hold on to that thought for a little while and we’ll come back to it.
Thank you.
Question: Hi, I’m Horo from the Philippines.
English is the international language so I think the language of science.
It becomes now a prerequisite, admitted or not, that if you know English well you’ll be a good communicator.
You are expected to be a good communicator.
And I think that won’t be selected here if I don’t have good command of English.
In publication or in presentation sometimes if you do not know how to speak English or write English well,
the science is compromised.
And I think you would all agree with me.
And I’m talking on behalf of other international students whose command of English is probably not that good or is still limited.
What is the science community doing to solve this seemingly unsolvable problem?
Of course we’re not going to say to the students, go back to your basic English.
Or even to professors.
I’ve reviewed papers with really good, really good science but just there was a problem with how they communicated it in English.
Are we going to pass the burden to the publishers?
I mean of course if it has not been accepted yet that we cannot do that, right.
So I mean if it’s not yet accepted and it’s really written in bad English, we cannot pass that to the publisher.
I mean what can we do about this?
And how can we help us, how can we help each other about it?
Adam Smith: Okay, that’s a great question.
Thank you.
I’m going to pass that to Beatrice.
But of course some of the publishers see a business opportunity there,
because they’re offering their own services for rewriting papers from not such good English into good English,
which is another question again.
But let’s not go there either.
Beatrice.
Beatrice Lugger: Oh well, I’m not the expert for publishing in English anyway.
Adam Smith: But you accept you come from this Institute for Science Communications and you’re a non-native English speaker.
Beatrice Lugger: Yes, what we definitely do at first hand
is to encourage the scientist to communicate with the public or to communicate mainly with the journalists outside.
And we also offer courses how to write a good abstract, that’s right.
And that’s basic.
You can learn something.
And I think also here you have the possibility, if you can’t go to our institute to get trained there.
You have some possibilities if you only look a little bit online.
What are the basics?
How should an abstract...
what should it look like?
What is the first paragraph and so on?
You wanted another answer?
Adam Smith: Well no.
But a little bit more fundamentally to the question,
Is there any way of getting around this issue of English being the language of science?
And competency in English is the only way forward.
Does anybody want to pick that one up?
Too difficult.
Harry Kroto: I must have been...
I admit to being supremely grateful that I speak English as a scientist.
And I’ve often felt that that problem you have is not a trivial one.
And actually yesterday I gave a presentation to small children of 8 and 9 year olds and I thought, I better try to speak German.
It was the first time that I’d actually made a presentation in German.
And it was difficult because I felt tremendously restricted in getting my personality over.
And I’ve talked to children all around the world.
So I really feel that.
It’s not just a case of the papers.
Because I think it’s...
we can solve that one.
And I have on occasion, on several occasions, corrected papers of friends who have said, can you help me.
And it's hard work.
But what I do feel is, what you're saying is that when you’re making a presentation - and the presentations are important I think.
You go to a conference and you need to present and you need your personality to come out.
Because it’s not just, it’s to do with not just the results.
It’s to do with how you got those results and the negative parts about it.
I feel really privileged that it’s my language.
But the publication I think can be solved.
That’s something, it's hard work and the publishers, one thing they should do is help you to make sure the English is right
- the science I presume is right.
But when it comes to young people like you giving a presentation at a conference, that is something that we should address.
And I don’t know how to do that very well.
Adam Smith: I don’t know if you still have the microphone.
But is the question you’re actually asking sort of more fundamentally.
It’s whether English is set as the language of scientific communication.
Or perhaps where the new communication tools that are available mean that there could be some change in that pattern.
That other languages could co-exist with English.
Question: I’m more of the second one.
I’m more of the second one.
That science, that English should be a prerequisite to understanding science.
It’s more as a whole, in general.
You know either in German or in Chinese or in other language.
I mean it persists, this problem persists and it will continue.
And we cannot ask someone who needs help to go back to basic English.
We cannot do that.
But what are we really doing.
Where are we going about this problem?
Adam Smith: Do you want to address that, Ada?
Ada Yonath: I want just...
I’m not sure I can answer you, but I want a word of caution.
When publishers rewrite your papers because the English was not good.
Sometimes the English becomes wonderful but the science is not good.
So be careful.
(laughter).
Adam Smith: That’s a very good question.
Okay, you had the microphone before, so go for it.
