Arquivo da tag: ciência

Biosemiotics: Searching for meanings in a meadow (New Scientist)

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23 August 2010 by Liz Else

Are signs and meanings just as vital to living things as enzymes and tissues? Liz Else investigates a science in the making

In your own world, enwrapped in myriad others (Image: WestEnd61/Rex Features)

In your own world, enwrapped in myriad others (Image: WestEnd61/Rex Features)


EVERY so often, something shows up on the New Scientist radar that we just can’t identify easily. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a brand new type of flying machine that we are going to have to study closely?

That was our reaction when we first heard about a small conference held in June at the philosophy department of the Portuguese Catholic University in Braga. There, a group of biologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, information technologists and other scholars from all over the world gathered to discuss some revolutionary ideas for developing the hitherto obscure field of biosemiotics.

Unlike most revolutionaries, it soon became clear that this group’s goal was not to overturn the established order. They don’t attack the current way of doing science- they see its value plainly- but they do believe that for biology to become a more fully explanatory science, it needs a more encompassing framework. This framework needs to be able to explain an under-studied aspect of all living organisms: the capacity to navigate their environments through the processing of signs.

Biology, of course, already concerns itself with information: cell signalling, the genetic code, pheromones and human language, for example. What biosemiotics aims to do is to weave these disparate strands into a single coherent theory of biological meaning.

At first glance, the group seems to have chosen an unfortunate and incomprehensible name for its activity- semiotics is the study of signs and symbols that is most commonly associated with linguistic philosophers such as Ferdinand de Saussure. “Biosemiotics”, then, might sound like the name of some arcane mix of biological science and linguistic philosophy. Luckily, though, the true message of biosemiotics is clear: we may do better to stop thinking about the biological world solely in terms of its physical and chemical properties, but see it also as a world made up of biological signs and “meanings”.

One of the nascent field’s leading lights, Donald Favareau of the National University of Singapore, provides a definition on the group’s website. “Biosemiotics is the study of the myriad forms of communications… observable both within and between living systems. It is thus the study of representation, meaning, sense, and the biological significance of sign processes- from intracellular signalling processes to animal display behaviour to human… artefacts such as language and abstract symbolic thought.”

To get a better sense of what this means, it is best to go back to the field’s roots. Biosemiotics traces its earliest influences to the independent efforts of an Estonian-born biologist in the early 20th century and an American philosopher of the 19th century, who wrote much of his work hidden in an attic to avoid his creditors.

Estonian-born Jakob von Uexküll was an animal physiologist whose 1934 book A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A picture book of invisible worlds – and later works – inspired Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, who then went on to win a Nobel prize in 1973 for their studies in animal behaviour, or ethology.

Von Uexküll wrote: “If we stand before a meadow covered with flowers, full of buzzing bees, fluttering butterflies, darting dragonflies, grasshoppers jumping over blades of grass, mice scurrying, and snails crawling about, we would be inclined to ask ourselves the unintended question: Does the meadow present the same view to the eyes of so many various animals as it does to ours?”

“Does the meadow present the same view to so many animals as it does to ours?”

He thought that a naive person would intuitively answer that it is the same meadow to every eye. Physical scientists, he thought, would see all the animals in the meadow as “mere mechanisms, steered here and there by physical and chemical agents, the meadow consists of a confusion of light waves and air vibrations… which operate the various objects in it”.

For von Uexküll, both views were wrong. Each creature in the meadow lived in “its own world filled with the perceptions which it alone knows”, and it was in accordance with that experiential world – and not the entirety of the whole, unseen but physically existing world – that the creature had to coordinate its actions to eat, flee, mate and sustain itself.

For some animals, that subjective perceptual universe, or Umwelt, as von Uexküll called it, writing in German, is narrow. He describes the umwelt of a tick which sits “motionless on the tip of a branch until a mammal passes below it. The smell of the butyric acid awakens it and it lets itself fall. It lands on the coat of its prey, through which it burrows to reach and pierce the warm skin… The pursuit of this simple meaning rule constitutes almost the whole of the tick’s life.” By reacting only to the single odorant of sweat, the tick reduces the countless characteristics of the world of host animals to a simple common denominator in its own world.

So von Uexküll’s meadow is alive with myriad perceptual worlds, with each one, for each species, evolving within, and functioning as, a different web of meaning. To understand why animals are organised the way they are, and why they act on the world as they do, he explained: “Meaning is the guiding star that biology must follow.”

Von Uexküll’s pioneering sensation-action “feedback-cycle” model for explaining the mechanics of biological meaning was revolutionary for its time. Indeed, it anticipated by many decades the science of cybernetics, which studies systems of control. But his model is now considered too mechanical and simplistic by most biosemioticians. To build what they hope might be a more scientifically fertile model, many of them base their understanding on the semiotic logic of the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.

Peirce was born in 1839 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father was a professor of mathematics and astronomy at Harvard University. Peirce junior was a brilliant but rebellious student, who suffered from both neuralgia and depression. Known today as the father of the philosophical school of pragmatism, as a student Peirce made the serious mistake of angering his chemistry professor, who went on to become president of Harvard. During a life-long feud, he ensured that Peirce never gained a permanent post at any university.

For the 55 years after he graduated, Peirce wrote scientific and philosophic dictionary and encyclopaedia entries to support himself and his ongoing studies, which included producing the world’s first photometric star catalogue at Harvard Astronomical Observatory and working as a geodesist for the US Coastal Service. It was a difficult life: he was often without heat and food, and was kept alive thanks to the kindness of his brother, neighbours and benefactors, including his closest friend and admirer, the psychologist William James.

