As the Bio International Convention begins here in Boston Monday, the most brilliant thinkers around the world will meet to discuss innovations in the life sciences, drug discovery, biofuels, and nanotechnology. Most of us will have no idea what the attendees at the largest global event for the biotechnology industry are talking about. The convention website highlights a head-spinning array of sessions about such topics as oligonucleotides-based therapeutics, engendering painful memories of attempts at AP Biology in high school.
Biological advancements have tremendous benefits to our health, energy supplies, and global food supplies. But there is a darker side to the bio-industry, and that involves both the capacity to cause harm and the need for medicine to treat us should that come to pass. So, as the really smart conventioneers present their goods in Chinese, Japanese, English, Spanish, and other languages, those of us on the outside have one simple request: When it comes to the public and the threats that we face, speak in a language that we can actually understand.
Comments
This comment has been removed.
Ms. Kayyem, You are one of the most cogent writers on the Globe and I thank you for your good work. You're always informative and a pleasure to read.
I have read this column twice. I conclude that the following is the most true statement in it: "Most of us will have no idea what the attendees at the largest global event for the biotechnology industry are talking about." Can someone please explain to me what on earth the BIO convention has to do with dirty beaches or nuclear radiation? Or why a Richter-like scale would be helpful to measure either? This is like using the Stanley Cup playoffs as an excuse to write a column telling the NHL that it should be better explaining the health risks of an all-poutine diet. If my 6th-grader showed me this as a homework assignment, I would yell at her and send her back to her room to think some more. This is particularly embarrassing given all of the visitors to our city who are here for BIO. I just hope this kind of thing happens in their cities too.
Americans are ignorant when it comes to mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology as an act of will and an overall hostility to science, scientists, and other intellectuals, not as a result of the means to learn not being there. Looking for 'language we can understand' is meaningless when in the mindset of the willfully ignorant the world is full of bogeymen. Take closing the beaches as a result of biological waste, for example. That is a euphemism for saying our sewage treatment capacity for dealing with household waste has overflowed and now it's in the water. The average local yokel would rather believe it is the result of some evil experiment at BU or Harvard rather than agree that maybe the water treatment facilities need upgrading. That won't happen, since no one wants to pony up the funds for it.
This comment has been removed.
This comment has been removed.
This has to be the worst article I have read in a while! The title has nothing to do with the content. Further the only section that actually speaks to the subject of the Bio conference is wrong as well. The international language of science is English and content is presented English! Thanks for wasting Globe readers time and my subscription.
I edit for several academic journals, so I know first-hand how easy it is for a scientist of any stripe to obfuscate in English — or in any other language, for that matter. The usual excuse is that the "public" is too under- or ill-educated to understand, so why try? I keep reminding my authors that the mark of a true expert is the ability to express their ideas, processes, or whatever in terms that are 110% clear to any- and everyone.
In your first post you mention "windbags." Three posts later I would say you must be speaking of yourself.
To obfuscate is to render something unintelligible. Are you claiming that the scientists with whom you interact act deliberately to make their ideas, processes or data unclear? There's no such thing as 110% clear. There's clear, and there's not clear.
Perhaps this is more the fault of the editor writing the headlines, but this column does not discuss any of the "darker side of the bio industry" - it merely complains that science is complex and hard to understand. The column does not specify what should be made clearer beyond the blanket term "science". Nuclear industry is separate from the FDA is separate from the biotech industry. I think that the author may be advocating for a blanket 1-5 scale of how BAD [something] is, but unfortunately the world is more complicated than that (and I'm still not sure what that [something] is). I believe, unlike the author, that the public is able to comprehend a collection of facts and opinions of experts on a given subject and form an opinion based on this rather than being fed a Good or Bad verdict blindly.
I completely agree with jgken. There is undoubtedly some element of a "dark side" to the bio industry, but this article doesn't cover that topic at all and is fact quite inane. A disappointing (and fortunately rare) lapse from this writer and this paper. But either change the headline or change the article, please.