Question: A really short one.
I just want to get back a little bit to open access.
And I’m sure we’ll be done.
I’m just really worried.
I would love for everyone, that we could all publish in some journals or somewhere that is open access.
But I’m really worried about getting a scholarship or getting resources.
Because they really look forward to you having your things published in this great magazine and have these great numbers.
And is there a role that you could do to help us to be validated if we publish in some alternative sources?
Adam Smith: Interesting question.
Anybody wants to take it?
Beatrice Lugger: Maybe in some sense.
There is this huge movement combined with open access which is called Altmetrics,
which means that it doesn’t count anymore only whether you have published your scientific research
in a really high value newspaper or paper.
But you are also counted by numbers: how often has this article been downloaded, how often has it been cited by everybody,
how often has it been tweeted?
This is not really a solution.
But it’s a new way how to value really what you have written, what you have published there in this open access way.
I don’t believe that the impact factor will be gone in 10 years or so.
But in addition maybe these Altmetrics help to value what’s going on in the open access way.
Harry Kroto: There is a problem with citations.
There was...
at one point, I was the second highest cited British chemist.
And the one who was first was Martin Fleischman.
Now you probably don’t know but he was one of the people involved with Cold Fusion.
So when you’d get to citations you have to be very careful because he was highly cited for something that was very wrong.
And so it really disturbs me that one looks at those sort of citation indices.
And a second thing.
I had a very high impact during a period when I was...
had produced a very original paper, it seemed to me, during a small period.
And I discovered it was on one paper, which was a review paper, which had no original work from me in it.
And so it really disturbs me how strongly affected people are by things like h-indexes and citation impact
and things of this nature.
We have to be very careful.
The other thing that bothers me about this is what I call hyperflation, that hype, inflated hype.
And this is very bad for the scientific community that they have a lot of impact,
but then it disappears - you know a new cancer cure and things of this nature.
And 5 years later there’s nothing, nothing there.
So there are lots of problems, not just in open access but in the papers, and things that need to be addressed, it seems to me.
And particularly for young people to think carefully about it and recognise that you need your career to move forward.
And it shouldn’t just be on things like citations and stuff like that.
Adam Smith: Okay, I’m going to take one last question on this right from the back,
there’s somebody waving their hand right at the back there.
And then we’re going to move into the sort of second part.
Question: This is Manoj Pateria from India.
I appreciate we have a very interesting discussion.
And I want to submit something.
In fact we have to distinguish between scholarly communication and public communication.
When it comes to scholarly communication definitely English is the language of elites.
And we have to be very concerned with the English communication
when it comes to communicating with the elite class of scientist or scholarly people.
But when it comes to communicating with the public, I think that local language should be given priority.
Incidentally India has something like 22 regional languages.
And we are communicating very well in all the 22 regional languages.
The only question that arises is getting the contents from English to the regional languages.
That is the job of the translator.
And we can have a middleman in between who can communicate, who can converse from English into the local language.
So the local language should be given priority when it comes to the communication,
communicating to the people at large.
That is my submission.
I appreciate your comments to that.
Adam Smith: Thank you very much indeed for that comment.
In fact it was the perfect transition from a discussion of bidirectional communication to unilateral communication.
So I think you could have been a plant.
But it's just fantastic, thank you.
(laughter).
I do want to move into this discussion of how we talk to other audiences outside scientists.
Beatrice, perhaps we should start with you because your Institute does train scientists to talk to the media in particular.
What do you think scientists most need to know from you?
What is the main thing you can teach people?
Beatrice Lugger: Well the main thing is that you are an expert in a special field,
in a special topic and you’re always deeper, deeper, and deeper down to the ground in your universe.
And you lose, many scientists lose the possibility to get the point of view
from the outside to see what is really of interest from the outside.
And to break down all the things that you know to a real message that you want to transport when you talk to someone.
What is the real thing that you have found out?
What is the main topic of your research that you want to tell the public?
And this is something that you can train before.
You can think about it before you talk to a journalist, before you are on a panel,
before you have an open doors day or an open night in the university and so on.
And also all the times please be aware to whom you are talking to.
This is the first step.
It’s quite different if you talk to the other scientists that know quite a lot about your research.
And it’s different if you talk to an interdisciplinary panel.