Peirce’s work in logic, mathematics and philosophy ran to an astonishing 60,000 pages. Much of this has been discovered and re-examined only recently, giving rise to the vigorous field of Peircean studies. He saw logic as a formal doctrine of signs, and his theory of signs is important in modern biosemiotics.

Most of us naively conceive of a “sign” as standing for something concrete: a red traffic light for most of us simply means “stop”. In other words, the two things – a sign and its meaning – are directly connected in a sign relationship. Peirce, however, saw a sign as representing a relation between three things.

Take the everyday example given by Jesper Hoffmeyer, a biochemist at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and a leader in biosemiotics, in his book Signs of Meaning in the Universe. Suppose a child breaks out in a rash of red spots and is taken to the doctor by his mother. For the mother, the spots are a sign that her child is sick. The doctor knows they mean that the child has measles. As Peirce put it in its most general form: “a sign is something which stands to someone, for something, in some respect”. The red spots are not automatically something which is a sign of measles to anyone, but only to “someone”, in this case the doctor.

Piece saw all signs as involving a triadic relation: the sign “vehicle” (the red spots); the “object” to which the sign-bearer refers (measles); and the “interpretant”, the system that allows the realisation of the sign-object relation to take place (the doctor’s thinking) and that acts accordingly upon that relation.

He wanted to investigate and uncover the complex logic by which “in every scientific intelligence, one sign gives birth to another, and especially one thought brings forth another”. His insight was to see that even the simplest sign must be considered as a triadic relation, in which the sign vehicle, object and interpreting system all play ineliminable parts – an insight biosemioticians believe science would do well to explore more fully.

This realisation led Peirce away from devising linear chains of logic that relied on just two factors, to the construction of a “sign” logic that is an endlessly branching, multidimensional network. Although Peirce’s work is theoretical, there are clear parallels between von Uexküll’s model of the meadow, filled with different meanings, interpreted by the different biological systems of different creatures, and Peirce’s model of the sign as ultimately a kind of relation that living agents adopt towards things for the accomplishment of various ends and actions.

When Peirce wrote, he was thinking primarily of signs as relations that enable human thought to effectively understand the world. Accordingly, his logic has recently been applied in efforts to understand the origins of human language that reject the idea that language appeared either as a lucky accident that endowed humans with a universal grammar- as posited by the linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky – or as a by-product of an enlarged brain.

Instead, researchers such as Terrence Deacon, a biological anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, have used Peirce’s sign logic to explain how language may have arisen as an evolutionary consequence of pre-linguistic symbolic activity.

But biosemiotics applies the idea of signs and signalling much more widely than just the analysis of human language. Take these sentences from a recent “Perspectives” article in Science magazine: “Living cells are complex systems that are constantly making decisions in response to internal or external signals. Among the most notable carriers of information are… enzymes that receive inputs from cell surface or internal receptors and determine what actions should be taken in response…” (Science, vol 328, p 983).

The broadest scope

Words like “signals”, “information” and “inputs” litter the biology literature. But all of these usages are metaphorical. What biosemioticians really want is an analysis which goes further, says Charbel El-Hani, a biologist at the Federal University of Bahia in Brazil. “The importance of going beyond metaphor and really building a theory of information is underlined by the reiterated claim that biology is a science of information,” El-Hani told New Scientist.

“What biosemioticians really want is an analysis which goes beyond metaphor”

The scope envisioned for the new field is therefore truly broad: a viewpoint which connects everything from biomolecular networks sending signals that control cell behaviour to animal behaviour and human language. That is the agreed goal, but the scientists and philosophers involved each bring their own uniquely interdisciplinary perspective, and so do not always agree on the best way forward. It is safe to say that this new science is very much in ferment.

To get a feel for this, New Scientist asked a range of thinkers attending the Braga conference to explain how they saw the field. More than 20 responded. The wildly different roads they have travelled to reach biosemiotics, and the different areas to which they wanted to apply it, were evident in their responses.

Favareau came to biosemiotics as a result of “growing discontent with the inability of cognitive neuroscience to explain the reality of experiential ‘meaning’ at the same level that it was so successful in, and manifestly committed to, explaining the mechanics of the electrochemical transmission events by which such meanings are asserted (without explanation) to be produced”.

For Gerard Battail, an information theorist at Télécom ParisTech in France, it is the fact that mainstream biology, while loosely using a vocabulary borrowed from communication theory- “pathways”, “codes” and the like- “remains basically concerned with the flow of matter and energy into and between living entities, failing to recognise [that] the information flow is at least as important”.

Frederik Stjernfelt of Aarhus University in Denmark echoes El-Hani: “Notions such as ‘information’, ‘message’, ‘representation’, ‘code’, ‘signal’, ‘cue’, ‘communication’ and ‘sign’ crop up all over biology,” he says. He points out, however, that while the use of such terms is apparently unavoidable in explaining the workings of living systems, rarely, if ever, are such concepts explicitly defined as technical terms. His version of biosemiotics sees this as an explanatory blind spot that should be taken seriously.

“If not, the danger is that biology is trapped in a dualism where all organic communication, from cells to apes, are claimed to be describable as simple physiochemical causes only- while, on the other hand, full intentional meaning is a specifically human privilege. How could such a thing have developed phylogenetically, if not from simpler semiotic processes in biology?” asks Stjernfelt.

