The International Conference on Science Communication 2012 (Journées Hubert Curien)

Science as a whole is coming to realise the importance of science communication and there are always new science conferences taking place with workshops and lectures designed to teach researchers about the common mistakes in public speaking and how to avoid them. Nicola reports from a recent conference in France and finds out about proteins and worm lizards along the way.

Name: Nicola Hodson

Date: 2nd to 7th September 2012

Location: Nancy, France

Website: http://www.jhc2012.eu/index.php/en/

This conference, which was attended by people from over 60 countries, had the aim of equipping both scientific researchers and PhD students with the skills to communicate their research to a wider audience.

It is well known that scientists often struggle when it comes to explaining their work to those outside their field. Consequently it becomes difficult to interest non-scientists in current research and also recruit the younger generation into scientific careers. This conference was designed to provide training in science communication for postgraduate students and through a huge repertoire of speakers, provide inspiration to scientists at all stages of their careers.

The conference began with workshops targeted at a selection of students across a range of scientific backgrounds. Personally, I took part in the writing workshops which were run by Jenni Metcalf, director or e-connect communication and Science journalist Toss Gasgoine. The workshop opened with a lecture about ‘machine translation of language’ given by a PhD student at the University of Lorraine. Having all previously encountered Google translate and other online translation tools we all excitedly sat down to listen to him. However from the array of jargon and text-filled slides it soon became apparent that he had been chosen as an example of how not to put across your work as a scientist! When asked bravely at the end of his talk “so what is it you actually do for your PhD project?!” he smiled, nodded, then promptly displayed a slide covered extensively in mathematical formulae. “Ah…thanks, but that didn’t really help…”

Predictably the following task was to write up the talk into an article, ensuring that the message came across in a slightly more accessible way! Using examples including the famous mistranslation from Russian of the biblical phrase “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” into “the vodka is strong but the meat is rotten” the group managed to turn a very complicated, inaccessible bit of research into something a lot more fun and interesting.

Potentially, if the PhD student had read the articles we had produced after his presentation he might have felt we’d slightly over-simplified his 4 years of research. This is one of the many problems faced when writing about Science where researchers insist on accuracy but the audience deserves clear uncluttered explanations. Our next task exemplified this problem further, when we tried our hands at writing press releases.

The members of the writing workshop group were paired up and given the task of writing a press release about the other person’s research. I was lucky enough to be paired up with an ecologist who was studying a rather bizarre creature native to Australia known as the endangered pink-tailed worm lizard (Aprasia parapulchella). He was investigating the environmental factors leading to its demise and using these to create a model to predict which areas are most suitable or unsuitable for its conservation – fairly easy to grab people’s interest with a press release. Unfortunately for him he had to get his head around the slightly abstract protein that I’m studying for my PhD. We exchanged articles at the end to see what we had come up with and to my astonishment I appeared to be “curing” a whole host of medical conditions! Amazing really, since I believed I was just studying the contribution of a small proton pump within a cell.

This exercise was important however, because it highlighted the eternal struggle between the media and scientists. There is a fine balance between accuracy and inciting public interest in the work. Scientists often complain of “sensationalism” whilst the journalist tries to link the work to something that the public are interested in, such as disease or disaster. However the scientists are desperately trying to bring what they consider to be quite a modest contribution to Science, back into context.

It was this “struggle” which probably led to a few of the heated arguments between the workshop organisers and the students – it was pointed our that some of the press releases we had written still contained scientific jargon – however the scientists insisted that there “was not possibly another word that would suffice” and that ”some scientific words are so specific that there is no other word that means the same thing”. The word under fire was “paralogue” They certainly had a point, there has to be a fine balance between accuracy and accessibility, yet which words are counted as jargon and which are not? We use the words “stem cells” quite freely but other scientific words generally aren’t allowed.

The rest of the conference after the workshops included both lectures and seminars from speakers including Jan Riise, a science communication expert in Sweden who is one of the co-founders of the International Science Festival In Gothenberg. He spoke about the scientific exhibitions he sets up in shopping centres in the middle of cities to try and grab the attention of children and get them considering science as “fun”. Additionally there was Dr Kai Erenli from Austria whose work centres around creating virtual worlds for scientific collaboration – here you create your own avatar and can communicate with scientists and journalists all around the world from the comfort of your office!

Overall, the conference, hosted by the University of Lorraine, was most impressive and very different to other scientific conferences I’ve attended. It provided inspiration and valuable insights into many methods of scientific communication and we all came away feeling like there was no excuse not to be talking about Science!

(Conference logo sourced from website. Image of a pink-tailed worm lizard from John in Canberra via Flickr)