The Canon (2 page)

Am I sounding self-pitying, a sour-grapes-turned-defensive whine? Of course: a good offense begins with a nasal defensiveness. If I was going to write a book about the scientific basics, I had to believe that there was a need for such a book, and I do. If I believed there is a need for a primer, a guided whirligig through the scientific canon, then obviously I must believe there to be a large block of unprimed real estate in the world, vast prairies and deep arroyos of scientific ignorance and scientific illiteracy and technophobia and eyes glazing over and whales having their nursing privileges rescinded. In the civic imagination, science is still considered dull, geeky, hard, abstract, and, conveniently, peripheral, now, perhaps, more than ever. In a 2005 survey of 950 British students ages thirteen through sixteen, for example, 51 percent said they thought science classes were "boring," "confusing," or "difficult"—feelings that intensified with each year of high school. Only 7 percent thought that people working in science were "cool," and when asked to pick out the most famous scientist from a list of names that included Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton, many respondents instead chose Christopher Columbus.

Scientists are quick to claim mea culpas, to acknowledge that they bear some responsibility for the public allergy toward their profession. We've failed, they say. We've been terrible at communicating our work to the masses, and we're pathetic when it comes to educating our nation's youth. We've been too busy with our own work. We have to publish papers. We have to write grant proposals. We're punished by "the system," the implacable academic track that rewards scientists for focusing on research to the exclusion of everything else, including teaching or public outreach or writing popular books that get made into
Nova
specials. Besides, very few of us are as tele-elegant as Brian "String King" Greene, are we? All of which amounts to: guilty as charged. We haven't done our part to enlighten the laity.

A fair question to interject here is: Need we do anything at all? Does it matter if the great majority of people know little or nothing about science or the scientific mindset? If the average Joe or Sophie doesn't know the name of the closest star (the sun), or whether tomatoes have genes (they do), or why your hand can't go through a tabletop (because the electrons in each repel each other), what difference does it make? Let the specialists specialize. A heart surgeon knows how to repair an artery, a biologist knows how to run a gel, a jet pilot knows how to illuminate the
FASTEN SEAT BELT
sign at the exact moment you've decided to get up and go to the bathroom. Why can't the rest of us clip our coupons and calories in peace?

The arguments for greater scientific awareness and a more comfortable relationship with scientific reasoning are legion, and many have been flogged so often they're beginning to wheeze. A favorite thesis has it that people should know more about science because many of the vital issues of the day have a scientific component: think global warming, alternative energy, embryonic stem cell research, missile defense, the tragic limitations of the dry cleaning industry. Hence, a more scientifically sophisticated citizenry would be expected to cast comparatively wiser votes for Socratically wise politicians. They would demand that their elected representatives know the differences between a blastocyst, a fetus, and an orthodontist, and that one is a five-day-old, hollow ball of cells from which coveted stem cells can be extracted and theoretically inveigled to grow into the body tissue or organ of choice; the next is a developing prenate that has implanted in the mother's uterus; and the third is never covered by your company's dental plan.

Others propose that a scientifically astute public would be relatively shielded against superstitious, wishful thinking, flimflammery, and fraud. They would realize that the premise behind astrology was ludicrous, and that the doctor or midwife or taxi driver who helped deliver you exerted a far greater pull on you at your moment of birth than did the sun, moon, or any of the planets. They would accept that the fortune in their cookie at the Chinese restaurant was written either by a computer
or a new hire at the Wonton Food factory in Queens. They would calculate their odds of winning the lottery, see how ridiculously tiny they were, and decide to stop buying lottery tickets, at which point the education budgets of at least thirty of our fifty states would collapse. This last figure, alas, is not a joke, suggesting that if a pandemic of rational thinking should suddenly grip our nation, politicians might have to resort to dire measures to replace the income from state lotteries and state-owned slot machines, including—bwah-ha-ha!—raising taxes.