Also some Nobel laureates who are here in Lindau,
they told me that what makes it so special in Lindau is that also the Nobel laureates are pleased
to give their presentations in a much more understandable way than they are used to.
Because it’s not a conference in the discipline, it’s interdisciplinary.
And be aware of the group that you are talking to.
These are the main steps.
Think about these things.
And what we are training as.
We are giving you courses on how to improve your writing skills, interview training,
how to present yourself - not only in words but also with your body language.
How can you improve all these things?
It’s all part of a scientific career also.
Adam Smith: I want to talk a little bit about the message that people impart.
So when you think of, what is the message you want to get across?
I mean that’s a pretty important question.
What message do scientists in general want to send to the public?
Because I’d submit that sometimes what science tells the public is that it’s going to deliver something.
Or often that’s at least what the public wants to hear or the media want to hear: what is this going to lead to?
Now from the discussion in the last hour we’ve heard...
the topics that have come up are questions such as,
how we deal with the fact that a lot of the time science doesn’t work - it's trial and error.
We... people who practice science all know that there’s a lot of success and there’s a lot of failure,
and there’s a lot of debate, and there’s a lot of disagreement.
I don’t know how much of that comes over in the communication of science.
Beatrice Lugger: I hope that more and more of this comes across.
And there is the possibility to write a blog for example, where you can show your daily life in your lab and write about this.
So that people get an impression how hard it is to have an idea, to follow this idea over 10 or 15 years,
as some people here did, and to stay on that and not to say, Well it doesn’t work, I’ll leave it, it’s not my place anymore.
That’s really good to see that science is not only a story of success.
It mainly is not.
It is the contrary mainly in your daily life.
And I think that’s very necessary to transport this as well.
Also another topic that I definitely wanted to mention is that it’s not the job of a journalist to translate what you are doing.
That’s a real necessary thing that you have to be aware of.
It’s not the job of a journalist to translate your research.
And then afterwards you say, Oh he didn’t understand anything, you know these journalists they are really bad.
That’s not the way it works.
You have to be prepared, what you want to say.
And the journalist’s job is to investigate, to get it into the whole context, to ask other people as well,
and to give a background story.
But not as your only translator - that’s not the role of a journalist.
Adam Smith: Harry.
Harry Kroto: Well this is a big problem and it always has been a big problem and it’s been for a long time.
I like Feynman's 'Can you explain it to a journalist in one sentence how you won the Nobel Prize.'
He said if I could explain it in one sentence it wouldn’t be worth the Nobel Prize.
And the story I like is about a businessman.
Business is bad, he goes and he prays to God and he says I need to win the lottery.
And so he prays hard and next week he doesn’t win the lottery.
The second week he said, It’s really bad, my wife is going to have to go out of work
and I’ve got to win the lottery next week or it’s really serious.
And he doesn’t win the lottery.
The third week, everything is cut, he said, I’m going to have to go in the poor house myself if I don’t win the lottery this week.
And then there’s a boom! - this is the only God joke I’m going to tell you by the way - and God comes out,
he says well meet me half way, at least buy a ticket.
Now the issue is I think really... if you were at my talk, this young woman Nicole,
who was here 2 years ago, where she had a Taylor expansion on her shoulder.
And she said this is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever learned.
And you realise that you as scientists are in a different world.
You can appreciate the beauty of this.
And I remember when I saw a differential of e^x and this differential just changed and moved once.
I thought I could have died happy if I’d discovered that myself and presented it.
And the point is that you’re talking about a culture
where someone like Nicole can say this is beautiful to people who don’t speak that language.
Now the journalist is the intermediary - the last question about the popular press.
Because by and large, 9 out of 10 questions that the journalist asks is, What use is it?
Because that’s the only thing that by and large non-scientists can probably say.
But because you can’t get over the absolute sensation and the culture.
And culture requires an understanding of the language.
You cannot understand English, Shakespeare, unless you’ve got some facility.
I cannot understand Japanese culture or any other culture without really going down into the deeper aspects of what it’s like.
And by and large Nobel Prizers in general do not do science to make money.
They’re looking at something and they get something out of it.
If they make some money that’s all to the good, we don’t do that.
But nevertheless that is a fundamental problem and I don’t know how to solve it.
And I usually tell someone who says, Can you explain this without mathematics?
And I say do you think we use mathematics to make our life difficult?
And the point is that it is the ONLY way.
