"Speaking up for Science"

An address delivered at Graduation Reception for Biology Majors
Division of Biological Sciences
University of Georgia, Athens, GA
13 May 2005

(COPYRIGHT Maryn McKenna 2005)

Hello. I'm Maryn McKenna, and I am so thrilled and flattered to be asked to speak to you. I'll declare up front my insufficiency for this task: I am not a scientist. I'm a journalist and author, and I specialize in writing about science and medicine. So I come before you as a sort of professional outsider to your world - but as someone who spends her professional life observing the intersection between your world and the rest of our society.

I'd like to boast that - in a tiny, tiny way - I have a connection to your world. Once a year for the past seven or so years I've come to Athens to teach a class on science writing for Professors Barry Palevitz and Michelle Momany. I know, somewhere in this assembly, there must be students who were in those classes. So - in that same tiny, tiny way - I consider myself part of the enterprise that brought you here this evening. And I want to say to all of you: Congratulations. I am so proud of you, and I feel so privileged to stand in your company tonight.

When I look back 20-ish years to my own graduation - where, let me confess, I was awarded a degree not in science, but in 16th century theatre and 20th century poetry, which was exactly as useful as it sounds - what I remember most vividly are two competing emotions. The first was real excitement at the opportunity to leave the protected bubble of academe and engage with what I thought of as the authentic, adult world that was awaiting me. The second was real sorrow at leaving behind that golden, concentrated, privileged time of exploration and discovery.

Tonight , I suspect you are feeling similar emotions. I hope you share that excitement. And I imagine you are feeling that loss. But I hope you won't spend too much time grieving.

Because, listen, here's the thing: We really need you out there.
There are few things that our society needs more than people who understand evidence, and argument, and proof.

We live right now in a culture where the greatest attention is given to those who shout the loudest. I can say that with absolute confidence, because as a journalist I am part of the machinery that directs the public's attention to those loudly-shouted topics of the day.

We are very much in need, out there in the world, of people who understand, and can demonstrate, that the truth of a proposition is not dependent on the volume at which it is expressed, and that the reliability of an assertion has no relationship to the force of the desire that it be so.

Most especially, out there, we need people to speak up for science. We live, as the astronomer Carl Sagan once remarked, in a society that is exquisitely dependent on science and technology, but in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

Carl Sagan died when most of you were entering high school - but many of us who are, regrettably, older miss him very much, because he was such a spokesman for science. And on this, as so often, he was right.

Now, nationwide, most of your class, the class of 2005, were born in 1983. That was the year that the first PCs and Macs were offered for sale. You have always been immersed in technology, and in the products of science. So it may be hard for you to understand that, to people not very much older than you, the pace of change has been breathtaking.

In a study produced a few years ago, economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas calculated that it took 55 years for the new technology of the automobile to spread to one-fourth of the households in the United States. They figured out it took 35 years for the telephone to get that far, and 22 years for the radio. Then the pace accelerated: It took 16 years for the PC to reach that many households, 13 years for the cell phone, and seven years for Net access. And, I suspect, three weeks for the iPod.

That rate of change is so fast that many people have simply tuned out the developments that underpin it. They could no more explain how their iPods work than they could explain string theory. That iPod, like the television to its first purchasers two generations ago, is not a cool gadget whose workings they are intrigued by. Instead, it's "magic box" that mysteriously produces exactly the input they most want - except of course when you put it on Party Shuffle and it instantly dredges up the most embarrassing track in your entire collection.

(And if anyone can explain that phenomenon to me, please come speak to me afterward.)

So why should we care if the average person, in this society you're joining, prefers to regard his or her iPod as magic? You know why: Because that iPod, like so much else in our world, is a product of science. And because when people start to think of science as magic - and I mean that not in the sense of something wondrous, but in the sense of something inexplicable - they really are, simply, saying No.

No, I don't want to take responsibility for trying to figure this out. No, someone else needs to do this for me. No, it's too hard.

And what that does is take science - all disciplines of science, and all the products of science - and sequester them in a corner, behind a screen, where most of our society doesn't really want to look.

And that is a problem. For all of us. Because as Stephen Jay Gould - another great popularizer of science, also sadly dead - once said: "Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood.  It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition."

What I'm hoping you'll do, as you come out of the academy and into the rest of the world out there, is insist on the essentiality - if that's a word - of science to our lives. I hope - whether you're going into jobs, or on to graduate school, or just taking a year off to walk around the world - that you'll speak up for science.

Even more, I hope you'll speak about science. I hope you'll describe the work you've done, and the research you plan on doing, if that is what's in your future. I hope you'll talk about it in detail, with all the intensity and the eagerness that you brought to pursuing it while you were here. And I especially hope you'll do this in carefully chosen language, in words so crystalline and simple that your great-grandmother and your toddler cousin will both understand exactly what you learned, and thought, and did while you were here, and why it mattered so much to you to do it.

Here's why I hope you'll do that: Because to a lot of our society, science IS magic - in the bad sense, not the good sense. They don't understand that an anecdote is not the same as data, and that coincidence is not the same as causation. And they especially don't understand that the scientific method is not just one possible way of stating an opinion, but rather the best and most reliable method we have found, in hundreds of years of trying, for explaining how the world works. For arriving at the truth, or its closest approximation, to however many decimal points you're willing to go.

I understand that I'm asking a lot. I'm asking you, really, to be counter-cultural. To speak up, against the prevailing tendency of our time, against the beliefs that an opinion is the same thing as an hypothesis, and that loudness is the same thing as evidence.
To speak so clearly, and with so much passion, that you will blow away these beliefs. That you will convince people that science is not arcane and opaque, but vivid and intoxicating. That you will effect a conversion.

It's a lot to ask, I know. But I also know that you are the best possible people for the task. And so: I know you have a busy few days ahead. You have your formal graduation tomorrow, and there will be parties, and there are your families, who saw you through this incredible journey, to have come here to rejoice with you. All of those deserve your time.

But not too much time, I hope. Because, as I said, we need you out there. We are eager for your voices to be heard in this conversation we all have to have. We'll be waiting.

Thank you.