Editor's Note: Last Sunday (August 10^th) on the ABC's Ockham's Razor, science communicator Julian Cribb took, according to the ABC, "a critical look at our ability to create knowledge and our reluctance to share it," and continued, "An ominous trend is developing in the 21^st Century - the world is dividing into those with easy access to knowledge and the power that goes with it and those without." (the talk is also available in Real audio if you can take the two minute musical intro).

It's an eloquent argument that Julian Cribb put in his Ockham's Razor talk. He spoke in favour of wider sharing of scientific knowledge. He said, correctly, that scientists are good at discovering knowledge but bad at communicating it. And he made a strong case for the social benefits of open sharing.

All that is fine and dandy but where did Cribb take us? Pretty close to a question time.

Share the knowledge with whom?  And how?

A decisive majority of our people have no understanding of scientific method, no skills to read scientific papers and precious little time to look at pop versions of same. In plain language, they are locked out by their own limitations. It gets worse: they not only don't want to be shown or taught, they want not to learn the stuff. Cribb seems to assume a broad public appetite for knowledge. In a story loosely attributed to Socrates, the human tendency is to prefer shadows to reality. Knowledge has little to do with a good life.

Scan major media up market or down market and the evidence is open to all -- our people prefer dramas, melodramas, catastrophes, crimes and contests to fact, knowledge or learning. The turgid sequence of Shane Warne's indiscretions will beat advanced endocrinology every time. Sharing mathematical thought or earth and life sciences with the mass audience is a forlorn proposition.

Let's go up market to the 15% or so who have some education and curiosity about the nature of our world and above average literacy. These are the people who can be expected to buy quality newspapers and magazines, listen to the ABC's Science Show and watch Catalyst on TV. Even in this social layer the taste for scientific knowledge is limited. Papers such as The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the Australian do carry some news from science -- but not much. This is not because their editors are cretins: they aren't. They have fairly shrewd assessments of how much their readers will accept. Go further upmarket and look at the circulations of specialist magazines such as Nature, Science, or the semi-popular Scientific American. They are pitifully small. In air media, Robin Williams has put a working life into spreading the good news from lecture hall and laboratory but he has not been able to get more than a small slice of the network's air time.

Cribb's assumption that there's an eager public for knowledge from nerdland is dubious. And what of the reverse side of the coin -- that scientists are hiding their lights from the world? Some probably are and a few probably hold back out of jealousy, miserliness and irrational secrecy. But in this matter of communicating to the public, most are inept. Their strongest driver is professional achievement. They don't care a lot about publishing their results for lay consumption, it's a bore and they imagine that word smithing is an inferior craft.

So much for the bleak aspects of the Cribb thesis. Surely something positive can be done? Of course. So long as the scientific community is prepared to use its own spin doctors. All right, that term is odious. Let's say science-communicators, SciComs for short. They need to be people with an understanding of scientific endeavour and a thorough knowledge of media. Their job? To exploit every pathway through existing media to the public.

The world of media is now a labyrinth. Look at your newspaper with all its sections. Each one has an editor, a clutch of specialist writers and contributors for home, motoring, dining, sporting, personal finance, commerce, fashion, IT...and so on. Multiply them out across all papers, add in hundreds of magazines each with an editor, section editors, feature writers, specialist contributors. Try to get an overview of air media's more useful programs, again with an executive producer, a show producer, a presenter and so on and so on. An effective SciCom will know where and with whom to try to place what the trade calls a "story." A good SciCom will see a piece of Cribb's knowledge and will realise that this editor or that could be interested. The same good SciCom will recognise the piece which will not appeal to an editor but may well ring a bell with certain feature writers who may pick it up and sell it up the line to an editor. The twists and turns make sense only to those who have a map of the labyrinth.

The notion of using a pack of SciComs depends on scientists surrendering their hold on knowledge, throwing the fruits of their efforts into a market which they'd rather not visit themselves. Not in person anyway.

One could draft a fistful of schemes to organise the dissemination of scientific knowledge but one factor would remain constant -- the initiative would have to come from scientists -- as Julian Cribb rightly indicated. He did us a good service by opening the question of sharing scientific knowledge. Sharing with whom and how remain open questions.

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.

Editor: We don't know what Robinson is worried about. Dr. Nelson has just announced another committee with a $22 million budget which will see to it that, "Australia’s research information will be more easily accessible and better managed... to further enhance our nation’s research capacity."