In December 2006, the APS K-12 outreach
program, Physiology Understand-ing Week (PhUn Week), was selected as one of
14 innovative science education programs to be highlighted at the Science +
Society: Closing the Gap conference (http://www.scienceandsocietyconference.com/).
The Conference, held in Boston last month, is the first science-related
event among scientists, educators, media professionals, policymakers and the
public to discuss effective and practical ways to improve science
communication and enhance science literacy. Participants included former
Vice President Al Gore, executives from PBS’ “NewsHour,” NBC’s “Law &
Order,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Wellcome Trust
and others.
The APS program PhUn Week was selected by conference organizers from among
scores of entries received from throughout the United States. On January 20,
Marsha Lakes Matyas, APS’ Director of Education Programs, presented the
strategies behind the program aimed at engaging school age children about
physiology.
According to Matyas, PhUn Week is a distinctive program of science
communication that brings teams of “citizen scientists”—comprised of a
senior researcher and his or her undergraduate, graduate and/or postdoctoral
students—to the classroom and uses a collaborative approach in working with
classroom teachers. During PhUn Week classroom visits in November,
researchers wear PhUn Week t-shirts and engage students in interactive,
hands-on physiology activities. Through this real-life, face-to-face
encounter with practicing scientists, students learn how scientific
discoveries are made. “Initiatives like this impact children’s lives and
career choices, which can shape the discoveries of tomorrow,” says Matyas.
In 2005, the APS initiated a small-scale pilot test of four events in four
states that reached more than 500 students. In 2006, the APS Council
supported a moderately expanded pilot test to 14 presentation events in nine
states that reached more than 1,000 students. In 2007, PhUn Week launches
nationally during the week of November 5, with an open invitation to all APS
members to participate. For more information, be sure to attend the PhUn
Week training session on Sunday, April 29 at EB 2007.
PhUn Week is a project of the APS Education Committee, which conceptualized
this initiative in 2005, and received support from the APS Council. In two
short years, the program has created resources that allow APS members to
implement it virtually anywhere. Members are encouraged to become a part of
this innovative program. For more information, contact the APS Education
Office at education@the-aps.org or 301-634-7132.
For more information about how you can get involved in PhUn Week, please
visit: http://www.PhUnWeek.org and
contact Mel Limson in the Education Office at
MLimson@The-APS.org. |
Each year, the Society sponsors a fellow to
participate in the American Association for the Advancement of Science
(AAAS) Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellowship program. The10-week
program is designed to provide scientists with an inside view of the media
while helping them sharpen their ability to communicate complex science to a
general audience.
This year, with input from the Communications Committee, AAAS selected Erin
Cline, who recently earned her PhD from Stanford University. Cline spent her
summer working at the Los Angeles Times, the newspaper with the
fourth-largest daily circulation in the US. Now that she’s finished her
newsroom stint, she describes her weeks at the Times:
 |
| Erin Cline stands in front of the
Los Angeles Times building, where she spent 10 weeks as a AAAS Mass
Media Fellow. |
By 2 p.m. on my first day as a Mass Media
Fellow I had my first assignment. I was to write a brief summary of an
article published in Science about some fossils of a bird called Gansus
yumenensis that were found in China. I was shocked to be thrown into
reporting so quickly. I had no idea of where to begin.
“Call the authors,” my editor said. I couldn’t believe it. The ink on my ID
badge was barely dry. I was going to call someone and introduce myself as a
reporter from the Los Angeles Times. I was terrified.
What was I going to ask them? I have to admit that upon reading the paper, I
thought “So what?” What more is there to say about a fossil find other than
that they found some fossils? Where was the surprising mechanism? Where were
the details to walk my readers through? What was I going to write?
But as I talked with the authors of the study, I got caught up in how
exciting this finding really was. These guys had gone to an ancient lake bed
to hunt for fossils, based on a hunch. They peeled layers and layers of rock
away and finally they found something – fossils of the oldest ancestor of
the modern bird. And what’s more, the fossils were so well preserved that
there was actually webbing left in the feet. This showed that Gansus had
been an aquatic bird, which surprised everyone.
It was exciting to be involved with science that was outside the narrow
scope of what I had worked on in graduate school. I had spent so long
working on one thing; I had sort of forgotten why I got into science in the
first place – the thrill of discovery. I may not have known anything about
fossils, but I recognized the feeling that these paleontologists had. The
tone of sheer joy in their voices conveyed the excitement of seeing
something no one else had ever seen. I began to understand that my new job
as a science writer was to let the readers in on all of this.
I interviewed every author on the paper and listened in on a press
conference they gave. I tried to learn some quick background on birds and
fossils. I started writing. And I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. What I
initially thought was so simple and boring ended up taking me three days to
complete – and it was only about 300 words long! I had to boil everything
down into something that not just a non-expert, but also a non-scientist,
could understand and be interested in. I started to get it—science writing
is really hard.
Instead of writing about the subjects I had spent so many years studying as
a cell biologist (as I had hoped), I ended up spending the summer writing
about fossils, spider webs, bats, baby formula, secondhand smoke, celiac
disease, ants with amputated legs, the feces of sea salp (similar to a jelly
fish), infant screening, breast cancer, biofuel, bird beaks, global warming,
genetically engineered goat milk, stem cells, bumble bees, Plan B (the
morning-after pill), and AIDS drugs. This was the best thing that could have
happened to me. Leaving my comfort zone allowed me to see science as the
newspaper’s readers do—a story that can be very interesting if told right.
The science the public is interested in is not necessarily the science
scientists are interested in. I cannot count the number of times I was
turned down when I pitched a story about a study that showed very elegantly
how some important molecular biological process works. I finally came to
understand that the public wants to know about things that will affect them
in their daily lives—”news you can use.” They also seem to like stories that
are about animals, as well as anything funny or gross.
I learned that no matter what the subject, science is pretty meaningless to
the average person without context. On more than one occasion I wrapped up
an hour-long phone interview with a study’s author and reported back to my
editor only to realize I didn’t have an answer to his question “Why is this
important?” It took me a while to realize that without the answer to this
question appearing in the first few lines of my story, no one would ever
read what I wrote, no matter how great a scientific discovery it was. I
didn’t just need to make people understand. I needed to make them care.
My summer as a Mass Media Fellow was spent learning about research I never
imagined existed. I talked with scientists from around the world, calling
them in their labs, in their offices, at their homes, in restaurants and
even in their cars as they drove off on vacation. I grilled a spokesperson
from the NIH and was excited to have asked a tough enough question that he
had to say “No comment.” I drove around L.A. like a madwoman, reporter’s
notebook in hand, trying to get that one little quote that would improve a
story that was due by 5 p.m.
The whole thing was one of the most exciting experiences of my life. I feel
like every day I learned something new about science, the way the news is
reported and about myself. Moving from the bench to the reporter’s cubicle
gave me a renewed interest in science in general and a better understanding
of how important it is for the public to understand it.
Cline is now making plans for a post-doc. She hopes to get the chance to do
some freelance science writing before starting the next phase of her
training and is also finding time to plan for her wedding in March, which
she notes “is like a full time job sometimes.” |