And I think Feynman again has a fantastic lecture - it’s on the internet - it’s about Feynman and maths.
You should see it.
It was made by a friend of mine, Chris Sykes, who interviewed Feynman maybe 25/30 years ago.
And he talks about this problem.
He says... I don’t know... if Feynman, who is the greatest scientific communicator I have ever heard, can’t do it.
He said, I don’t know any other way to do it, to give the beauty of it, the deep resonances.
And you see they don’t ask a musician, you know what’s the...
Well at some point, Louis Armstrong, a woman or someone asked, What is Jazz?
And he just said, If you don’t know you’ll never know, right?
Because you have to listen to the music and it’s there.
And if you like it that’s it - you can’t explain it in words.
Adam Smith: But just a quick follow up.
Is there therefore a danger though...
okay there’s an understanding gap which means that the public at large only gets the answer to the question what is it good for.
But then they’re not going to understand why it’s necessary to support fundamental science which basically yields nothing.
They might think of that as useless research and that’s a big danger.
And we live in a world where there is an increasing energy being put into saying
we should be funding this because it’s going to lead to that.
So it’s our duty isn’t it, it's scientist’s duty to break down that barrier.
And somehow tell people what science really is.
Harry Kroto: Well they’ve got to recognise that it’s a Gaussian distribution in which there are young people
who are going to follow the things that they are passionate about.
And out of that unpredictable fundamental research have actually come some of the major breakthroughs.
And I think we must pound away.
I know it’s like, you know 'blue sky' is a bad term because they don’t want it.
Politicians say we haven’t got so much money so we’ve got to put it in these SRDG grants.
But by and large some of the big breakthroughs come out of left field.
We know we’ve got to solve water splitting.
100’s of groups are looking at that sort of problem.
But it’s possible, it’s obviously difficult.
If there is a solution it may come from left field by some guy who is doing something totally different - and comes to this.
And the one that is very famous within the sciences is someone has an eye problem.
They’ve got a lot of money.
Where would you put your money to solve this eye problem?
And the last place you would go to, a physicist Charlie Towns,
who is sitting on a bench thinking how can I build a high frequency amplifier?
He’s a microwave spectroscopist building a Maser amplifier.
5, 10 years later is the laser.
20 years later some smart optician thinks I can use a laser to solve this eye problem.
And you can never do it by saying this is the problem I’m going to solve, because you’d never get the laser.
And I think we’ve got to fire away at politicians as hard as possible.
And say we must keep 10 to 15% of our research for the fundamental areas - blue skies, whatever you call it.
Adam Smith: But then the onus is also on the scientist to give honest answers to the questions of what is it good for.
Because, I don’t know, Brian, when you were doing your work, if a journalist asked you what is this good for.
Do you answer truthfully?
And say it’s good for understanding this protein.
I’m not sure, it might lead to something else.
Or do you answer with a slight degree of kind of exaggeration and say well actually I think once we get this structure
it's going to lead to this and we’re going to get some drugs - which is what they probably want to hear.
It’s a difficult position to be in but...
Brian Kobilka: I wouldn’t say that, I probably am some place in the middle.
I think the fact that almost all of my funding comes from the NIH.
The NIH demands that we rationalise in some way that a lay audience can understand how our research might, even if it’s
- not directly but perhaps indirectly in a certain number of years - lead to something that may benefit the tax payers.
And I have to say that what I am doing is probably not that hard to rationalise.
But I agree.
I think perhaps we can’t necessarily say
why fundamental research in a particular area... for example in the case of the biological sciences.
I’m aware of some colleagues who are working on model organisms.
And they’re doing fantastic work.
But the proteins they’re working on, there are no representatives or no homologues in the human genome.
And they’re suffering at NIH because it’s not immediately translatable to something that may end up as a medicine.
So I think what we have to do is maybe give examples.
If we can’t necessarily say this is going to lead to a human... have some impact on humans,
at least we can give examples, as Professor Kroto just mentioned,
where really fairly basic research has through...
over a number of years combined with other lines of research to lead to something very important.
At least give them examples.
Adam Smith: Thank you.
Ada.
Ada Yonath: I think that the discussion is drifting into many, many types of questions.
I thought that we talked about the public.
It means maybe the public has the wrong ideas about something’s like we started with evolution and with global heating,
genetic engineering of plants and whatever.
