Let’s understand other cultures, pleads John Durant

Context counts for a lot in the field of public engagement with science and technology. Since moving to the United States in 2005, to become Director of the MIT Museum and a professor (again), I’ve had to rethink what public engagement with science might mean in a different national and institutional setting.

Similar yet different

Similarities include, of course, a common concern with the proper place of science and technology in public (including cultural, economic and political) affairs, and a common sense of malaise around the state of formal science education in the public schools. Differences include rather less emphasis in the US (at least in the recent past) on various more-or-less experimental forms of public consultation on scientific and technological issues, and far greater reliance on formal (especially legal) mechanisms of dispute resolution.

Strikingly, the patterns of particular public concerns about science and technology appear to have been very different in the two countries over the past couple of decades. In the UK, for example, the issue of GM food came to dominate the headlines in the late-1990s; but at the same time, it passed almost unnoticed in the US. Again, research on human embryonic stem cells has proceeded relatively smoothly in the UK, albeit partly as a result of carefully managed public consultation; but in the US, this same issue has been the subject of almost endless
– and often extremely bitter – public and political disagreement. The list of contrasts could easily be extended.

Creation Museum

As I write, I’ve just returned from leading an undergraduate study tour of a new ‘Creation Museum’ that opened last year in Petersburg, Kentucky. The brainchild of Australian Ken Ham, President and Founder of Answers in Genesis-US, the Creation Museum is a highly professional 60,000 square-foot visitor attraction devoted to the twin theses that the whole of life on earth was created by God in a period of six 24-hour days roughly 6,000 years ago, and that the entire fossil record of prehistoric life was caused by Noah’s Flood some 4,500 years ago. The Creation Museum is extremely popular – on the cold Saturday in mid-January that we were there, it attracted more than 2,000 visitors.

Many European onlookers are astonished that the world’s leading scientific nation should also be the world’s leading centre of resistance to conventional scientific accounts of the origins of the Universe and of life on Earth; but really, astonishment is not in order. The US is a hugely more religious place than most other industrialised countries (including the UK); and many Americans experience no particular difficulty in warmly embracing the experimental sciences and their myriad applications in technology at the same time as firmly but politely rejecting what they regard as the inherently secular and secularizing premises of the historical sciences. 

We need to recognize that there are many, very different, often culturally specific, sometimes painfully contrasting forms of public engagement with science

Different configurations

My point is simply that the ways in which science is configured in the public domain differ widely from place to place; and these different configurations create different challenges and opportunities for public engagement. In the UK, science teachers for the most part get on with their work in the classroom without fear of recrimination or reproach; in the US, by contrast, science teachers are frequently caught up in various kinds of ‘culture wars’ that all-too-often mobilize parents, school boards, citizen action committees, lawyers and the mass media in very confrontational forms of ‘public engagement with science’.

Here in Massachusetts, we’re preparing for our second Cambridge (US!) Science Festival (the dates are 26 April – 4 May 2008). Last year, our first Festival featured a wonderful production of a science oratorio called Lifetime: Songs of Life and Evolution. Written by English composer David Haines and performed to an astonishingly high standard (with David’s active help at the keyboard) by more than 100 parents and children belonging to the North Cambridge Family Opera, this oratorio featured songs about everything from the origin of life (‘Birth’), through the basics of evolutionary theory (‘Taxonomy’, ‘Selfish Gene’, ‘Lake’), to an evolutionarily inspired plea for the conservation of biodiversity (‘4 Billion Years’).

In the performance of Lifetime, as in the presentations of the Creation Museum, passion, conviction and sincerity were on display in abundance.

We need to recognize that there are many, very different, often culturally specific, sometimes painfully contrasting forms of public engagement with science. Before proceeding to embrace some and excoriate others, a little more understanding on our part is probably in order.

John Durant is Director of the MIT Museum, Executive Director of the Cambridge Science Festival and Adjunct Professor, Science, Technology & Society Program MIT