Props to TechAlliance and BIOTECanada for booking Adam Bly to speak at the launch of National Biotechnology Week. I’m very grateful to have attended; I came away rejuvenated with energy and ideas…
Bly made the case we need to reorient “our collective ideology, our collective imagination,” towards science — towards “Big Science.” Some of his remarks were captured on Twitter by David Millar (sitting next to me):
- “Science is culture… a catalyst for economic growth.”
- “We need to rekindle the value that knowledge is good.”
- “We need — a new scientific lens for the 21st Century.”
He admitted, given the audience, that he was “preaching to the choir.” Certainly I was one of the already-converted, having made a similar case in December:
For the past few years we’ve been passionate about gadgets and fashion: we want toys and a distinctive personal image, and consumers have paid incredible sums of money to create a robust and prolific supply system to meet those demands. Now if some of that passion could be turned to science — energy and healthcare being the most immediate and relevant fields — then more money and human resources will gravitate towards addressing the greater demand for scientific discovery and innovation.
… The principle I have in mind is that if we spent as much time wishing, thinking, and talking in public about medical research and green technology as we spend talking about jeans, cars, and iPhone apps, that scientific sentiment would seep into our cultural values and affect people’s beliefs about what jobs are cool and what kind of investments are sexy.
Seed Magazine — which Bly founded in 2001 — is proof that there’s a cultural market for science. Society has the capacity to love science, it just has to be calibrated the right way to take hold.
Because science is more than just what scientists do. It’s more than what happens in the lab — or what ends up in the library (often to be read by no more than a few dozen people). It’s an attitude, a mindset, an “approach to the world… a foundation for thinking,” as it was for one of Bly’s childhood role models.
That’s one of the things we need: more role models — or better role models — or better ways of finding and interacting with them. A couple of books mentioned today are good places to start:
- Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, by E.O. Wilson
- The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution, by John Brockman
From there the spokes go out… e.g. here…
Another way to recalibrate the popular mindset towards science — this was more explicitly promoted in the talk — is via data visualization, aka infographics. Check out Seed’s ScienceBlogs community; there’s been a recent series there on data visualization, and Smashing Magazine ran a recent list of useful resources for web designers.
Much more to come…
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