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ONE OUT of three people in a recent American survey said they believed
that astrology was ‘sort of’ scientific. In a similar survey of Britons,
only 63 per cent knew whether the Earth went around the Sun and fewer than
a third knew that antibiotics do not kill viruses. Such scientific ‘illiteracy’
worries policy makers concerned that the demographic time bomb will worsen
the skills shortage, especially in science, information technology and engineering.
The Royal Society, in its report on The Public Understanding of Science
in 1985, claimed that people must understand science to be able to participate
fully in social decisions. It would help, too, if those responsible for
public policy knew something about science.

Scientists have two more reasons to popularise their activities. As
cuts in public funding bite deeper, scientists have come to realise the
need to justify what they spend. But that need for greater public accountability
comes at a time of increasing disquiet about the activities of science in,
for example, genetic engineering, experiments on human embryos, or the use
of animals in research. Scientists are well aware how adverse publicity
contributes to shifts in public attitudes towards science and science policy.
Recent surveys of attitudes towards nuclear power in France, for example,
suggest a decline in support following Chernobyl. If people knew more about
science, the argument goes, they might be more willing to support it.

The surveys do seem to indicate public misunderstanding of what scientists
see as basic facts about the world . These surveys can be useful; we can
point to public misunderstanding of science to argue for a wider science
education, for more interactive science centres, and so on. But surveys
have two fundamental problems. They tell us little about how people use,
and make sense of, the science they encounter in their lives. And the encounter
between science and ‘the public’ is rather one-sided, portraying the public
as inevitably deficient.

Scientists themselves are not much more knowledgeable than ‘the public’
in fields other than their own, suggests Jean-Marc Levy-Leblond, a physicist
at the University of Nice. Even within physics, say, specialists in particle
physics may have forgotten much of their classical physics. ‘Are we,’ he
asks, ‘creating some misunderstandings about the misunderstandings of science?’
Perhaps we also need studies of the scientists’ understanding of the public?
Recent research shows that lay people are not really as ‘ignorant’ as the
surveys suggest. Most people become quite conversant with the science that
is relevant to their lives. Moreover, it is misleading to think that we
can talk simply about ‘the public understanding of science’ – irreverently
referred to at a recent conference at the Science Museum in London by its
acronym, PUS. Instead, researchers now stress the needs of different ‘publics’
and the different ways in which they understand different sciences.

A historical perspective is enlightening. In the 19th century, public
interest in science was strong. Science clubs and magazines were established,
and itinerant lecturers spoke on various scientific topics. But this promoted
largely what David Layton and his colleagues at the University of Leeds
have called ‘science for specific social purposes’. For example, lecturers
taught applied chemistry to prospectors in a way that was different from
the way they taught chemistry to public health inspectors.

What emerged as science education during the past century was not ‘science
for social purposes’, the researchers suggest, but abstract knowledge removed
from its social context and aimed at the upper classes. That abstraction,
and the class bias, contributed to public ‘failure’ to understand science
– which the Royal Society had begun to lament as early as 1902. The response
of the scientific community to that failure was to emphasise how beneficial
and progressive science was. The American Chemical Society, for example,
established a ‘public relations’ office in 1915 to promote public understanding
of the chemicals industry, while in Britain, the Research Defence Society
was established in 1908 to stress the benefits of scientific research based
on animal experiments.

Bruce Lewenstein, a historian at Cornell University in the US, believes
that nearly all attempts to popularise science this century have underlined
the benefits. The emergence in recent decades of social movements largely
opposed to science, such as environmentalism, has probably strengthened
this response. ‘Public understanding of science’, he says, has meant ‘public
appreciation of the benefits provided by science’.

Emphasising the benefits might profit science in the short term: but
it displays a perception of the public as gullible and naive, and as accepting
passively the authority of experts. Even so-called ‘interactive’ science
museums can reinforce this message: Drew Ann Wake and James Bradburne, designers
of museum exhibitions in Canada and France, believe that such exhibits have
tended to minimise the contradictory and complex nature of science by stressing
the benefits. This, they suggest, reduces public awareness of ‘the true
nature of the scientific enterprise’, including its failures. Wake and Bradburne
are equally critical of newer exhibits which often involve little more than
pushing buttons. ‘We can’t expect an upsurge in scientific understanding
if all we offer is arcade games,’ they argue.

One thing that recent research into public perceptions of science has
shown is that people are often rather better at knowing how to know, or
how to make sense of contradictory information, than the results of surveys
suggest. But they tend to do so when the need arises, obtaining information
and relating it to their own experience. Helen Lambert and Hilary Rose,
at the University of Bradford, for example, are studying how people who
discover that they have a genetic predisposition to high levels of cholesterol
in the blood deal with relevant scientific information.

People with this condition, familial hypercholesterol-aemia (FH), find
out what they need to know to understand their own condition: their knowledge
is ‘good enough’, Lambert and Rose suggest. Such people learn relevant details
about nutrition and about how genetic diseases are transmitted, but they
are less concerned about the details of genetics. They become aware, too,
that much scientific information is provisional: many had learned from newspaper
reports that medical opinion now accepts that mono unsaturated fats such
as olive oil may be beneficial, for instance.

