Kissing the blarney stone: Using stories to tell science
1 December 2003
Professor Frances Ashcroft, University Laboratory of Physiology, Oxford, UK
Science is one of the most exciting and most rewarding of human activities, and to many of its practitioners it is an all-consuming passion. It is therefore sad that this great intellectual adventure is often dismissed as inaccessible, irrelevant or boring by a large section of the community. Yet, to my mind, understanding the life sciences is no more difficult than speaking another language or appreciating Schoenberg and it is often far more relevant to our lives.
So how do we go about making science enthralling, informative and pertinent to the general public? How can we change the caricature of the scientist – mad, bad and dangerous to know – in fiction and film? How do you explain your own research to your sister, taxi driver, fishmonger or local politician in terms that they understand? I have found that one way to accomplish this is by telling stories. A fascinating story can lead people through the science so that they absorb it without even noticing – until they come to explain it to their friends in the pub when they suddenly realise what they have learnt.
This lecture presents a personal account of the difficulties and delights of learning to communicate science to the public. It will discuss the experience of writing popular science books, giving public lectures, acting as science advisor for TV dramas and as a muse for poets, and talking to journalists. It will suggest ways that we all can contribute, illustrate some of the pitfalls, and explain why it is worth bothering. I have found life as a scientific storyteller immensely hard work and very stressful, and far from easy in the beginning. But it has also been enormously enjoyable, very rewarding and a great privilege. It has changed my life.
Biography
Frances Ashcroft is the Royal Society GlaxoSmithKline Research Professor at the University of Oxford and holds a Professorial Fellowship at Trinity College, Oxford. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1999 and an EMBO Member in 2000. Her research focuses on how a rise in the blood sugar concentration stimulates the release of the hormone insulin from the pancreas, what goes wrong with this process in type 2 [adult-onset] diabetes, and how drugs used to treat this condition exert their beneficial effects. She is also actively involved in the public understanding of science and her popular science book Life at the Extremes [2000] was critically acclaimed, became a bestseller, and was translated into 9 languages.