This is public that tries to tell us what to do by knowing a bit here, a bit there,
a bit there, and being very fashionable.
They know everything.
This is really difficult: to talk to these people and try to put some sense into the blah, blah that comes with them.
(laughter).
Second part.
I don’t say much about it, I just say what I sense happening here now in this room.
Second was how to talk to the media.
It means to the media...
does the media have to know what they say, what we are saying?
There are too many media people, I don’t want to help them.
So I’m going to the next one.
Talking to the media is not simple.
And it can be very beneficial for the general public.
I only want to answer the question that you asked Brian a minute ago:
Would you say that you really do your research for understanding, for basic understanding?
Or would you say that it’s going to open a new area of new drugs?
I try to say I just want to know more before I went into the antibiotic thing.
And I brought some examples, like Newton with the apple that developed missions to outer space, fibre optics - you name it.
We can bring enough examples that people tried to understand a process
and came out 20 years, 50 years, 200 years later with a new drug, a new invention, a new material, a new something.
So this is the way I am trying - at least I was trying to treat the media.
But how about people and young people?
They are not scientists, they are still school kids or high school kids.
How about talking to them?
They are very, very interested in hearing.
And I think that my best lecture was to 5 year old kids, the kindergarten kids.
It’s not only me thinking so.
I kept them listening for more than an hour - kids, 5 year old kids.
And one kid came to his father and told him about me coming to the kindergarten.
And the father was a scientist, so he wanted me to give him the presentation.
And they used it to raise money from millionaires, this kid’s lecture!
So this is what talked most to the lay public.
And explaining high science to lay people - doesn’t matter if they are 5 years or 50 years old - is an art,
in my opinion is an art.
And when I give a lecture to young people and I saw and I do a lot of it in schools from the age of 5 to the age of 20.
When I see shiny eyes in the middle of or in the beginning of my lecture and it goes on - this is what gives me the satisfaction.
And I think that it gives them some real feeling, what science is.
And I think we should do that, we should be very aware of the public.
It doesn’t matter what age and doesn’t matter what other ideas they have.
We should try to bring the real sense of science to them.
Adam Smith: Thank you.
Okay let’s open up for questions on this question of talking to the public.
There's a question back here.
Question: Hello.
I’m from Taiwan.
There is a big issue in Taiwan with media.
Our media in Taiwan was really horrible and they have no scientific knowledge about anything.
(laughter).
They think like a CO group is some kind of toxic compounds, containing, I don’t know cosmetic or something.
My problem is actually: usually the public receives information, especially scientific information, from the media.
So is it only our responsibility to try to teach a public or has media the responsibility
to let themselves know more about science so they can give the correct information to the public?
Adam Smith: Sorry, Beatrice.
Beatrice Lugger: Well first of all I don’t believe that you only get information
about what’s going on in the science community via media.
This totally has changed in the last 10 years.
And if you want to reach the youth to engage themselves into sciences, then you have to go to social media
because that’s what they consume.
And they don’t actively read newspapers, they don’t actively go outside and read anything.
They are just waiting here and look what their friends liked and maybe they read that one.
So you definitely, if you like it or not, you have to communicate via these media.
And to leave it to the media, that’s definitely the wrong way.
And if we look to Greece or we look to Spain where all the media have really cut down,
broadcasting have closed and so on - how to fill the gap, the information gap?
Nobody is talking anymore about science.
Maybe that’s what scientists then themselves have to do in some sense.
It doesn’t help.
Adam Smith: But I suppose the phrase, ‘the media’ now means much more than the traditional media.
Because it also means...
Beatrice Lugger: He named the media in that sense.
Adam Smith: I know but when you think about the media presumably you think of the media as a kind of...
you know the editors are the media.
But then all the extensions of the media that happen through online communities etc.
And they also therefore have a responsibility, and indeed are very active in pushing things.
Beatrice Lugger: Yes they also have a responsibility.
And maybe we have, I told you some days ago, in my sense we now have finally cut some dots into the ivory tower
and everything is coming out.
And now we have this open access.
Well what does it mean?
Now we have all these scientific papers that everyone can read, but they have no translators,
they have nobody who can tell them what’s going on.
So we are...
the pay wall has fallen.
But now we have the chugging war, we have the wall of languages.
And as I said before: who can translate it?
Maybe it’s really the need that scientists learn to translate a bit.