Although gaining the scientific knowledge is in some ways empowering
– it gives people with FH a greater sense of control over their ‘treatment’,
for example – people were sometimes sceptical. Younger people, especially,
were often unconvinced of the validity of the blood test ‘counts’ that purport
to measure cholesterol levels in the blood – ‘it’s like firing numbers into
fresh air’, commented one.

So whether scientific knowledge contributes to individuals’ wellbeing
and allows them to make informed choices about their lives depends upon
who they are, and what use they can make of the knowledge. Knowledge that
cannot be used is unlikely to be empowering (and may not even be remembered).
And sometimes, even when people have access to knowledge and have understood
it, they may choose to reject it, for good reasons.

Emily Martin, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, has studied
how women dealt with scientific information about their bodies. She asked
women to explain how they would describe menstruation to young girls. Middle-class
women, she found, typically answered by describing the physiological changes
in medical language; they spoke, for example, of hormonal fluctuations and
of the breakdown of the uterine wall. But working-class women did this very
rarely. They focused instead on the social signficance of menstruation –
that it is a sign of ‘becoming a woman’ and ‘part of growing up’. Martin
does not believe that working-class women have never encountered the scientific
account; many mentioned how often they were taught about it at school. But,
she points out, medical accounts are often ‘downright offensive’ to women,
written in terms of ‘deterioration’, ‘loss’, ‘degeneracy’ and ‘failure’.
Working-class women may not use scientific descriptions, she says, because
they are resisting the scientific account and its pejorative language, rather
than because they do not understand it.

People may resist scientific explanations if it is not clear how these
could help them. Apprentices at the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant
in northwest Cumbria show what researchers at the University of Lancaster
have called a ‘vigorous non-interest’ in the physics of gamma and beta radioactivity,
despite their obvious involvement with it. Brian Wynne and his colleagues
were at first surprised by the apprentices’ response. But what the apprentices
were heeding, the researchers found, was the set of organisational procedures
that governed their work at the reprocessing plant. Scientific understanding
had already been distilled into these procedures, and the apprentices had
to trust the rest of the organisation to do its job properly it they were
to work there.

The researchers at Lancaster were also interested in how Cumbrian sheep
farmers dealt with scientific knowledge – and with scientific experts –
in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster. The government’s initial response
was to restrict the movement of sheep in the Cumbrian hills for three weeks.
But this directive had to be revised as radioactivity persisted in the soil
through biological recycling. Today, 150 farms still face restrictions,
and researchers now think that radioactivity may persist for some years
yet.

The farmers responded to the information from scientific ‘experts’ with
scepticism, not least because it rapidly became apparent that the advice
proferred by the scientists showed that they knew little about sheep farming.
Keeping lambs for even a few weeks longer, for instance, means overstocking
the fells, with the consequent risk of starvation, a point which government
advisers seemed to ignore.

Cumbrian sheep farmers particularly mistrusted the certainty implied
by scientific pronouncement, which was quite unlike the variability with
which they worked daily, while trying to predict the vagaries of the weather,
for example. That mistrust was confirmed by the failure of the ‘experts’
to make the right predictions, and by the apparently arbitrary way they
monitored levels of radioactivity in lambs.

Farmers were even more sceptical when scientists claimed they could
tell that the radioactivity came from Chernobyl, on the basis of the ratio
of isotopes of caesium (one isotope decays faster than the other, so, in
principle, the ratio can pinpoint the source of the radioactivity). Many
of the farmers had noticed that the farms which were most contaminated occupy
a crescent shape due east of Sellafield. ‘I think there’s been low-level
fallout ever since that place opened, and Chernobyl has just gone on top
of it,’ said one farmer.

Public mistrust was exacerbated by the government’s failure to release
data on fallout for the high fells from before 1986: there had been very
little monitoring. ‘A lot of people have it in their minds that they (the
authorities) were just waiting for something like this to happen’ to shift
the blame, commented one farmer. The farmers, like other groups of ‘the
public’, pick up bits of scientific information and use them when appropriate.
They also reject others. So is there cause for concern over ‘public understanding
of science’? Researchers in the field would generally agree that attempts
to improve people’s access to scientific knowledge, or to any other kind
of knowledge, is in principle a good thing.

But we must not, urges Levy-Leblond, ask more of the public than we
ask from scientists themselves. We do not, for example, generally teach
scientists much about the social and political implications and context
of what they do. Nor should we see ignorance of particular facts as failure
or incapability. On the contrary, Wynne points out, people may actively
construct and defend that ‘ignorance’ in certain situations. In the case
of the Sellafield apprentices, the science was still there, but ‘underground’.
The issue, says Wynne, is not public understanding of science but ‘the basis
of trust and authority across the social division of labour in the organisation’.

So the problem lies not with the attempts to ‘popularise’ science, but
with the way that it tends to be done. People do not want to be told a collection
of abstract ‘facts’ by an elite band of experts. Rather, different ‘publics’
may want access to science in different ways, or to different bits of scientific
information, and they will make their own use, and sense, of it. Self-help
groups of various kinds already do this – groups formed of people with particular
medical conditions, for example, or women’s health groups. Pressure groups
focusing on the environment or food, for instance, are a powerful way of
finding a voice. But we need to find new ways of enhancing the public’s
access to scientific ‘facts’ that are. One encouraging development is the
notion of ‘science shops’ .

