Championing Science

Communicating Your Ideas to Decision Makers

Roger D. Aines, Amy L. Aines

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780520970182
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Studi sulla comunicazione

Championing Science shows scientists how to persuasively communicate complex scientific ideas to decision makers in government, industry, and education. This comprehensive guide provides real-world strategies to help scientists develop the essential communication, influence, and relationship-building skills needed to motivate nonexperts to understand and support their science. Instruction, interviews, and examples demonstrate how inspiring decision makers to act requires scientists to extract the essence of their work, craft clear messages, simplify visuals, bridge paradigm gaps, and tell compelling narratives. The authors bring these principles to life in the accounts of science champions such as Robert Millikan, Vannevar Bush, scientists at Caltech and MIT, and others. With Championing Science, scientists will learn how to use these vital skills to make an impact.

PART ONE

Fundamental Concepts for Championing Science

1

Becoming a Champion

Robert Millikan had a problem. In the early 1920s, the established titans of California learning, Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley, had thwarted his attempt to put his new university on a solid footing through state funding. Millikan was chairman of the Executive Council of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and his plan was to aggressively recruit top-notch scientists to launch Caltech into the first rank of U.S. schools. Experimental physics, Millikan’s specialty, was to be the centerpiece of that effort. George Hale, Millikan’s collaborator in this plan, was drawing attention with his bold new science using the Mt. Wilson telescope, one of the largest in the world. Hale was sure that he could surpass that one-hundred-inch instrument, which he had made for the Carnegie Institute, by building a record-shattering two-hundred-inch telescope. His article in the Atlantic Monthly extolling the scientific discoveries that would be possible with such a behemoth captured the imagination of a public just discovering science—and the post–World War I growth of American education guaranteed that many of the magazine’s readers would have the knowledge to follow and discuss such advanced topics.¹

Millikan was a brilliant scientist. In 1923, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for measuring the charge on the electron. But perhaps his greatest talent was as an organizer and champion for science. He knew that Hale could change the world with his huge new telescope, and he knew that many of his faculty could match that accomplishment. Ultimately, three of the original Caltech professors took home the Nobel Prize. As he looked around his home in Pasadena, he knew that the wealth of Southern California, launched by gold, solidified by railroads, and now being multiplied by oil, movies, and airplanes, was clearly enough to support a major university. How could he inspire the investments that this wealth could support?

The answer, as often happens, lay in dinner and discussion. The new faculty of Caltech met regularly for dinner at a traveling table of twelve. The discussions, and responses from friends occasionally invited to fill the table, suggested to Millikan that the way to encourage interest, and ultimately investment, in science was to invite wealthy residents of Pasadena to dinner. Let them sit in on the excitement and share in the anticipation of new problems and approaches to solving them, and in the course of that intellectual thrill they would realize that they held the key—the funds—to make it happen.

With a fortunately timed $500,000 donation of stocks that Caltech sold just before the crash of ’29, Millikan was able to build the Athenaeum, advertised as a combined faculty and private dining club for Caltech; the Huntington Library, whose founders built the transcontinental railroad; and the Mt. Wilson Observatory. His regular dinners with the Pasadena elite enabled Millikan to fund his new institution without the help of the State of California, despite the desire of Stanford and Berkeley to keep Southern California firmly out of the academic limelight.

By 1936, the institute had established itself as a center for aeronautical (and soon space) science and engineering. Hale and Millikan were able to build the two-hundred-inch Mt. Palomar telescope—the largest telescope in the world for nearly half a century, and still one of the great scientific instruments—without any government funding by convincing the Rockefeller Foundation to finance the project. The discovery of the positron (Carl Anderson), the elucidation of the nature of the chemical bond (Linus Pauling), and the creation of modern seismology (Charles Richter) were all made possible not because the United States Congress felt that the military or the economy needed some scientific groundwork laid but because Millikan was able to share the excitement and promise of new science with wealthy individuals who were inspired by this real-world Buck Rogers. This champion of science would no doubt be just as adept at convincing a politician or some federal agency if he were alive today. His ability to involve others in the thrill of scientific discovery serves as a consummate example of how scientists can bring our excitement and our breakthroughs to key decision makers.