It doesn’t mean that every researcher has to do it.
And not every tool is the right tool for someone.
But there’s a broad range of things, how you can do it.
The one might be...
one person might be good in presenting and to hold speeches.
And the other person might like just to tweet and to write some things in 140 characters.
It depends.
But you have tremendous possibilities, you can do that.
And I think at least in every department one person should be in charge to do this.
Adam Smith: Thank you.
Do you want to touch on that, Simon?
Simon Engelke: Maybe just really short.
I think it can be a really great advantage if you can show other people
what you are doing - your friends know why you always spend your time in the lab.
But on the other hand you also have a lot of people pay attention to it - you know you just mentioned.
And people...
once the media is interested in you, you have a lot of attention,
not just from other colleagues but also maybe from other funding agencies etc.
So I think it’s a great advantage to be close to the public and to be able to transfer your knowledge.
And I think today it’s so easy.
We have seen some videos, which you also showed in your lecture, which are really magnificent.
And people can see them now.
You can put them on the internet and people see them worldwide and can get inspired by them.
That’s what I like so much: that you can create something here in your country right now.
And everyone on the planet can see it really easy.
And nobody has to pay for it.
Adam Smith: Thank you.
There was a question right at the back of the gallery.
Question: So this is actually more just a comment or some thoughts on what we’ve just been discussing.
I live with this guy who is an organic chemist.
And he’s a fantastic chemist, does wonderful chemistry.
When we sit down at a bar for instance and someone says, oh what do you do and he starts speaking
and they just glaze over and it’s horrible.
He can’t communicate and I don’t want him to communicate because he ruins the dynamic of the night.
(laughter).
Okay.
But there’s a point to this story.
There’s people who are really good at communicating and there’s people who aren’t.
Now I can’t play the violin, with some practice I’d probably be able to play a little bit of violin.
But I’m never going to be as good as the people we heard play in this hall earlier.
I’m just simply not as good as that.
Part of the reason you have blue laniards on, some of you, is because you can communicate this.
Now my thoughts on this matter are that it’s our responsibility as scientists to share what we do.
Because it benefits the scientific community and we progress forwards.
But there’s also people out there that...
their responsibility as good communicators should be to communicate science.
So that people trust them and understand what’s going on and it’s being portrayed with no bias.
But I can’t really describe how I feel about this more, than drawing an analogy to movies.
So like for instance there’s people who are critics of films and television.
And we read it and we make a judgment on that.
But it’s not what you want for science, you want something which is direct.
But you also want it to come from somebody who is good at conveying science.
So not everybody who does it should convey their science because it can take 2 steps backwards, if everyone is not united.
A great example is what Mario was talking about this morning.
That we have so...
everybody is united in atmospheric science that things are changing.
But for some reason the general public doesn’t get that idea, right.
And it’s because if you ask 5 different people and they’re all...
and one is good at saying something, the other ones are not, then you’re not going to get a progressive step forwards.
Adam Smith: That’s a very interesting point.
But just on that last thing.
I mean one of the problems is that there is doubt out there in scientific questions.
And if the public hears that there is doubt they begin to doubt the science it seems.
I mean in politics the public is very used to hearing about doubt.
And they like doubt.
And they embrace doubt and they get engaged with it just because there’s doubt and there’s disagreement.
With science it seems that once you start raising doubt, as with climate change and people have different opinions,
then people say, Well the whole edifice is kind of crumbling - we want certainty.
And that seems to me to be a very fundamental problem.
Question: But surely if you can show that you know the weaknesses of what you’re discussing,
and the areas in which it’s deficient, that that is enough.
If you’re confident with where your shortcomings are and the variability, then that’s enough to convince someone.
Because everybody, just about every reasonable person, will understand that not everything you say is perfect,
as long as you express your understanding of its flaws.
Adam Smith: Thank you.
Harry.
Harry Kroto: I tried to address this a little bit in my talk where I said don’t just say there’s climate change and that we’re...
although much of the community is united in this.
I think the public will understand how science works better if, as I said in this particular issue of climate change,
here are the factors that large numbers of scientists are looking at.
And they look at these and then tick these off.
And they said, these are 9 out of 10 pointers, looks as though there is climate change.
And just then pass it over to the public and say well this is, here’s the evidence.
And get them to get a feeling for the way that the scientists have arrived at their fairly unanimous attitude
that we got a problem.
