by Jon Franklin
I am aware that most Americans still tell pollsters they believe in science. But talk to those people; they don’t know what science IS.
If you believe in the power of the press, the most frightening poll was taken at the Columbia graduate school of journalism, one of my profession’s most elite institutions. Fifty-seven percent of the student journalists believed in ESP, 57% believed in dowsing, 47% in aura reading, and 25% in the lost continent of Atlantis.
In the late 1970s I was forced to rethink my journalistic strategy. I had been reporting and explaining discoveries, but my stories were not being widely read.
I generally used the word “science” early in the story, thinking it would attract readers. The word generally ended up in the headline. But I now realized that the effect was to tell general readers what to avoid. They might trust science in theory, but in practice it had bad personal associations. It confused them, made them feel negative about themselves. Science pages ghettoized science news, gave people a whole section they could throw away unread.
There was something more sinister afoot, as well. As attitudes changed, editors started wanting a certain negative spin on science stories. If you didn’t comply you got played inside, or your existence was otherwise made uncomfortable. Some science writers, especially those who identified with the ecology movement, saw hostility to science as a path to success. Many reporters, outspokenly neutral on other topics, found it easy to align themselves with the anti-science faction. This was often couched in terms favoring plurality, and an openness toward “other ways of knowing.”
The turning point for me was when Three Mile Island blew.
I am aware that TMI did not “blow,” but I’m talking journalism here, not science—and in the newsroom, the story went off like Eniwetok. My editors didn’t send me, though. They saw me as biased toward science, and so they assigned a environmental advocate who also happened to be outspokenly against nuclear power. The resulting headlines implied that Baltimore was in imminent danger. Years later, when Chernobyl went, one of the wire services moved a story that said 200,000 people were killed in the first few minutes. That sounded reasonable to wire editors.
I happened to be a gardener, and mine was the kind of newsroom where
people brought in their produce and piled it on a table for others to take
home. But at the end of the day my tomatoes, my cukes, my cantaloupes were
still sitting on the table. This happened several times and I was really
hurt, so I asked one of my friends. He hemmed and hawed and said, well,
Franklin, you’re a scientist and so they don’t know WHAT you may
have done to those vegetables, or what you put on them, or anything.
I wasn’t a scientist. I only associated with scientists. But that was enough. They were afraid of me.
I started leaving the word “science” out of my stories, I wrote
about science as though it were a normal human activity. That sold surprisingly
well. Pretty soon I was concentrating on essays and narrated stories, and
getting a nice slice of readership. I won some prizes, which makes newsroom
life easier, and I started thinking about books.
Truly I loved that life. It gave me access to all these great minds on the
cutting edge of knowledge. Once I asked a Nobel prizewinner for some advice.
He was having a meeting at the time with several senior scientists. He shooed
them out and spent the next three hours explaining restriction enzymes to
me. It happened all the time.
Anyway, I was happy and science was good and the money was flowing. Richard Nixon, echoing John Kennedy’s promise to land men on the moon by 1970, vowed to cure cancer in ten years. I didn’t know a single cancer scientist who thought that likely, but nobody would say so on the record. They winked at me. They wanted a piece of the action.
There were exceptions to this bright picture—the post-Sputnik boom in physics had by the Seventies produced a glutted market, and we were running stories about people with PhDs in physics who were unable to get jobs – who were driving taxi cabs. Will you be surprised, or shocked, if I tell you I have sat there on the city desk and watched editors and reporters read those stories and throw back their heads and laugh?
At about the time that journalists were laughing at out-of-work physicists, a Pennsylvania research group was studying the growth of antiscience attitudes. One study showed that people who watched a lot of television tended to be biased against science. A follow-up focused on the mortality rates of the various professional groups portrayed on television. It turned out that TV scientists had the highest fatality rate of any occupational group on the airwaves, with fully 10 percent of them dead before the closing credits. Even lawyers fared better. The message is clear: Science, like crime, doesn’t pay. Or shouldn’t.
