Three prizes were awarded in the St. Louis FameLab competition, held Feb. 22. The first prize was the "audience's choice," which went to Joseph Orkin, a graduate student in anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Orkin accepted his certificate and took his place on stage.
The speaker then announced that the judges decided to make an unusual "wild-card award" to allow a second person to advance to the nationals as well. That award went to Amanda Melin, PhD, assistant professor of anthropology. Melin joined Orkin on stage.
And then it was time for the "judges' choice." And again it was Orkin, who was visibly startled. "I thought once I won the audience's choice, that was it," he said later. "I just didn't expect my name to be called again."
Not for nothing do FameLab's sponsors, National Geographic and NASA, call it "American Idol for Scientists." As in "American Idol," torturing the contestants a little only increases entertainment value.
Orkin repeated his three-minute presentation for the Record; you can listen to it below.
Scat-Sniffing Dog FameLab Presentation
Although Orkin won a swag bag, the real prize is advancing to the national FameLab competition held in Washington, D.C., in April.FameLab
FameLab is a science communications competition open to graduate students (MS, PhD, and MD), as well as postdoctoral fellows and early-career researchers. Participants craft a three-minute talk on their research or a related topic and rehearse it before a panel of judges who provide feedback. Ten finalists then present their talks on stage and in public.
Only people with nerves of steel volunteer for this event. Keynote speaker and evolutionary anthropologist Kenny Broad, PhD, who cave-dives for science and, not incidentally, also studies how we misjudge risk, told the audience that people rate public speaking as the scariest of all scary things. Second on the list is death.
To be successful in this forum — on stage and above the audience — the contestants have to be actors as well as scientists. Think Bill Nye the Science Guy or Neil deGrasse Tyson, narrator of the remake of "Cosmos."
So during the rehearsals, some of the judges' tips were directed at the quality of voice acting. "Vary the cadence," presenters were told. "It will make you sound less scripted." "Don't end sentences with a dying fall, which betrays that you're already thinking about the sentence to come. "
But most of the feedback was directed at the central difficulty of communicating science to the public: How do you describe in three minutes something it took you years to understand?
Well, first off, the judges made it abundantly clear, you can't use the vocabulary of science. Don't say "selective advantage." Forget "heterozygous." Discard "alleles," and abandon "reproductive success." One judge, the Simon Cowell of the three, even asked, "Are you sure people know chimpanzees live in Africa? Or, for that matter, where Africa is?"
The judges also were the very devil on the dreaded 'So what?' question. 'Why should people care how elements are made in supernova explosions, or why pulsars suddenly speed up instead of slowing down?' they asked. By the way, what is a "pulsar" when it's at home?
The reminder is always useful, though some things, including supernova explosions and pulsars, are interesting in and of themselves. As Neil deGrasse Tyson once said, “I know that the molecules in my body are traceable to phenomena in the cosmos. That makes me want to grab people on the street and say: ‘Have you HEARD THIS?”
What's so special about science?
Annoyed members of the public sometimes ask, "What's so special about science?" After all, nobody understands what lawyers or mechanics do either.
Although it may be dangerous to say so out loud, many scientists would claim exceptionalism for science. Science pervades our society, they would say. Our prosperity and our health are based on it. Science is entwined with many, if not most, policy issues of national and international importance and a wide range of personal activities. The world can tolerate a few people who believe impossible things, but once there are too many, we begin to make bad collective decisions, ones that eventually bump up hard against the laws of the universe.
Worries about public understanding of science aren't new; what's new is scientists' recognition that they must do a better job of communicating with the public.
In 2009, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press polled Americans about their views of science and polled scientists about their views of Americans. They found that while Americans tend to have positive views of the scientific community, scientists tend to consider the public ignorant (and the media irresponsible).
Or, as a pamphlet summarizing recent American Academy of Arts & Sciences workshops on science communication put it: "The problem is not that the public needs to understand more science but rather that scientists need to understand more public."
That's what FameLab is all about. And the presentations Feb. 22 -— all of them, not just the winning ones — were enough to make one audience member, at any rate, feel that it will be OK, after all. The young scientists will save us from ourselves, inspiring us to see the passion, beauty and joy of science. They will help us to understand.