Kalevi Kull at the University of Tartu in Estonia stays closer to von Uexküll. “Biology has studied how organisms and living communities are built. But it is no less important to understand what such living systems know, in a broad sense; that is, what they remember (what agent-object sign relations are biologically preserved), what they recognise (what distinctions they are capable and not capable of), what signs they explore (how they communicate, make meanings and use signs) and so on. These questions are all about how different living systems perceive the world, how they model the world, what experience motivates what actions, based on those perceptions.”

These answers and many more are just a taste of how biosemiotics is shaping up. As Favareau explains, we must remember that it is still a “proto-science- closer to a very lively debate between scientists about what such a future science will have to explain about biological meaning, and how it will do so, than it is to a fully realised science with a common terminology and a settled methodology”.

The founders are open to new ideas. “If one truly recognises the need for something like biosemiotics, then one owes it to science to apply one’s best thought and effort to the task,” writes Favareau in the introduction to a recently released anthology Essential Readings in Biosemiotics (Springer, 2009).

Marcello Barbieri, a molecular biologist at the University of Ferrara in Italy, another key figure, echoes Favareau. He brings yet another perspective to the field – a “code model” that he has applied to the genetic code, splicing and other cellular codes. “Nothing is settled yet in biosemiotics,” he says. “Everything is on the move, and the exploration of the scientifically new continent of ‘meaning’ has just begun.” Watch this space.

“The exploration of the scientifically new continent of ‘meaning’ has just begun”

Bibliography

To learn more about biosemiotics and its history, download a free pdf of the first chapter of Donald Favareau’s Essential Readings in Biosemiotics at www.bit.ly/axHqMO, courtesy of Springer Science publishers and Donald Favarea.

"Selvagens" no museu (Pesquisa FAPESP)

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Memória
“Selvagens” no museu
Há 128 anos, grupos de índios eram expostos na Exposição antropológica brasileira
Neldson Marcolin

Edição Impressa 175 – Setembro 2010

O dia 29 de julho de 1882 prometia ser diferente na cidade do Rio de Janeiro. O feriado e os fogos de artifício anunciavam o aniversário de 36 anos da princesa Isabel e convidavam para um evento raro na cidade. Naquele dia o Museu Nacional abriu a Exposição antropológica brasileira com a presença das principais personalidades da sociedade carioca e de toda a Corte. Além da princesa, o imperador dom Pedro II e a imperatriz Teresa Cristina visitaram a exposição, amplamente coberta pela imprensa. Também participaram da cerimônia de inauguração alguns índios Botocudo – de Goiás e do Espírito Santo – e Xerente – de Minas Gerais. A diferença é que os indígenas foram trazidos para serem expostos, e não para visitá-la.

© museu nacional

Capa da revista com desenho de índia Botocudo

O evento de 1882 foi um dos acontecimentos científicos mais importantes do final do século XIX no Brasil. Mostras semelhantes às do Rio estavam em voga em outros países da América Latina, Europa e nos Estados Unidos. O desejo de popularizar a ciência, as polêmicas sobre a teoria da evolução proposta por Charles Darwin, o anseio de conhecer o passado do Brasil e o fascínio provocado pelos índios motivaram o diretor do Museu Nacional, Ladislau Netto, a organizar a exposição. As coleções foram dispostas em oito salas que ganharam nomes em homenagem a figuras da história e da ciência: Vaz de Caminha, Léry, Rodrigues Ferreira, Hartt, Lund, Martius, Gabriel Soares e Anchieta. Todos escreveram relatos que ajudavam a tornar conhecido o Brasil de períodos anteriores, desde a descoberta da nova terra no século XVI. As oito salas mostravam peças arqueológicas descobertas no país, como restos humanos fossilizados, conchas de sambaquis e objetos indígenas de etnias diferentes. Também foi editada a Revista da Exposição Anthropologica Brazileira, com artigos que tentavam dar um significado científico ao conjunto apresentado no museu.

© museu nacional

Objetos de rituais usados pelos índios Mahué

Os “selvagens”, como eram chamados, faziam parte da exposição em grupos vivos, compondo um cenário que simulava seu cotidiano. Os artigos da revista, dirigida por Mello Moraes Filho e escritos por especialistas brasileiros, sempre se referiam aos indígenas como representantes dos mais primitivos estágios da evolução humana em contraposição aos evoluídos homens brancos caucasianos. O evento era uma oportunidade para observá-los como se fossem fósseis vivos, na argumentação tão científica quanto possível para aquele período. As medidas dos índios, sua forma muscular, o formato do crânio, os hábitos sociais e morais foram analisados e comparados com mestiços e brancos. “Era uma antropologia física, completamente diferente da antropologia do século XX”, diz o biólogo Charbel Niño El-Hani, coordenador do Grupo de Pesquisa em História, Filosofia e Ensino de Ciências Biológicas da Universidade Federal da Bahia, que estudou o tema. “Havia um olhar sobre os indígenas diferente do que viria a ter Claude Lévi-Strauss várias décadas depois.”

© museu nacional

Ilustração de índio Tembé

A ideia do índio como fóssil vivo era considerada útil para estudar o passado do homem no Brasil e não causava a mesma repulsa provocada hoje, avalia a historiadora Márcia Ferraz, do Centro Simão Mathias de Estudos de História da Ciência da Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (Cesima/PUC-SP).“Aquela era a forma como se fazia ciência em todo o mundo, não só no Brasil”, explica Márcia. Os critérios científicos utilizados eram os da história natural, e não aqueles que as ciências sociais viriam a usar mais tarde.