Journalism, meanwhile, was changing. It became difficult and then impossible to get the time and space that good science writing required. I had enough clout to continue my own narrative work, at least for the moment, but the pressure was for “harder” coverage—investigative stories about science. Science writers who were pugnacious toward science had an edge in assignments and promotions. The “gotcha” story, so conspicuously absent from science coverage, now arrived. Reports surfaced about scientific malfeasance, misappropriation and dishonesty. The dam-breaker was the story about the misuse of scientific overhead at Stanford. Later, the Chicago Tribune did a major take-out on the contradicting claims for the discovery of the AIDS virus. Very, very dirty laundry.
Science was a sitting duck for this. Scientists were accustomed to solicitous, if perhaps inaccurate, treatment by the press. They had dealt with science writers. Now there were science reporters on their trail, and that was another thing entirely. It had never occurred to many scientists that their grant requests, their reports, their memos . . . this stuff is all public record. Science is a muckrakers’ paradise, like shooting fish in a barrel, and I predict that you are going to see a whole lot more of it in the future.
Science, as a community, might be able to withstand the pressure. But science has never been a community. When NASA was in trouble, bench scientists lined up to take swipes at it. Climatologists despise particle physicists. Scientists are all in this together, whether they like it or not, but they don’t know that yet, and I’m not sure they’re going to find out in time.
What all this means is that science’s political childhood is over, and what is true of science is doubly true for the science writer.
Not that science news is on the wane. Broadly defined, it takes up an increasing percentage of the news columns. A few days ago I read through my local paper as a reality check, and it was full of science news. Social science, space science, a story on salmon ecology, another on medicine. Science is pervasive in our civic life . . . in our lives, generally. But a smaller and smaller percentage of this science journalism is being written by science writers, or even science reporters. Much of it, as a result, is grossly inaccurate—if not in fact then in tone, play, and context.
My scientist friends bitch a lot about this. I used to tell them not to judge the whole profession by how it covered science. Political coverage is much more in the journalistic tradition. Journalism grew up with democratic politics, has even been called the fourth estate of government. Many reporters have degrees in political science. So they do a better job of politics, or at least they used to. Today, with so much of politics tangled up in science, I’m not sure that is true anymore.
As for me, I saw the handwriting on the wall but thought I could be of some value educating the next generation of science writers. In 1989 I took a job as head of the science journalism department at Oregon State University. OSU is Oregon’s premier science campus, and its journalism department was the only undergraduate science journalism department in the country. There are several graduate institutions that teach science journalism, but most journalists do not have advanced degrees.
In any event, shortly after I arrived the voters of Oregon approved a tax-cutting measure that fell heavily on higher education. OSU decided science journalism was expendable. I knew the news industry wasn’t going to support the program, but I thought science might. The critical player was OSU’s dean of sciences. I went to him, hat in hand. I’ll never forget his response.
“That’s your problem,” he said. “We don’t need you.”
I left the university, of course. Shortly thereafter they closed down science journalism. It looked for a while like they might also close the ballroom dance program. But they found money to keep that. Also, that year, the university undertook a multimillion dollar renovation of its football stadium.
There comes a time in every professional life when circumstances bring you to a pause, and a reassessment. So I thought long and hard about what that science dean said. I finally decided that there was no anger there, and no arrogance. Just indifference. He was stating what, to him, was a fact.
My own writing in the meanwhile was doing quite well. I wasn’t exactly getting rich, but I was writing well and people liked what I was doing, and my own future was being clarified. I no longer called myself a science writer very often, because it seemed to put people off. More and more of my thinking was about people, not science – about human problems, and the courage or cowardice or determination or whatever human beings summon in response. So I pushed the science into the background. Pretty soon I had de-emphasized science so much that it almost wasn’t there.
But it was very much there. It was the fabric of the life in my stories; science had simply become a condition of existence.
By this time I was on the Internet, and beginning to realize its potential as a literary medium. I considered moderating a listserver for science writers, but started one for writers, instead. Several of us started assembling what I think will be the foundations for a literary marketplace. This is all wildly exciting, and relevant here mainly because it adds perspective to some of the other things I’ve just said. My laments are not personal.
Meanwhile, though, I did the professional autopsy. It seemed necessary. I had invested many years and a lot of creative energy in science writing. I’d thought I’d done good work for a good cause, translating science. I thought I was helping the two societies exist together in the modern world. But when you cut a corpse open and look at it piece by piece, there on the stainless steel, it’s difficult to be romantic.