Lucy Jones, a seismologist at the California Institute of Technology, knows too well how resistant people can be to reason, and how readily they dive down a rabbit hole in search of axioms, conspiracy theories, the rabbit's fabled foot. A hearty, fiftyish woman with short, peach-colored hair and a rat-a-tat cadence, Jones serves as the United States Geological Survey's "scientist-in-charge" for all of Southern California, in which capacity she promotes the cause of earthquake preparedness. She has also been a designated USGS punching bag, officiating at media squalls and confronting public panic whenever the continental plate on which Southern California is perched gives a nasty shake. Like seismologists everywhere, she is trying to improve geologists' ability to predict major earthquakes, to spot the early warning signs in time to evacuate cities or otherwise take steps to protect people, their domiciles, that treasured set of highball glasses from the 1964 World's Fair. Jones has heard enough earthquake myths to shake a trident at: that fish in China can sense when a temblor is coming, for instance, or that earthquakes strike only early in the morning. "People tend to remember the early-morning earthquakes because those are the ones that woke them up and scared them the most," Jones said. "When you show them the data indicating that, in fact, an earthquake is as likely to happen at six
P.M.
as six
A.M.
, they still insist there must be some truth to the story because their mothers and grandmothers and great-uncle Milton always said it was true. Or they will redefine 'early morning' to mean anything from midnight until lunchtime. And, by gosh, it's true: many earthquakes that occur, occur between twelve
A.M.
and twelve
P.M.
Uncle Milton was right!"

The public also believes that seismologists are much better at predicting earthquakes than they claim, but that they perversely keep their prognostications to themselves because they don't want to "stir a panic."

"I got a letter from a woman saying, 'I know you can't tell me when the next earthquake is going to be,'" Jones said, "'but will you tell me when your children go to visit out-of-town relatives?' She assumed I'd
quietly use my insider's knowledge on behalf of my own family, while denying it to everybody else. People would rather believe the authorities were lying to them than to accept the uncertainty of the science." With a minimum of scientific training, Jones said, people would realize that the words "science" and "uncertainty" deserve linkage in a dictionary and that the only reason she would send her children to visit out-of-town relatives would be to visit out-of-town relatives.

Many scientists also argue that members of the laity should have a better understanding of science so they appreciate how important the scientific enterprise is to our nation's economic, cultural, medical, and military future. Our world is fast becoming a technical Amazonia, they say, a pitiless panhemispheric habitat in which being on a first-name basis with scientific and technical principles may soon prove essential to one's socioeconomic survival. "Soon after the Industrial Revolution, we in the West reached a point where reading was a fundamental process of human communication," Lucy Jones said. "If you couldn't read, you couldn't participate in ordinary human discourse, let alone get a decent job.

"We're going through another transformation in expectations right now," she continued, "where reasoning skills and a grasp of the scientific process are becoming things that everybody needs."

Scientists are hardly alone in their conviction that America's scientific eminence is one of our greatest sources of strength. Science and engineering have given us the integrated circuit, the Internet, protease inhibitors, statins, spray-on Pam (it works for squeaky hinges, too!), Velcro, Viagra, glow-in-the-dark slime, a childhood vaccine syllabus that has left slacker students with no better excuse for not coming to class than a "persistent Harry Potter headache," computer devices named after fruits or fruit parts, and advanced weapons systems named after stinging arthropods or Native American tribes.

Yet the future of our scientific eminence depends not so much on any cleverness in applied science as on a willingness to support basic research, the pi-in-the-sky investigations that may take decades to yield publishable results, marketable goodies, employable graduate students. Scientists and their boosters propose that if the public were more versed in the subtleties of science, it would gladly support generous annual increases in the federal science budget; long-term, open-ended research grants; and sufficient investment in infrastructure, especially better laboratory snack machines. They would recognize that the basic researchers of today help generate the prosperity of tomorrow, not to mention elucidating the mysteries of life and the universe, and that you
can't put a price tag on genius and serendipity, except to say it's much bigger than Congress's science allotment for the current fiscal year.