A exposição ficou em cartaz durante três meses e foi considerada bem-sucedida por ter atraído mais de mil visitantes e causado alguma repercussão internacional. “Quem a visitou, no entanto, foi apenas a pequena elite do Rio daquele tempo, que era alfabetizada e interessada pelas novidades científicas”, conclui El-Hani.

Why trust a reporter? (The Scientist)

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What science writers are looking for and why it behooves you to answer their calls.

By Edyta Zielinska

There was a time when the public saw newspaper reporters as heroic figures. In those days, “Men wore hats and pounded away on the typewriter with two fingers,” says neuroscientist Richard Ransohoff, whose father was a beat reporter at the Cincinnati Enquirer and Post and Times-Star through the early 1960s. His father “knew every cop in town,” recalls Ransohoff, who works today at the Cleveland Clinic’s Mellen Center for Multiple Sclerosis. “I was enamored with that persona.”

Even with his fond memories of journalism’s glory days, as a clinical neurologist, Ransohoff understands the frustration common to many scientists when their work is covered by the media. The effect of news coverage is immediate. His patients will visit his office with clips in hand, full of hopes and questions. “I’ve had thousands of conversations with patients,” he says. “You have a disease for which the cause is unknown and the course is variable,” and you have to explain that even the most promising research is years away from being tested, much less proven as a treatment, he says.

The public understands that if they “go to their niece’s third grade recital and the kid plays chopsticks, and plays the hell out of it,” he says, “no one in the audience is fooled into thinking that the next stop is Carnegie Hall.” That same appreciation is missing in the public’s understanding of the scientific enterprise, he says. That there is a slim chance for big findings in basic research, trumpeted by news stories, to make it through the long vetting process of drug development and clinical trials is a concept that the public rarely grasps.

And basic researchers can get burned by media coverage, as well, such as when years of bench work are cast incorrectly by a reporter who makes a factual mistake or misinterprets complex findings.

But there are many reasons why scientists should speak to reporters, and why doing so can help their careers. “I don’t think scientists are hesitant to speak to the press. I just don’t think they’re good at it,” Ransohoff says. “But in fairness it is difficult to talk about cellular processes to people who [sometimes] don’t know their bodies are made out of cells.” Of course, most journalists who write primarily about science these days are well versed in basic biology, physics, or whatever field they cover—many are even former scientists themselves.

Here are tips from leading science reporters, producers and other communications experts on how researchers can get the most out of interactions with the press, and why taking a call from a reporter is worth your time.

Why you should make time for reporters

It’s your duty

“I don’t think it’s important [to talk to reporters], I think it’s essential,” says Brandeis University’s Gregory Petsko, who served as past president of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. “The public puts us in the lab. They spend their money to allow us to do what we love to do.” Since taxpayers fund the majority of research, it’s scientists’ responsibility to communicate the science on which the money is spent, says Petsko.

It raises your profile with journal editors and funders

Editors of high-impact journals don’t just look for the best research, they also look for research they think will catch the eyes of editors at the New York Times. If they see that your lab publishes the kinds of studies that appear on the radar screens of science journalists, they may be more prone to look favorably on your next submission. The same is true of some granting agencies.

Your bosses will love it

“Our institutions love publicity,” says Ransohoff. “We get local credibility and a type of celebrity within our institution.” Having your research covered by media outlets can translate to recognition and validation within your department that may ultimately help you win departmental resources.

You may pick up grant-writing tips

Journalists have an eye for distilling the details—a skill that increasingly shorter grant applications place at a premium. “We’re in a completely new era of grant preparation and review,” says Ransohoff. With applications for National Institutes of Health grants recently trimmed from 25 pages to 12, researchers and reviewers must briefly emphasize a project’s significance and innovation—concepts that science writers routinely think about. Scientists will benefit from seeing how a seasoned journalist distills years of work and a long manuscript into a readable, 500-word article.

It gets the public excited about science

Robert Langer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology biomedical engineer, has more than 760 patents pending or awarded, and runs the largest academic biomedical engineering lab in the world. He is also something of a press darling for being approachable, despite the demands on his time. (He called this reporter within 20 minutes of receiving an email request.) “The future of our country and science depends on getting outstanding young people interested in science,” says Langer, and helping reporters publish stories that describe the achievements and possibilities of science is one way to do that.

It’s better you than someone else

If you care about how the science in your field will be described, the best thing to do is to respond to reporters’ calls, especially with hot-button topics like stem cells or climate change. “If no [expert scientists] talked, [reporters will] end up going to people who are less and less expert,” which can result in stories that are less accurate, says Ed Sykes, a press officer at the Science Media Centre, an organization that provides press support for the UK national media.

The Medium Matters

TV is different from print

When Vincent Liota, a senior series producer at NOVA scienceNOW, was working as a news cameraman for a local television station in Norfolk, Va. in 1985, he covered the hostage takeover of Flight 847. When the hostages were released, both TV and newspaper reporters swarmed around one hostage who was willing to speak. The man said that he had gotten off the plane, sat down and lit a cigarette. “He was telling this story and getting really emotional,” says Liota. At that moment, a newspaper reporter interrupted and asked “what brand of cigarettes were you smoking?” to the frustration of all of the television reporters who wanted the uninterrupted, first-hand account. Print reporters will often grill you for specific details and numbers that will help the reader visualize the story.

If it’s live, do pre-interview mental pushups

Most people who are interviewed on radio or TV usually experience a pre-interview, in which someone—either the on-air reporter or a producer—asks questions similar to those they’ll hear on-air, says Christopher Intagliata, one of the producers of Science Friday, a live public radio talk show hosted by Ira Flatow. Mooney, who’s been interviewed on radio about his work, says he usually spends 5 minutes before going on the air, thinking about what the audience is interested in, and how to explain those ideas in the clearest way. “If it’s live radio, you’ve only got one shot,” Mooney says.

For the news— no personality, no problem

Not everyone can be dynamic, funny, witty, engaging, dramatic,” says Petsko. But you do have to be clear, he adds. “Nothing is more important than that.” Personality is not as crucial to a news story as it is in a feature article or live interview. When Tom Clarke—who covers breaking science stories for Channel 4 News in the United Kingdom—hits the road for a story, he isn’t looking to find the perfect source. News reporters like Angier and Clarke will digest the science for their audience, using quotes or sound bites from scientists to give a story context. “It doesn’t matter what the scientist is like,” says Clarke. “We’ll find a way to get something we can use.”

Getting the most out of a press call

Understand what the journalist/outlet is looking for

You should always get a sense of the kind of story the reporter aims to write. It’s perfectly acceptable to ask a reporter about his or her intentions for an article. But keep in mind that the reporter may not always know, says Faye Flam, a science journalist at the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Sometimes I’m just fishing,” for an idea, she says. But asking the journalist for more information, or for a list of sample questions, can help you decide if you’d like to participate, and provide clues for how to prepare and “be more helpful,” says Flam. Another way to decide whether to participate is to try to imagine the headline that will appear with the story that you’re interviewing for, says Brad Phillips, president of Phillips Media Relations, and author of the blog mrmediatraining.com.

K.I.S.S.—Keep It Simple, Scientist

Sometimes, the simplest answer is the best one. “When you’re learning to drive a car, you want someone who’s going to answer your questions in a way that’s going to be fruitful to you,” says Liota. “When someone asks ‘how do you make the car go, you don’t want someone to say, ‘Well, there’s this thing called the carburetor… and that supplies gasoline into the manifold, where it is combusted. The valves adjust the fuel injected into the cylinder, and pistons compress it, and then they fire.’” While the information is all correct, viewers want a scientist who can simply say “you step on the gas and it goes.”

It’s okay to give personal details

While personal questions may seem like dangerous territory or off topic, they can be crucial to conveying the human face of science. “I want the audience to know that scientists aren’t bronzed figures that, with very little homework, come up with great pronouncements,” says Krulwich. If you’re uncomfortable with giving a particular personal detail, feel free to ask why the reporter thinks it’s important.

Be a go-to source

“My job is to get good people,” says Science Friday’s Intagliata. Come Friday’s deadline, “I want to know I have a failsafe solution,” he adds. If reporters can’t get the clarity they’re looking for, they simply search for another source. “One wonders why we turn to the same sources again and again,” says Angier. Some sources are simply good at drawing a caricature that captures the essence of an idea. “People who master that will get called again and again,” says Angier.

It’s all about significance

Reporters will want to know, “Is this something the rest of the public should care about?” adds Sykes. He says that scientists should come to the interviews “armed” with “the bottom line” and numbers that demonstrate the impact the science could have on humanity or on the field. “Journalists love the numbers, but they have to be in context.”

Prepare a plate of metaphors

Scientists should come to the interviews “armed” with “the bottom line” and numbers that demonstrate the impact the science could have on humanity or on the field.
—Ed Sykes

The goal of the science writer, says Angier, is to “bring the senses to bear—what it would look like, what it would feel like, smell like.” The shortest path to achieving this goal is the use of metaphors, and you can aid reporters in crafting these turns of phrase. For example, to describe RNA interference to a lay audience, Liota once constructed several layers of metaphor: Using animation, his team drew RNA as a recipe that a “monkish scribe” copies from the grand cookbook of DNA, which was kept locked in a tower (the nucleus). Those recipes were then chucked out of the nuclear “window” (a pore) and caught by a chef (a ribosome) floating in the cytoplasm, who would whip up proteins based on the instructions. While such extensive metaphors may seem excessive and loose, they give uninitiated readers a fighting chance to understand complex biological concepts.

Want coverage? Be available

Make yourself accessible to the press, and be sure not to book travel plans during the week before your new research is published. If a reporter can’t reach you or someone in your lab, they may choose not to cover the story.

Common press pitfalls, and how to avoid them

To avoid oversimplification, connect the dots

Good science reporters do their best not to tell an overly simplified story. That isn’t satisfying to anyone, says Angier. When using metaphors, make sure to think about and convey the limits of the metaphor. A journalist will try to convey the full complexity, but in the end, a story is “just a taste,” he notes. “It’s not the master class.” If you’re worried that a reporter won’t get all the most important parts of your science, prepare three main points you want to get across, making sure to convey how you came to those statements, and field-test them on a layperson to ensure that the message is clear.

To avoid errors, avoid jargon

When science writer Carl Zimmer teaches a course on science communication to budding researchers at Yale University, he often returns the assignment with loads of jargon words circled in red. “A scientist has spent years learning how to talk like a scientist,” he says, and often have a hard time distinguishing jargon from genuinely descriptive language. But every time a scientist uses a word that is meaningful only to that particular field, it increases the likelihood that the reporter will misunderstand the intended message when he sits down to write and translate that term for a general scientific or lay audience.

