Scientific Citizenship

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00:00:14.25 I'm Larry Goldstein. I'm a professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at UC San Diego.
00:00:20.20 And what I want to tell you about is why I think it's so important
00:00:25.12 for practicing professional scientists to embrace the notion of scientific citizenship.
00:00:32.16 And so what I'll do is I'll tell you a little bit about
00:00:35.21 what I think scientific citizenship means in a broad sense,
00:00:39.26 what are the rights that we expect that come with that scientific citizenship,
00:00:45.07 what are the responsibilities that that brings,
00:00:48.01 and then what are the benefits that you can get
00:00:51.17 from fully embracing this notion of being a scientific citizen in our broader societies.
00:00:57.25 So, the first issue is: What do I mean by that?
00:01:02.20 And I think what I mean by being a scientific citizen is somebody who
00:01:08.04 has a life and an impact that extends
00:01:11.28 not just in the lab and in the work around you but extends
00:01:16.24 outside of your institution and into your society at large.
00:01:21.18 And the reason that that's ultimately important in one sense is
00:01:27.02 that there are certain rights that we want as scientists
00:01:30.24 that are really important to us.
00:01:32.24 We want the right to pursue whatever inquiry we think of.
00:01:37.08 We want the right to pursue our curiosity.
00:01:40.08 We want the right to disagree and the freedom to disagree
00:01:45.24 with anybody that has an idea that we disagree with or that disagrees with our data.
00:01:51.09 And we want, if you will, the freedom to excel.
00:01:56.07 We want to believe that we are in a system, and we do work in a system,
00:02:00.02 where we can be better than we were yesterday
00:02:02.13 and where we can achieve excellence.
00:02:04.28 Now, those our wonderful rights, but like all rights that come with citizenship,
00:02:09.24 they bring responsibilities and some of those responsibilities
00:02:13.06 I think are obvious to any of us who practice science.
00:02:17.01 We review papers. We review grants. We review each other.
00:02:21.28 We don't always like that, of course, but we do it.
00:02:24.09 We write letters for our trainees.
00:02:26.20 We have a responsibility to teach and train the next generation of scientists.
00:02:31.02 And of course, we have a responsibility to pursue our work
00:02:37.05 in an ethical and thoughtful way.
00:02:41.12 There's a less obvious set of responsibilities though that I also want to talk about.
00:02:47.15 And these are responsibilities to the community outside of our research institutions
00:02:53.14 or our universities. These are responsibilities to the public at large.
00:02:57.13 And I think there are really two major ones.
00:03:01.20 One is we have a responsibility to explain to
00:03:06.22 the people who pay for our work what it is we do,
00:03:10.05 so that they can appreciate what kind of science we do,
00:03:14.18 what are the questions we ask.
00:03:15.23 And so they can understand what's going on in our labs
00:03:19.15 because that's part of building trust with a society.
00:03:22.14 And then, the second thing that we have a responsibility to do
00:03:27.09 is I think that we have a responsibility
00:03:30.21 to explain why what we do matters.
00:03:33.27 If we asked our friends and our neighbors in essence to pay for our work
00:03:38.20 either through tax dollars or philanthropies
00:03:41.04 or direct giving it seems to me that we have a responsibility to explain why
00:03:47.05 this has an impact on their lives, not just today but perhaps in the future.
00:03:51.28 That seems a sensible thing to me to do.
00:03:54.29 Now, that may seem like a lot of time and energy.
00:03:58.05 My experience is that it actually does not take a huge amount of time and energy,
00:04:02.00 but that, even more important, there are benefits that one gets both in
00:04:07.12 the long-term and in the short-term from embracing and practicing this full scientific citizenship.
00:04:15.14 The long-term benefits, of course, are
00:04:17.19 if we're going to be scientists for more than a few years
00:04:21.07 and we want to have long, fruitful careers,
00:04:23.23 we need to have a stable enterprise. We need stable funding.
00:04:27.13 We need to attract the best and brightest students and trainees to the practice of science.
00:04:33.12 And of course we need to have an environment where there is
00:04:39.04 stable regulation and oversight, where we can practice our craft
00:04:43.21 in an environment where we can pursue our curiosity in ways that are
00:04:48.05 consistent both with scientific inquiry but within reasonable bounds arrived at with the community at large.
00:04:55.13 But there are short-term benefits as well. And this may be particularly important
00:05:00.08 for trainees who are thinking about:
00:05:02.11 Do they want to spend a small amount of their time engaging with the public,
00:05:07.10 with politicians, with people outside of your lab or your institution?
00:05:12.19 And I think the short-term benefits are, in fact, very significant.
00:05:18.29 One short-term benefit is that we all do a reasonable amount of teaching
00:05:24.15 of one sort or another, either to students in lecture halls or in small groups or in our labs.
00:05:30.24 And, learning to communicate effectively with non-experts
00:05:35.26 such as politicians, members of the press, your neighbors, actually helps your teaching.
00:05:42.10 It helps you learn how to take difficult concepts, with a foreign language,
00:05:48.03 the language of science, and express them in ways that a non-expert group
00:05:53.09 can understand and appreciate and actually get excited about.
00:05:56.15 That's one short-term benefit.
00:06:00.23 Another short term benefit, also not obvious but a realistic one in my experience,
00:06:07.00 is that the same types of skills it takes to communicate with a non-expert
00:06:13.06 are the same kinds of skills you might bring to an inter-disciplinary collaboration.
00:06:17.27 If you're a biologist and you imagine collaborating with someone
00:06:22.04 in physics or engineering or chemistry who does something very different from what you do,
00:06:27.10 you have to be able to communicate your ideas effectively, accurately and
00:06:33.12 in a way that gets them excited enough to think about collaborating with you
00:06:37.05 using whatever novel methods or technologies they bring
00:06:41.11 that you don't necessarily have in a scientific lab.
00:06:44.21 Finally, one thing that is also a very nice short term benefit is
00:06:51.04 if you take the time to explain to people what your science is, what your research is,
00:06:57.12 why it matters and why it has value in a way
00:06:59.16 that they can understand as non-experts, people appreciate this.
00:07:03.11 Your friends, your family, your neighbors who are non-scientists
00:07:08.06 will express that appreciation and to be honest, it makes you feel good
00:07:11.23 to think that you're having a positive impact on the people around you
00:07:15.16 and potentially on their lives in the ultimately longer term.
00:07:19.19 So, while it may seem daunting to some
00:07:23.16 to leave the lab and talk to politicians or people in the press
00:07:26.28 or people in government or just the guy down the street,
00:07:30.09 the fact is, you get a lot from it
00:07:32.26 and ultimately, it's something we desperately need in the future
00:07:36.27 for our scientific enterprise to be healthy, vigorous and responsibly pursued.
00:07:42.17

This Talk

Speaker: Larry Goldstein

Audience:

Researcher

Recorded: September 2011

Talk Overview

Like other forms of citizenship, scientific citizenship comes with certain rights and responsibilities. Goldstein explains that as scientists, we have responsibilities both to our colleagues and to those outside of the scientific community. Ultimately, practicing good scientific citizenship may make us better scientists and better global citizens.

Speaker Bio

Larry Goldstein

Larry Goldstein is Professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of California, San Diego and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Goldstein is also a recipient of the ASCB Public Service Award. The Goldstein lab studies how molecular motors interact with axonal vesicles and how this relates to neurodegenerative disease such as Alzheimer’s… Continue Reading