Hawkeye Talks Science Communications. (March 2, 2012)

While Alan Alda will probably be identified with his alter ego M.A.S.H.'s deliverer of telling one-liners, Hawkeye, until the universe disappears, he is also a founding board member of the Center for Communicating Science. In any case it is because of the combination that Science invited him to write its March 2, 2012 editorial.

He writes: "I see the failure to communicate science with clarity as... serious for society... Scientists urgently need to be able to speak with clarity to funders, policy-makers, students, the general public, and even other scientists."

Mr Alda goes on to describe his interviewing technique for the television program Scientific American Frontiers: "Having to talk with someone who was truly trying to understand caused an actual human interaction to take place in these interviews. There was more warmth, and the real person behind the scientist in the white lab coat could emerge. Suddenly, both young people and adults could see that scientists were like them, with a natural way of speaking and even a sense of humor."

He came to the realisation that "clarity in communicating science is at the very heart of science itself", and in due course this led to the founding by the State University of New York at Stony Brook of the Center for Communicating Science where "Hawkeye" became part of the teaching faculty. The courses are now offered to science graduate students and the courses include the students interacting with "the public".  "Dumbing down" the science is not tolerated: "The goal is to achieve clarity".

Mr Alda concludes his Science editorial with a challenge: I'm 11 years old and looking up at you with the wide eyes of curiosity. What is a flame? What's going on in there? What will you tell me?

^{http://flamechallenge.org.}

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Gottfried Schatz is professor emeritus at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel and former head of the Swiss Science and Technology Council.

In concluding his editorial for the February 10, 2012 issue of Science he wrote: "We should no longer tolerate lectures that drown the audience in a flood of unnecessary information and technical terms. Effective communication is a bridge between different disciplines and is essential to the advance of science... In science, simple and clear language in both spoken and written communication is not only a matter of style—it is also a matter of substance."