I’ll tell you why I was a science writer, and there wasn’t a drop of altruism in it. I like science. I like the game. I like the idea that knowledge is a frontier, that inquisitiveness is a force. I was enthralled by the revolution in neuroscience, and I followed it like some people follow baseball. I got to dabble in everything. Once I was at Kitt Peak, and got to bend over the lens container and stare down into that beautiful, bottomless piece of perfectly ground glass that was the same color as the night sky. I remember seeing my first autopsy, my first brain operation, a manned-flight lift off, down at the Cape. The sound is what you remember. It doesn’t come through the television speakers, it’s too deep.
It was some of the best material a writer could possibly ask for. It was like covering a major war and the United Nations and the White House and a mass murder, all at once, and with almost no competition.
So much for altruism. I didn’t do it for science, and I didn’t do it for mankind. I did it for me, and it was worth it.
Saying that gives me space to say the other thing, which the moment requires. Because there was a lot of power there, for a little while, being a science writer—and if I wasn’t serving any great altruistic purpose, then what purpose was I serving? Journalistic power only comes when you somehow engage history. So what had I connected with? Once I asked the question the answer came to me in a fairly straightforward fashion: We were on duty, right at the epicenter, witnesses to the whole affair. We should have seen its implications, but it was not in our interest to do so. We allowed ourselves to be dazzled by the power of science, and we forgot the power of art.
We called ourselves writers, but we failed in our artistic responsibility to look directly at the world and articulate what we saw. We allowed someone else’s definition to be imposed on us and our art.
“Science writer!” It had such a ring.
The science writer was supposed to be a translator, and it was often phrased exactly that way. One of the things translators do is make it unnecessary for us to learn the other fellow’s language. The translator is always in great danger of becoming the de facto negotiator. That is, he is apt to start putting a spin on what Joe says, so as to prevent Sam from getting mad, and then making similar corrections when Sam answers back. First thing you know, all the differences have been absorbed by the translator. The problem doesn’t show up until it comes time to actually do the deal, which falls apart because each party agreed to different things.
I think we science writers did that. We softened science’s priestly image, concealed that aspect of its character that I call intelligent focus but others label arrogance. We helped carry science’s political water, and in the process of all this we became acolytes and enablers for a society with a bad case of split personality. We helped it avoid confronting the problem.
The two cultures, and I mean both of them, wanted to have their cake
and eat it too. The humanistic culture wanted to embrace romanticism and
do it on the Internet, while living thirty percent longer and being eighty
percent richer. The scientific culture wanted to continue telling itself
it was above the fray and apolitical, and that it was doing what it was
doing for love of knowledge – that it was a priesthood, in short, but
without priestly duties or responsibilities.
Well, we can’t have it both ways. Either we are going to live in the
Enlightenment or we are not. We can be Voltaire or we can be Rousseau but
we cannot be both. At least we cannot be both and survive, without constructing
some very rational psychosocial firewalls.
I speak to you now not as a science writer but as a writer. It is my artistic observation that my civilization is on the brink of a great decision about itself, and that it is high time to dispense with translators. It is time for scientists to come to terms with the fact that they’re eating at the political trough and that they’d damned well better make their political case, and make it in a way that real people can understand it.
An artist’s place, a writer’s place, is different. My generation has been very sterile, artistically, and I have touched on some of the causes, but it bears mention here that some of the best writing of our day focuses on the subject of science. I might mention Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff and any number of pieces by John McPhee. But we don’t call them science writers, do we? No, we don’t, any more than we would call Hemingway a war writer, or Steinbeck a poverty writer, or Mark Twain a children’s writer.
If I mistook myself for a science writer, which is to say a specialty writer, well – that was a measure of my own innocence and self doubt, which was no less than anyone else’s. It was an easy enough mistake to make, for any of us to make. Being a science writer, like being a scientist, seemed like a nice, pleasant, well-defined niche. But it was no such thing. For we were born into a moment in which the chief problem besetting our kind was the conflict between the two cultures – between ourselves and ourselves, between what we felt we knew and what we thought we felt.
If science was ever a thing apart, a special way of living and of seeing things, that time is past. Today, science is the vital principle of our civilization. To do science is critical, to defend it the kernel of political realism. To define it in words is to be, quite simply, a writer, working the historical mainstream of literature.
Jon Franklin is Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon.