The High Price of Insider Shop-talk

Harry Robinson Writes: Professor John Bradshaw of Monash, who should have known better, said this on the public air waves of ABC's Radio National,

For the first time a disorder, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease was found to be both heritable and infectious, someone inheriting this rate disorder via parental germ-line could pass it on through contaminated body parts or products to someone without the genotype. Small prion particles, proteins with abnormal conformation or folding, can alter proteins in the recipient, template-fashion, in a cascade of pathological events. The boundary between genetics and environment is now more blurred than ever.

His field is neurobiology and Ockham's Razor was the program, first heard on 12/01/03. Some passages were even more dense, some were a shade lighter. The delivery was fast, too fast for lay listeners to catch. The title was Disease, Ecology, Society and Language, a huge promise for a 13 minute talk. As an exercise in communicating ideas to people at large, the show was a waste of time.

This is not to suggest that Professor Bradshaw's talk was in any way incorrect or that his line of thought lacked value. His thought was, in fact, a stimulating dance across the philosophies of identifying, describing and treating various diseases. Trouble was you had to download the script to get to grips with the material.

As it came over the air, the discourse seemed like eavesdropping on a professor talking to a small group of elite post-graduate students already familiar with the territory….a clique of scientists making insider shop-talk among themselves.Talking among themselves and to themselves are habits that scientists enjoy and rightly so except when the aim is to engage outgroups such as taxpayers, plebs, proles and politicians. They have little time or inclination to try unravelling the pleadings of scientists who want more money to spend on mysterious endeavours.

Mandarin language is not the only trap. Mundane language dealing out mundane thought can be as deadly. Frequently we receive long statements of the obvious about what ought and should be done for the cause of science in language so banal that the eyes close and the mind wanders by the fifth paragraph.

<Then there are personal encounters in which the players show they live by different rules and abide by different values.

Margo Kingston, the idiosyncratic and eccentric editor of the Sydney Morning Herald's Web Diary, recently described a meeting between a clutch of scientists and a posse of politicians. The pollies, she said, outlined the "political process" to the scientists, many of whom were surprised at the facts of public life. Some, said Margot, showed glimmerings of understanding the drives and triggers of the political process. Some, she added, thought the whole thing a distasteful story about shabby people engaged in a disreputable game.

Editor Kingston was not offering judgement on either party: she was simply pointing to the communications gap between the scientific and political fraternities. (Don't you hate phrases such as 'communications gap'? Shoddy shorthand ciphers beloved by journalists but they do serve a purpose, or so we journalists tell ourselves.)

Science lies on the wrong side of the communications gap which can be as wide as a canyon or ravine. Science wants the other side to understand that it offers great benefits to the nation--intellectual prowess, international respect and economic profit. Into the bargain. science offers a higher rate of return than any other activity. But to achieve these benefits, science needs money and a lot of it. The plebs, proles and politicians on the other side of the gap aren't very interested. In fact they don't even know what the pointy heads are talking about. And they--the plebs, proles and pollies--hold the money.

That puts the onus on science to bridge the communications gap, to take the initiative, to talk to people at large and not be content with talking to themselves.
As a footnote to the Bradshaw reference, that program was introduced by Robyn Williams who has produced Ockham's Razor for many years. He should have suggested that the professor re-work his script to make it digestible by a wide audience. Williams however, has been helping scientists talk to themselves for decades.

Harry Robinson who for 25 years worked in television journalism in Oz and the US and who was for several years air media critic for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sun-Herald.