The challenge for scientists eager to popularise is to learn to understand
the public – or publics. Popularisation can begin only with what they want
to know and the context in which they want to know it. But the task should
not be left to the scientific community alone. Scientists, understandingly
intent on advertising the benefits of science, inevitably have vested interests
in the directions that research and development take. Those interests may
clash with public beliefs and may not always work towards the greater good
of society at large. A dramatic increase in ‘scientific literacy’ – in public
access to scientific and technical information in its appropriate social
context – can move Britain towards genuine democracy.

Dr Lynda Birke is a biologist who lectures in continuing education at
the University of Warwick.

* * *

1: Surveying the extent of public ignorance

THE British survey, carried out by John Durant and his colleagues at
the University of Oxford in 1988, makes gloomy reading, at least at first
glance. Not only were many of the people sampled unable to answer some of
the questions probing their knowledge of scientific facts, but very few,
says Durant, seemed to understand what it means ‘to study something scientifically’:
only 3 per cent of the 2000 people questioned associated science with testing
theories, for example.

But less abstract questions revealed that many people did indeed have
an idea of what ‘scientific method’ is meant to be. For example, when respondents
were asked to decide between alternative ways in which a doctor might be
sure a drug was working, almost two-thirds opted for a comparison between
people taking a drug and those not taking a drug – the basis of clinical
trials.

Durant also discovered that people were twice as likely to pick the
right answer (outlining an experimental comparison) if the question was
medical. People faced with a similar question about comparing two metals
were more likely to pick the ‘wrong’ answer, and conclude that the practitioner
would rely on a prior knowledge of metals. As Durant says, ‘people don’t
know what metallurgists do’.

People are not only more familiar with medicine, but, to the researchers’
surprise, they also see it as ‘very scientific’. When people were asked
to rank different disciplines as more or less rigorously scientific, medicine
was given a higher ‘scientific’ rating even than physics.

When Durant and his colleagues looked more closely at these data they
found that those who did better on their factual knowledge (‘science understanding’
scores) were more likely to discriminate between the disciplines of science.
High rating for medicine came predominantly from those whose ‘understanding’
scores were low.

Beliefs about science in turn own much to media accounts, and newspapers
and TV probably devote more coverage of advances in medicine than to other
fields. Jean-Marie Trouve, at the University of Poitiers, argues that, in
France at least, the media tend to portray physics and chemistry exclusively
through their industrial and technological applications. This might explain
the results of his survey, which suggested that many French people see physics
and chemistry as technology. The French media portray medicine, on the other
hand, as scientific: we can speculate, Trouve suggests, that ‘studies of
the human body and mind will occupy the vacuum left by hard sciences and
become Science par excellence’.

It is easy, too, to misinterpret surveys by assuming that people always
act on their professed beliefs. Jon Miller at the Public Opinion Laboratory
at the University of Northern Illinois conducted similar surveys for the
American National Science Foundation. Disturbing though it seems that more
than a third of adult Americans sampled thought astrology to be scientific,
few (about 5 per cent) actually used astrological prediction to guide what
they did. Yet three-quarters said that they used scientific information
from animal testing of drugs and food to change what food or medicines they
consumed.

* * *

2: Out shopping for science

‘SCIENCE SHOPS’ are a novel sort of resource centre, intended to provide
public access to scientific expertise and information. Science shops have
operated in the Netherlands for many years, although similar ventures in
France during the 1980s were less successful. The first science shop in
the UK was set up by Peter Stringer, of the Policy Research Institute in
Belfast in 1988, to cover the whole of Northern Ireland. There is now a
similar shop in Merseyside. Both are funded by the Nuffield Foundation.

The idea behind science shops is to put voluntary and community groups
in touch with suitable academics who are willing to help them to solve a
particular problem. People concerned with the effects of local pollution,
for example, might want help in analysing soil samples, which could enable
them to organise opposition to those responsible for the pollution.

It is too soon to say whether the British ventures will succeed. According
to John Stewart, a biologist who worked with French science shops for several
years, one of the biggest stumbling blocks was ‘a quasi-mystical belief
in the ‘magic-bullet effectiveness’ of ‘science’ by members of the public:
people sometimes did not want to know that there were many, complex answers.
‘The communication gap’ between scientists and the public, he says, ‘is
even worse than we imagined’.

Dutch science shops have been more successful. One reason for this,
suggests Stringer, is that they have concentrated on ‘doing work that will
benefit groups’, rather than dealing with individuals’ idiosyncrasies. Many
of the Dutch shops have ‘theme groups’ dealing specifically with queries
about the environment or health, say.

The Northern Ireland shop is trying to follow the Dutch model. Awareness
of the project in Northern Ireland has been spread ‘very much by word of
mouth’, and requests for help are still fewer than staff would like. Stringer
is optimistic, however, seeing the establishment of the Belfast shop as
a ‘demonstration project’.