MISSILES, RADAR, AND NUCLEAR DETERRENCE: THE BEGINNING OF BIG GOVERNMENT SCIENCE

Up until the late 1930s, big science remained the bailiwick of the Robert Millikans of the world. Government made sure that agriculture, mining, and the technologies of the industrial revolution got the educational attention they required for safe and somewhat sustainable resource utilization. The land-grant schools taught us how to keep our soil from blowing away. But the physics breakthroughs of the beginning of the twentieth century were made largely without the support of the world’s governments. World War II taught us another lesson: big science led to incredible advances, which ultimately translated into better lives at home—at least once we recovered from the destructive power of advanced weapons.

Suddenly, government was in the science business, led by brilliant minds like Vannevar Bush, who spearheaded U.S. research during World War II and helped create the National Science Foundation with his report Science, the Endless Frontier, which was the beginning of a new approach to government science not just in the United States but around the world.² The new mantra was “Government support of science equals better lives for all.” Without question, that has been true from the eradication of polio to the economic advances of a world where, now, for the first time in history, the majority of the world’s people soon will be middle class.³ (For more on Vannevar Bush, see chapter 16, “High-Impact Examples of Championing for a Cause.”)

During the postwar period, the enormous expenditures of the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, and their equivalents around the world changed the face of science. Science was now a larger fraction of the world’s investments. With this came the need to ensure that the torrent of money created things of value, and that led to formal processes for funding—calls for proposals, peer reviews, funding panels, and agency oversight.

The burden of excitement shifted in this world. Now, the scientist was more responsible for making sure that other scientists thought his or her ideas and practices were solid and defensible. The job of being champions for science fell to politicians, cabinet secretaries, and industry leaders. The president himself was called on to champion the U.S. charge into space in 1961, and a massive bureaucracy was created not only to justify and enliven the idea of space science but also to see it executed in an effective, safe, and, when university or industrial research funding was required, fair manner.

So the task of championing science was taken up by leaders who were often just as interested in creating a boon for their district as in making the world a better place. Scientists were trained to be eminently accurate, fair, and honest—to the betterment of the overall scientific enterprise, which needed a huge cadre of reliable workers to advance the great science of the age. The benefits to humanity were clear. From those dependable hordes of scientists came the transistor, giant growth in food production, and continuous increases in longevity worldwide. Scientists happily let others drive the agenda and champion the need for science and knowledge.

THE NEW AGE OF SCIENCE CHAMPIONSHIP

Many scientists continue to be content living in the world of science agency proposals and careers built on hundreds of publications in their field. Others no longer find this path financially or intellectually satisfying. Venture-funded technology, the demands of dealing with difficult diseases, and the challenges of bringing the benefits of developed nations to the entire world while keeping our climate in check mean we need to move beyond the postwar model of science funded only by giant government programs.

Science is, and must be, much more than providing the best response to the latest call for proposals or, for more mature and influential scientists, participating in writing the text for that call. Science once again needs champions who are scientists—champions who will make the pitch for funding new inventions or advancing the fight against hazards that impact humanity. If scientists can explain why science matters with the accuracy, enthusiasm, promise, and capability of people like Millikan, they can compel decision makers to provide support.

Certainly there is self-interest in this activity. Scientists love science. They love to be paid to practice science and love to have the funding to make incredible scientific advances. But just as Robert Millikan did, scientists must elevate their efforts to bring greater benefits to the world. Millikan’s passion attracted a faculty who were willing to risk oblivion by leaving established positions on the East Coast, San Francisco, and Europe for the orange groves of Pasadena. He brought his enthusiasm to bear on physics, aeronautics, and the exploration of the universe. Along the way, he built a considerable university, but he never made that his primary goal—it was just one of the things that would help make the science happen. For promoters of science, that is one of the great challenges. Successful advocacy without excessive self-interest equals championship.

But responding to calls for proposals that are intended to compare the ideas and capabilities of scientists who are very much alike will never be adequate for this new age. And yet that is what scientists are trained to do in graduate school. This book is intended to help increase any scientist’s ability to make the case for excitement and bring decision makers and colleagues along to become a part of doing great things. Our goal is to unleash a little of Robert Millikan’s spirit in all of us. We ca...