To avoid misquotes, take a pause

“The big issue is pausing properly,” says Petsko. When talking to a reporter, he always takes breaks to let the reporter “digest and see what kinds of questions come back at me.” Some reporters try to take down all of the words you say—especially unfamiliar scientific terms (so they can look them up later). The faster you talk, the more likely it is that they’ll miss something.

To avoid sensational stories, research the reporter

The majority of science reporters are quite conscientious about getting their stories right. “Most of us are trying to make an honest effort to get at the truth, and we’re genuinely interested in what [scientists] do,” says Flam. But general assignment reporters, who don’t usually cover science, may not be as adept at capturing scientific stories. It’s always a good idea to research reporters or outlets before you agree to speak with them to see whether you trust how—and if—they cover science. If a reporter calls first (without sending an email request), feel free to say that you’ll call back, and do a few Internet searches.

if it’s wrong, ask for a correction

Even the best science reporters do get it wrong sometimes. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with reporters or their editors to set the record straight. Most will be happy to oblige. But remember that many outlets have a policy only to correct factual errors, not omissions or changes in tone.

Definitions

Disclaimer: While the following represent widely held definitions in the field, not every reporter will interpret the rules in the same way. Your best bet is to either not say anything you don’t want to see in print or have an explicit conversation with the reporter about how your words will be used before the interview begins.

Off the record:

This is an agreement you make with a journalist before you say things that you do not want published. Here, nothing you say will be published or attributed to you. If you only want parts of the conversation to be “off the record,” make sure to tell the reporter when you’d like those parts to begin and end.

Not for attribution:

You can agree to speak to a reporter about a sensitive topic under the condition that your name will not be used. This information will be published, but attributed to an unnamed source. The reporter will then negotiate an attribution for your comments that demonstrates your expertise without revealing your identity.

Background:

When a reporter asks to speak “on background,” this indicates that your guidance and opinion are needed. Talk to the reporter ahead of time if you don’t want what you say used in the story.

Outside comment:

This is the journalist’s method for peer review. Reporters invite researchers who were not involved in the issue or study at hand to weigh in on the science and its potential impact on the field.

Take home message:

This is the most important point about the science or issue at hand, stripped of the details. A succinct sentence in summary usually suffices.

News story:

More timely, more focused, and written on a tighter deadline than features, news stories generally highlight one finding or event. In general, reporters have much less time to grasp the content of the science and fact check—so you may have only one chance to be understood.

Feature article:

These longer pieces posit a particular concept—a thesis—and support that concept with quotes and anecdotes from a much larger number of sources than a news story.

Profile:

These stories tell the science of a single person (and more rarely a place) through the recollections of people who have worked with, mentored, or inspired that scientist.

Fact checking:

Reporters will ask to read back (or email) the facts stated in the article to make sure they are accurately portrayed. This is not, however, an opportunity to change quotes, or the focus of a story.

The rules of engagement

You’re always on the record

“It is the responsibility of the scientists to know what the rules are.” —Natalie Angier, New York Times science columnist

If scientists choose to speak to a reporter, everything they say can be published, and it’s the journalist’s prerogative to choose which portions of the interview to include in a story. The law of free speech gives reporters the right to publish what they hear. This concept could be unfamiliar to many scientists, says David Mooney, a bioengineer at Harvard University. “Scientists routinely talk to each other off the record to kind of exchange ideas in a very informal way, where there’s no sense that these ideas will ever become public,” he says. “It’s an integral part of the scientific process.” Printable information can even include data divulged in conference presentations, but each meeting typically has a unique confidentiality policy, if members of the press will be present. This can vary widely, so it’s best to know the ground rules for the conference at which you’re presenting.

No, seriously—you’re on the record

It’s possible to ensure that some portion of an interview is off the record (see definitions), but scientists have to go about this a specific way. Simply saying, “it’s off the record,” isn’t enough, says Carolyn Foley, a lawyer who specializes in media and communications law at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP in New York. “You need to get the reporter’s agreement,” preferably in writing, but verbal agreements are okay. You must first say you want to speak off the record and obtain the reporter’s agreement, before sharing sensitive information. “It is the responsibility of the scientists to know what the rules are,” says New York Times science columnist Natalie Angier. You can’t talk to a reporter and then “suddenly negate the whole conversation,” by saying that it was off the record. The reporter is still allowed to use that information. Don’t “talk to a reporter like you’re talking to a friend,” says Foley. “Even if you have a good rapport with them, the journalist is free to use the information.”

Don’t hype or overstate

Every journalist’s primary objective is to entice the reader to care and to continue reading. Part of that equation with science stories is spelling out the major finding and implication of the research—either for the general public or for a general scientific audience. Take extra care when talking about the relevance of a finding. Be aware that, to the reporter, these may be the most important two sentences you say, so take care to include all of the relevant caveats. According to MIT’s Langer, “it’s natural to get excited about your science,” but it’s important to be conservative about your predictions for the human implications. “You don’t want to give false hope,” he says.

It’s your science, but it’s their story

You can try to guide reporters to the parts of your science that are most important, you can emphasize your main points, but in the end, “once I walk away with these notes, that’s my work product and it’s my job to come up with an account of this conversation,” says Robert Krulwich, cohost of Radiolab, a public radio show about science and philosophy. Some outlets allow scientists to read a draft of the piece to check for errors, while others have strict policies that prevent a reporter from showing any part of the draft. Except in the most extenuating circumstances, these policies are typically non-negotiable.