And I think that’s a way of educating the public in a sense, in the way that science works,
that it does depend on doubt and questioning.
And we should recognise that that’s important.
And then say well yes science, the scientific community are fairly unanimous - not completely so because...
but we’re in a middle of a 100, 200 year experiment.
And we can’t afford to make a mistake.
We must err on the side of caution and we’re not doing that - that’s the real problem.
And I think that will give the public a better feeling for the way the scientific community has got to the conclusion
that they have, and it will be better for them as well.
So they must meet us half way, they must start to think a little bit.
We must help them to think the way the scientists have got to these conclusions.
Adam Smith: Thank you Harry.
Okay.
You’ve been very patient, so your turn again.
Question: We’re probably nearing the end of the questions.
I want to make it a lighthearted one.
Beyond understanding and the application of science, there’s also the wonder of science.
A science communicator once told me, that astronomy is a sexy science, chemistry is just hot.
I’m wondering if we should all go out Valentine ’s Day, 14th of February each year, to the chemistry of love day.
And that way we can talk about the chemistry of flowers and chocolates.
And the biologists can talk about the chemistry that happens after the evening.
And the physicists candlelight and the spectra of candlelight.
What does the panel think about that?
Ada Yonath: Why only one day.
(Applause).
Ada Yonath: Why only on February 14th, why not every day.
(Applause).
Adam Smith: Thank you for that.
(laughter).
Fred Guterl.
I’m Fred Guterl from the Scientific American and I wanted to respond to the comment about communicating science.
And I’ve always been a great admirer of Slate Magazine, the online magazine, because they write such really great headlines.
And a friend of mine works there and I asked him.
I said, How come everyone at Slate can write such great headlines?
And he says everyone can’t write great headlines at Slate, there are actually 2 or 3 people that write all the headlines.
And so the point is that even among journalists who are professional communicators,
there are some who are better than others, and some who have a flair and others don’t.
And I think that’s true of everyone.
I think that’s true of scientists as well.
And there are some scientists who are just terrific communicators.
And there are other scientists who are less terrific communicators.
And I would submit that the ones who are good at it may have more of a responsibility to pull that rope
and do some of the work of communicating.
There is no question in there but...
Adam Smith: No, that’s fine.
But it seems to fit very much with Beatrice’s vision of one communicator per every department,
at least one person pushing it out there.
So thank you very much for that.
We got time for...
Christian, how long have we got?
Oh we should kill him, oh dear.
Can we have one more question?
- That's a lovely idea.
Seven to meet, that would keep me busy.
Beatrice Lugger: We can continue the discussion further on the Lindau online Nobel community page, lindau.nature.com.
(Applause).
Adam Smith: Okay.
Beatrice you’re in charge of hosting it.
But I’m still going to fit in one last question.
Question: First of all I would like to comment on what Professor Yonath said earlier.
Albert Einstein said that if you can’t explain your science to a 6 year old, you probably don’t understand it.
So that may be a note that every scientist should consider.
But I just wanted to say…
Harry Kroto: I don’t agree with that.
Adam Smith: And have you read his simple text on relativity - because no 6 year old let alone me can understand it.
(laughter).
Question: You have to take this to Einstein.
Ada Yonath: We will try later with you.
Question: But anyway I wanted to comment about the distinction you keep making between the scientist and the public.
I think the scientists are part of the public - even the aspect of consuming science media.
I mean most of the laureates on the stage are working in biology and chemistry.
I assume you read about the Higgs Boson from the media and not from the original scientific papers
published in the physical journals.
So I would like to see scientists approaching journalists with a little more patience,
and a little more tolerance to their lack of scientific knowledge.
Because not every journalist can be a PhD in physics or biology or chemistry.
And after all scientists are working usually on public funds and they are obliged to the public, which is paying them.
Adam Smith: Thank you very much indeed for that comment.
And I think that very beautifully…
(Applause).
Adam Smith: I think it beautifully highlights the point that bidirectional communication between scientists
and unidirectional communication from scientists to others are intimately connected, they’re the same thing.
Okay, I think all the panellists would like to thank very much the audience
for being here this afternoon and all of your questions.
So thank you audience.
(Applause).
Adam Smith: And of course thank you to our wonderful panellists.
It’s been a pleasure, thank you.
(Applause).
End.