Sir

The time has come for the professionalization of science communicators. Not only are the number of degree programmes in science communication growing, but rudiments of a professional code of conduct have now been published. Although there is nothing new about the advice given in Guidelines on Science and Health Communication, issued in November 2001 by the Social Issues Research Centre in partnership with the Royal Society and the Royal Institution (see http://www.sirc.org/publik/revised_guidelines.shtml), what is striking is that it is directed at science communicators by people who are not themselves full-time science communicators.

This pattern is familiar from the history of such 'mediating' professions as nursing and librarianship. Members of a senior profession typically try to formulate the aims of the newer profession in terms of their own interests. Physicians have tried to set nursing codes, academics librarian codes, and now scientists are trying to set codes for science communication.

At the same time, however, the mediating professions have often provided their own visions, which in significant respects cut against those of the senior professions. For example, Florence Nightingale did not want nurses to make it easier for doctors to administer medicine, but to provide a total healing environment that would eventually prevent the need for doctors. Similarly, Melvil Dewey's cataloguing system envisaged librarians, not as dutiful retrievers of books, but as the last encyclopaedists in a world where knowledge was quickly fragmenting.

To be sure, nursing and librarianship have not been completely successful in their professionalization. Nevertheless, their histories provide valuable lessons for science communicators. The public profile of nurses and librarians was raised as physicians and academics, respectively, became increasingly specialized. This led ambitious members of the mediating profession to occupy the role previously filled by the 'general practitioner' of the senior profession: someone sufficiently familiar both with a broad range of specialist knowledge and with clients' particular needs to make the knowledge meaningful for them.

If the history of the mediating professions is a guide, the idea of science communicators as general practitioners of science may well generate conflict with professional scientists. Whenever someone claims that Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene has done more for biology than most front-line research in the field, we get a taste of those potential battles.

Nevertheless, by involving the general public, science communication is uniquely placed to make good the idea that science is truly universal knowledge. The current guidelines reduce communication to the one-way transmission of accurate information. More ambitious professional guidelines would require a feedback element in any form of science communication, whether it be as letters to the editor, Internet chat rooms or the interactive exhibits now routine in good museums.

The current guidelines pitch the aims of science communication too low. The field should aspire not simply to make people trust science but to make them feel part of it. This is more than encouraging people to become scientists. Science communication will truly come of age when people regard participating in a scientific experiment as a civic duty on par with jury duty. We are far from that day, but it is not too early for full-time science communicators to convene formally to draft some professional codes of conduct.