Have a comment? E-mail us at mail@the-scientist.com

Read more: Why Trust A Reporter? – The Scientist

A arte do (des)encontro

Uncategorized, ,

Parceria entre cientistas e jornalistas em prol da cultura científica ainda está distante

Mariluce Moura, de Madri e Brasília
Pesquisa FAPESP, Edição Impressa 172 – Junho 2010

Ainda que jornalistas sejam na origem generalistas por definição, hoje estão se acumulando as evidências de que os profissionais do jornalismo científico em toda parte – e não apenas nos paí­ses de tradição anglo-saxônica – investem mais e mais na estratégia do aperfeiçoamento contínuo para exercer seu ofício com o necessário rigor, espírito crítico e, claro, um grau de conhecimento indispensável do campo que é objeto de suas narrativas. Nessa busca valem tanto os caminhos tradicionais da pós­-graduação que permitem refletir e investigar com apoio teórico e mais profundamente sua própria prática quanto as oficinas e workshops de caráter mais pragmático que se propõem, por exemplo, a ampliar em curto prazo a competência dos jornalistas no manejo das bases de dados de produção científica, na separação do joio e do trigo – diga-se, ciência e pseudociência – dentro da vastidão da web e nas vias de articulação possíveis e eficazes entre redes sociais e jornalismo, entre outros temas. E é possível que essa tendência se expanda, com novos apoios institucionais, a julgar por uma das principais recomendações do seminário “A cultura e a ciência narradas pelos jornalistas: desafios e oportunidades”, realizado de 20 a 22 de abril passado, em Madri: dar alta prioridade à formação e ao aperfeiçoamento contínuo dos jornalistas voltados para a ciência e a cultura, ampliando-se os mecanismos de bolsas e outras formas de financiamento para tanto nos países ibero-americanos.

Depois de dois dias e meio de debates intensos levados a cabo por quase meia centena de jornalistas, professores, pesquisadores e produtores culturais da Espanha e de vários países da América Latina – o Brasil entre eles –, essa recomendação, assim como a de procurar as conexões entre cultura, ciência e tecnologia no jornalismo, a de se adaptar o trabalho jornalístico aos novos formatos que a internet oferece e a de formar uma ampla rede de cooperação de jornalistas de ciência e de cultura na web, tinha o respaldo das instituições por trás do seminário. Eram elas a Organização dos Estados Ibero-americanos para a Educação, a Ciência e a Cultura (OEI), por quem falou seu secretário-geral, Alvaro Marchesi, e a Fundação Novo Jornalismo Ibero-americano (FNPI), representada por seu diretor-geral, Jaime Abello, com o apoio da Agência Espanhola de Cooperação para o Desenvolvimento (Aecid), da Agência Efe e Escola de Jornalismo UAM-El País.

Vale dizer que essas recomendações consensuais foram construídas a despeito de toda a diferença entre as experiências de jornalismo científico e cultural apresentadas e mesmo das divergências conceituais profundas que se explicitaram. Assim, se para alguns jornalistas a internet e a democratização da produção de conteúdos via web representam uma ameaça à própria existência de sua profissão, para outros, como o diretor adjunto do respeitado jornal espanhol El País, Gumersindo Lafuente, constituem um belo desafio à quase reinvenção do jornalista. “Nossa narrativa foi sempre conectada com a realidade e hoje a realidade está nas ruas e está na rede. Como jornalistas, temos que contar o que se passa também na rede”, disse ele. Observou que não estamos mais em tempo de esperar que as pessoas vão em busca dos meios de comunicação, e sim em tempo “de irmos com nossas histórias aos lugares em que se está falando dos temas que tratamos na internet”. Lafuente destacou que mais que nunca é fundamental o papel do jornalista independente, capaz de filtrar o que tem valor e de contrastar a informação no mar fervilhante da internet. E ainda apostou que, como num ambiente darwiniano, “as plataformas da internet que tenham qualidade, sejam blogs ou twitters, se converterão em marcas, enquanto os meios que já são marcas só vão sobreviver se conservarem sua qualidade”.

Divergências também se levantaram em torno da propriedade ou impropriedade de um caráter mais literário nas narrativas do jornalismo científico. Se para María Ángeles Erazo, diretora do Centro de Estudos sobre Ciência, Tecnologia, Sociedade e Inovação de Otovalo, no Equador, e Liliana Chávez, jornalista da revista mexicana Día Siete, é necessário hoje experimentar novos gêneros para contar de forma atraente e mais literária fatos do campo da ciência, a jornalista Milagros Pérez Oliva, professora da Escola de Jornalismo UAM-El País e ombudsman de El País, vê nessas tentativas “um perigo para o jornalismo e seus profissionais, além de uma contaminação narrativa”, uma vez que “a linguagem jornalística é objetiva”.

A propósito, Milagros, ao participar no dia anterior da mesa-redonda sobre “divulgação do conhecimento científico e as indústrias da ciência” (que incluiu a apresentação sobre a experiência de Pesquisa FAPESP), observara que “a notícia científica tem um grande valor quando bem elaborada, porque gera opinião e conhecimento, mas é a mais arriscada quando malfeita e tendenciosa porque pode provocar danos sociais pelos quais vamos todos pagar”. Em sua visão as portas do jornalismo estão cada dia mais abertas para a pseudociência, o que exige, em especial na informação digital, contenção e comprovação.

