In the age of the anti-expert, Christopher Reddy has a daring proposition for scientists – put yourself out there.
Reddy, a chemist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who specialises in oil spills and related environmental disasters, has watched in despair as public confidence in scientists has plummeted in recent years, culminating in widespread pushback against public health measures and vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Just 29% of Americans say they have a great deal of confidence in scientists to act in the best interests of the public, according to Pew Research. In a reflection of how politicised science, including medicine, has become Democrats are three times as likely as Republicans to trust scientists. Reddy has an explanation some scientists might not like. They are part of the problem.
In his new book, Science Communication in a Crisis: An Insider’s Guide, the chemist challenges scientists to learn how to explain what they know to the public, particularly around environmental disasters and medical emergencies, at a time when the spread of misinformation is turbocharged.
“The core problem is rooted in academia itself: communication with non-scientists is not appreciated,” he writes.
Reddy’s book uses a series of high-profile disasters and emergencies to offer specialists advice on how to engage with the press, the public and other players in ways that illuminate the science rather than obscure it.
Too often, Reddy says, specialists are talking to each other but failing to help ordinary Americans understand the science, whether over oil spills, the climate crisis or a pandemic.
Reddy was seared by his own experience of working on “groundbreaking studies on the chemistry of oil spills”. He said the industry and cleanup specialists rarely paid attention to the developing science, in part because researchers like him were not talking to those who might make use of their work. Reddy thought he was wasting his time and was preparing to move to a new field of research.
Then on 20 April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico killing 11 workers and pouring massive amounts of oil into the sea. Finally his expertise was called upon by the US government, along with other scientists who accurately measured how much oil was released into the Gulf and determined how currents were going to distribute polluted water.
“Initial containment, damage assessment and environmental restoration work all hinged on our contributions. And yet, both the government and the industry hated us more than ever,” he said.
Why?
“The public had soured on standard science-based cleanup efforts, believing they were making a bad situation worse – an eerie foreshadowing of vaccination hesitancy during the Covid-19 pandemic,” he writes.
“And the media was having a field day, ferreting out petty personal disputes between researchers and cherrypicking the most sensational end-of-world claims made by anyone with a PhD attached to their name. I got into an argument with a reporter during a taping of Good Morning America, which ended with him pulling the plug and storming off.”
Reddy said that part of the problem is a gap in perception about what research or tests can tell us. “The lay public doesn’t understand how science works. A scientist is more than willing to wait weeks, months, years, even decades to solve an outstanding research question. The public wants certainty, and they want it in four seconds. They want it to be like Wikipedia,” he said.
But Reddy said that while the public might have unrealistic expectations, all too often scientists shy away from clear explanations because they are worried that their colleagues will think they are “reckless and unknowledgable” if they give definitive answers. So they respond to questions from the press and public by cloaking explanations with caveats about what they don’t know.
“Most people want answers and not a laundry list of the gaps and challenges within a scientific issue,” he said.
Added to that is the fear of being made to look foolish with some mistake that the public soon forgets but the scientific community does not. “When you venture outside of the ivory tower and make a mistake, more often than not the risk is greater than the reward,” he said. Reddy describes mistakes for scientists as “sticky”.
“They don’t go away the next day, or the next year, or even five years after that. They could completely derail your career,” he wrote.
Then there is the problem of the celebrity scientists.
“Your colleagues might think you’re a sellout because you get too much attention,” he writes.
Reddy offers the example of Carl Sagan, the cosmologist, astrophysicist and much else besides who was denied tenure at Harvard and never admitted to the National Academy of Sciences. Reddy said Sagan was sneered at within parts of the scientific community because of his public popularity through his books and interviews.
Reddy was prompted to write his book by the politics of the Covid-19 pandemic. “I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of so much pushback against the vaccine once it started rolling out. Then you see death threats against scientists, and it’s not just [Anthony] Fauci [the chief medical adviser to President Biden]. These people are dedicating their lives and putting themselves in harm’s way,” he said.
“It just seemed like we were missing an opportunity to add some clarity about how science works, and how medical science works, and what happens in a crisis. So I try to add some clarity from my own mistakes and experiences.”
One of the things he learned is to make clear that a scientific explanation is not the same as a solution. “This whole idea of trusting your experts is recognising that there is no happy ending during any crisis, and ultimately you’re working on the basis of stopping a bad thing from getting worse,” he said.
Reddy understands the challenges of going public, not least for the likes of climate scientists amid the vicious politics and conspiracy theories around global heating. One way to deal with that, he says, is to keep it local.
“Folks are much more likely to gravitate to a local scientist. And the risks are lower for a scientist when they’re working on a more local scale. So my advice for a lot of these things, whether it’s communicating on vaccines or the climate, is to have the people who have the most the best understanding who their audience is, and the most likely chance of trust,” he said.