For the past two weeks, we’ve been hosting Matt Nisbet as an Osher Fellow to the Exploratorium. Matt is well known in the blogging community for his Framing Science site on ScienceBlog and his cross-country speaking tour with Chris Mooney. They’ve been talking about science controversies and about ways that scientists can reach the public by framing or contextualizing their work in ways that are meaningful for different audiences. An example he gives is that of the religious community embracing global warming as an issue that needs to be addressed for moral reasons.

Of course, this is something that the museum world is also interested in, especially in ways to reach audiences that don’t traditionally come to science museums. Much of our audience is well-educated, middle-class adults, families, and even senior citizens who have time and money to come to the Exploratorium. Like all museums, we would like more diversity in our audience and to make science appealing to girls, minorities, and other underserved audiences. Matt’s dance card in his residency here has been filled with staff interested in talking to him about ways to communicate to broader audiences and to increase the appreciation for science through “incidental exposure” essentially taking advantage of science angles to popular topics like entertainment or sports. For instance, we were recently featured in a front page article in the San Francisco Chronicle, coinciding with the All Star Game, about the science of baseball. One of our educators demonstrated the physics of pitching and the story was linked to a Web site that we developed as part of our Accidental Scientist series (which also included gardening, music and cooking).

There’s been a backlash though from some bloggers and science communicators that accuse Matt of distorting science, of advocating manipulative tactics similar to that of political operatives. One online comment in a piece by The Scientist says that under no circumstances should anyone “spin” science which is how he interprets framing. The poster, Earl Holland of Ohio State, goes on to say that scientists should stick to their work, running experiments and distilling the facts, and leave the communication to the professionals. I think this shortchanges the abilities of many scientists to tell compelling stories about their work and make it understandable and relevant to everyday people. Science is multi-dimensional and the implications of the enterprise go well beyond ”the facts” and into realms of politics, policy, culture, education, the economy, and everyday life. Wading into these realms may make some scientists uncomfortable, but it is the right of citizens in a democracy to know what their tax money is supporting and its relevance to their lives and interests. The Exploratorium has a long tradition, beginning with our founder Frank Oppenheimer, of working with scientists fully capable of explaining their work to public audiences and discussing its implications and context in a larger world. The more scientists there are who embrace this more public role, the better we are as a society.

Modern genetic researchers say there is no biological basis for the concept of race, that the average genetic differences between geographic groups such as Japanese, Europeans, and East Africans are too small to be significant. But if race is not a scientific concept, is it still a culturally valid one?

Joanne Rizzi, an exhibit and program developer and visiting Osher Fellow to the Exploratorium, explored the misunderstandings and realities of race with an exhibition she helped develop with the American Anthropological Association and the Science Museum of Minnesota. RACE: Are We So Different? covers the myth and meaning of race. There are obvious differences in the way we look, in skin color and hair for instance, but is race really only skin deep? What about the human experience of race and culture—is it possible to reconcile or at least acknowledge the two concepts?

Joanne told a group of us at the Exploratorium that she was initially reluctant to work on the exhibition because she didn’t think a purely scientific exploration of race would be broad enough to embrace the cultural reality and history of race and racism in America. But the Science Museum of Minnesota kept asking her until she finally agreed to come onboard. While on the exhibit team she initiated a community advisory panel that would become part of the development process and co-developed a series of programs. It was tough going, many people of color were suspicious that the exhibition wouldn’t tell the truth about racism and power. One advisor quit over the prominence of a map, based on genetic evidence, that all humans on earth originally came out of Africa. A Native American, his religious and cultural beleifs conflicted with the scientific views so he left the project.

But eventually what they created allowed many voices and viewpoints into the exhibition. One especially powerful public program were the “talking circles” which brought together groups of people to share ideas about the exhibition with a process that allows everyone to speak. Now the exhibition is on tour, currently in Detroit and spreading out across the U.S.

For the past week, crowds along the Sacramento Delta east of San Francisco have marveled at the spectacle, and fretted over the fate, of a mother humpback whale and her calf who are headed away from rather than toward the ocean. Biologists have been trying to herd them back to the sea to no avail and now their health appears to be deteriorating.

It’s a quirk of human nature that the public (and media) care more about two individuals that can be captured on TV or seen with their own eyes than about the lives of tens of thousands of whales that hang in the balance pending a vote by the International Whaling Commission this month in Anchorage. Twenty years ago, commercial whaling was banned by the IWC, but Japan is lobbying to lift that ban to satisfy their market for whale meat. The Japanese and some of their pro-whaling supporters claim that scientific studies have shown that whale populations have recovered enough to support commercial whaling. They probably don’t have the votes needed to overturn the ban this year, thanks to some intense lobbying by conservation groups in Britain, Australia and New Zealand (those countries seem much more attentive to the issue than the U.S.)

The IWC meetings started early in May with the scientific committees meeting first. David Ainley, who’s been studying penguins in Antarctica for 20 years, presented some papers there about the interactions between whales and penguins in Antarctica’s Ross Sea. (We did a webcast with him from his research camp at Cape Royds late last year.) David, who took this picture of a minke whale at left, said the IWC conference was the only biology meeting he’s ever been to with armed guards at the door. Japanese whaling vessels were in the Ross Sea this year, killing minke whales as part of their “scientific whaling” program. The whales are cut open on the ships and data on fat stores and stomach contents is collected. It’s doubtful whether Japanese scientists would kill whales for research if there was no market for the meat and David says that nearly all biologists at the IWC meeting question the need to sacrifice whales at all since there are non-lethal ways to study them.

I’ll keep you posted what happens with the IWC meeting and writing more about the spectacular Ross Sea and David’s research there.

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