No meio das discussões pairava alguma coisa da fala do professor José Manuel Sánchez Ron, catedrático de história da ciência na Universidade Autônoma de Madri, na conferência inaugural do encontro. “Cultura e ciência são parte da vida intelectual, mas entre elas existe uma mútua incompreensão, hostilidade e antipatia.” Os meios de comunicação, além de informar, em sua visão, devem educar ao tratar da ciência – com o que dificilmente algum jornalista concordará em termos estritos. “O jornalista, além de crítico e rigoroso no desempenho de sua função, não deve renunciar à imaginação e à boa escrita, para fazer da ciência precisamente algo interessante e oportuno”, disse ele. E ainda: “É importante escrever bem, com graça e originalidade quando se fala de ciência”.

Silêncio e ruídos – Se no front dos jornalistas e dos cursos de comunicação há visível preocupação com a qualidade do jornalismo científico, há indícios de que dentro do sistema nacional de ciência e tecnologia a ideia de parceria com os meios de comunicação para difundir a cultura científica na sociedade, que parecia vicejar no começo da década, experimenta hoje retrocesso. Assim, na IV Conferência Nacional de Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação, realizada de 26 a 28 de maio em Brasília (ver reportagem na página 26), evento em que se procurou ressaltar ao máximo as parcerias entre a comunidade científica, o Estado, os empresários e os chamados setores sociais, para o desenvolvimento de uma verdadeira sociedade do conhecimento no país, o papel da mídia foi ignorado, mesmo quando se falava em popularização da ciência. Entre todos os debates, reservaram-se apenas 15 minutos à fala de um jornalista, aliás, uma jornalista, a presidente da Associação Brasileira de Jornalismo Científico (ABJC), Cilene Victor, dentro da sessão “Construção da cultura científica”. Vale lembrar que na II Conferência Nacional, em 2001, sob o comando do ministro Ronaldo Sardenberg e organização do professor Cylon Gonçalves, foram várias as mesas que debateram a questão da comunicação pública da ciência com mediação do jornalismo.

Dessa forma, parece voltar à cena, de certa maneira, uma velha visão meramente instrumental do jornalismo ante a ciência, o primeiro submetido à segunda, em vez de uma visão mais contemporânea de parceria para a difusão social do conhecimento.

* A jornalista viajou a convite da Organização dos Estados Ibero-americanos (OEI).

Anthropology and Climate Science Controversies

clima, Incerteza, mídia, meteorologia, mudança climática, poder, previsão, , , , , , , ,

Brad Walters (Mount Allison U.)
Anthropology News (American Association of Anthropology), vol. 51(5):36-37 (May 2010)

Enormous research effort has been invested in the study of climate change. Many scientists reveled in the acclaim that followed last-year’s awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This year, some of these same scientists have faced an onslaught of criticism as a result of a few mistakes found in published reports of the IPCC and leaked emails from an eminent, UK-based science group that revealed an all-too-human side of the scientific endeavor (so-called “climate-gate”).

The editors of the pre-eminent science journal Nature commented that these supposedly explosive revelations would be laughable were it not for their policy consequences. Like many, they recognize that the real scandal has little to do with climate change science, but everything to do with its political ramifications.

The scientific consensus on climate change is rock solid on the most critical issues: greenhouse gas emissions from human activity are now warming the earth’s climate at a rate that is extremely rapid by historical and recent geological standards and this poses increasingly serious risks our well being (Union of Concerned Scientists, March 2010, “U.S. scientists and economists’ call for swift and deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions,” http://www.ucsusa.org). The evidence for this general conclusion is so broad, diverse and compelling that virtually no reputable scientist doubts it.

Yet, large swaths of the American public and many opinion leaders continue to doubt the reality of climate change. A major reason for this is that the controversies over the credibility of climate science are to a large degree intentionally contrived by people and organizations with vested interests in the economic status-quo and fear of government regulation, particularly members of the oil, gas and coal industries. What we are witnessing today, according to authors James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore (Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming) and George Monbiot (Heat), is a similar but much more ambitious replay of the tobacco industries’ campaign in the 1980s and 1990s to sew doubt about the scientific consensus on the health risks of smoking. These climate deniers understand what many social scientists do: where there is uncertainty in the minds of the electorate, the political cost of inaction falls while the cost of decisive action rises.

These climate controversies raise intriguing questions for anthropologists who may have interests in issues of public knowledge formation, risk perception, and the application of expert and non-expert knowledge in policy making. But, what motivated me to write this column is a different question: do many anthropologists also not trust the credibility of the scientific “experts” on the matter of climate change?

I came to this question as a result of recent exchanges on the Environmental Anthropology (E-Anth) List-serve that revealed a far less solid consensus on the matter than is found within the mainstream climate science community, which is dominated by natural scientists. Specifically, postings by some list members revealed a surprising lack of trust in the credibility of scientific bodies like the IPCC and the National Academy of Sciences. Even more troubling was their referencing of scientifically un-credible sources—climate skeptics’ blogs, for example—as the basis for their opinions on the status of climate science.

Anthropologists are not alone in having within their ranks credentialed scientists who espouse views on climate change that are totally unsupportable in any reasonable scientific sense. But is it possible that anthropologists are particularly vulnerable to this kind of anti-scientific way of thinking about the issue? Has the disciplines’ deep emersion in subjects like the social construction of knowledge produced social scientists with so little trust and respect for the work of natural scientists that they won’t (or can’t!) distinguish between peer-reviewed research and politically-motivated blog postings?

There is a point reached—and we are now well passed it in climate science—where theoretical arguments and empirical evidence are so overwhelmingly compelling that positions contrary to the scientific consensus are simply untenable. Perhaps it is time for the AAA to step-up as a body and officially state their position on this most critical of issues.