Yes, let's cosset the scientists of today and let's home-grow the dreamers of tomorrow, the next generation of scientists. For by fostering a more science-friendly atmosphere, surely we would encourage more young people to pursue science careers, and keep us in fighting trim against the ambitious and far more populous upstarts India and China. We need more scientists! We need more engineers! Yet with each passing year, fewer and fewer American students opt to study science. As a National Science Board advisory panel warned Congress in 2004, "We have observed a troubling decline in the number of U.S. citizens who are training to become scientists and engineers," while the number of jobs requiring such training has soared. At this point, a third or more of the advanced science and engineering degrees earned each year in the United States are awarded to foreign students, as are more than half of the postdoctoral slots. And while there is nothing wrong with the international complexion that prevails in any scientific institution, foreign students often opt to take their expertise and credentials back to their grateful nation of origin. "These trends," the Science Board said, "threaten the economic welfare and security of our country."

Who can blame Americans for shunning science when, for all the supposed market demand, research jobs remain so poorly paid? After their decade or more of higher education, postdoctoral fellows can expect to earn maybe $40,000; and even later in their careers, scientists often remain stubbornly in the stratum of the five-figure salary. David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate and the former president of Caltech, who spent much of his early career at MIT, observed that the classic bakery for an upper-crust life, Phillips Academy prep school in Andover, Massachusetts, where his daughter was a student, has an excellent science program, one of the best. "But you never see Andover graduates at MIT," he said. "Academy alumni with quantitative skills go on to become stockbrokers. There are damned few patrician scientists."

Beyond better pay, science needs more cachet. Science advocates insist that if science were seen as more glamorous, racier, and more avant-garde than it is today, it might attract more participants, more brilliant young minds and nimble young fingers willing to click pipettes for twenty hours at a stretch. "Things were different while I was growing up," said Andy Feinberg, a geneticist at Johns Hopkins University. "It was the time of
Sputnik,
the race into space, and everybody was caught up in science. They thought it was important. They thought it was exciting. They thought it was cool. Somehow we must reinvigorate that
spirit. The culture of discovery drives our country forward, and we can't afford to lose it."

These are all important, exciting, spirited arguments for promoting greater scientific awareness. I'd love to see more young Americans become scientists, especially the girl who serves as the vessel of my DNA and as a deduction on my tax return. I'd also be happy to see voters make smarter and more educated choices in Novembers to come than they have in the past.

And yet. As Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate and professor of physics at the University of Texas, points out, many issues of a supposedly scientific slant cannot be decided by science at all. "When it comes to something like the debate over an antiballistic missile defense system," he said, "I've been more bothered by the fact that our leaders seem to be the sort of people who don't read history rather than by the fact that they don't understand X-ray lasers." Can science really decide an issue like whether we should extract stem cells from a human blastocyst? All science can tell you about that blastocyst is, yep, it's human. It has human DNA in it. Science cannot tell you how much gravitas that blastocyst should be accorded. Science cannot settle the debate over the relative "right" of a blastocyst to its cellular integrity and uncertain future—deep freeze for possible implantation in a willing womb at some later date? or a swift bon voyage down the fertility clinic drainpipe?—versus the "right" of a patient with a harrowing condition like multiple sclerosis or Parkinson's disease to know that scientists have unfettered, federally financed access to stem cells and may someday spin that access into new therapies against the disease. This is a matter of conscience, politics, religious conviction, and, when all else fails, name-calling.

In sum, I'm not sure that knowing about science will turn you into a better citizen, or win you a more challenging job, or prevent the occasional loss of mental faculties culminating in the unfortunate purchase of a pair of white leather pants. I'm not a pragmatist, and I can't make practical arguments of the broccoli and flossing kind. If you're an adult nonscientist, even the most profound midlife crisis is unlikely to turn you into a practicing scientist; and unless you're a scientist, you don't
need
to know about science. You also don't need to go to museums or listen to Bach or read a single slyly honied Shakespeare sonnet. You don't need to visit a foreign country or hike a desert canyon or go out on a cloudless, moonless night and get drunk on star champagne. How many friends do you need?