I fully believe that part of our responsibility as scientists is to engage with the public in meaningful ways, making scientific knowledge accessible to all, and be able to tell our science in a way that inspires and make people feel in awe.

I also believe that science cannot be apolitical. There is no social enterprise that can be considered apolitical, and science, as a collective and social phenomenon, is no exception. Scientists must aknowledge that they too are political actors, and that their involvement (or lack thereof) in societal issues sends political messages.

Ciencia Café pa' sumercé

Ciencia Café pa'Sumercé was born as an idea to highlight colombian scientists (domestically and abroad), and make their science accessible to all. It has a similar format to a regular science cafe, but it also includes short videos showcasing colombian scientists and a blog where science is told in an entertaining way.

I've been part of Ciencia Café since around 2017. Lately, I've been contributing to the blog, where I have focused on highlighting interesting topics evolutionary biology using familiar and accessible terms and examples (my family -non of them scientists- has been the main reviewers for each entry!)

Other

As a modest contribution towards the accessibility of scientific knowledge, I wrote a wikipedia article about developmental bias, a topic that I'm particularly fond of.

Wikipedia has a really profound philosophy about democratizing knowledge, and it may become especially important to early career students and institutions that don't have access to scientific literature due to paywalls. I think that scientists can have a great impact in society by providing free, detailed, first-hand knowledge - not to mention that it is a great way to practice writing and communication skills.

Science and politics

This is a personal reflection I wrote about the political nature of science and scientists.

The scientist and the public sphere

At the core of every civil society are the citizens, who, sheltered by the tacit agreement of a common social contract, share rights and responsibilities which ensure their involvement in the public sphere to attain collective objectives. This public sphere is the common world, a discursive space, that belongs to everyone and where social actors engage in critique and debate, in which public opinion ultimately forms and may lead, even if indirectly, to political participation1. One could argue that the roles played by each social actor in the larger stage of the public debate within the public sphere are tightly linked to each actor’s role in the society, i.e., their profession.

It is hard to imagine otherwise. Ideas, critique, and debate shared in the public sphere are inextricably linked to each person’s intellectual formation (through formal or informal education) and worldview. An apparent exception to this has been the long-held view about scientists being objective and therefore apolitical, i.e., that the scientists can divorce their science from themselves. Here, I will argue that such a view is untenable, for the scientist is a citizen and therefore a political figure; that is, that they are part of the social contract within a society, inasmuch as their participation in the public sphere – by discussing and identifying societal problems – and even the nature of their scientific inquiry may influence political action either directly or indirectly2.

When scientists are advocating for their science their discourse can shape political relationships and agendas by prioritizing what types of questions and research aim to be the focus of support for the next administration and policymakers. It can shape the distribution of social resources by explicitly encouraging how much of the national budget is to be spent on what kinds of research; or it can do so by lobbying, shaping the network of social relationships such that peoples’ social, economic, political and ethical views align with their science. It can also shape people’s perspectives and opinions about science, thus shaping public opinion. This advocacy, which happens everywhere at all times -- in classrooms, hallway chats, or public speeches -- is itself a political act and a form of political speech. This very essay represents a political standpoint.

As an example of these ideas, consider the plethora of cases where science and society (politics, economics, etc.) intersect: Genetics, race and access to social resources; conservation and fossil fuel-based economy; genetic medicine, personal data management and access to the healthcare system; neurobiology/psychology and the structure of the education system; agricultural research and food security, to name a few. In every case, advocating for the science implies advocating for a particular set of ideological and political views. The scientist becomes a political figure in the public sphere every time the person exercises their citizenship. The citizen and the scientist are ideologically indistinguishable within the same person.

But what if the citizen and the scientist were ideologically distinguishable? Let’s consider the hypothetical scenario where the person and the scientist were separable, where a scientist could decide whether to engage in the daily public sphere as their own persona or as a scientist. This deceptively simple choice would represent in itself a political decision, for the scientist alter ego would be purposefully and deliberately being used to make a statement. Thus, by saying that scientists are citizens, and therefore political actors, we are acknowledging their involvement in the public sphere and further that their involvement contributes to the formation of public opinion that may result in political action.

Having explored the citizenship status of the scientist, we may now ask: What is, specifically, the civil responsibility of scientists in the public sphere?

Public opinion is a valued social capital, for it affects the social network of interactions between the citizens in the society and between citizens and the state through political participation. Scientists are in a privileged position within the public sphere to the extent that they hold first-hand knowledge by questioning, producing and analyzing data. It is privileged because knowledge and data are limiting resources for the formation of an unbiased, or at least informed, public opinion.

We established before that the public sphere is a common discursive space, shaped by the ongoing dialogue on public issues, and that is characterized by its rhetorical nature. By “public” and “common” it is meant that all citizens should have access to the debate and to the ideas presented therein, which leads us to the answer of the question asked above: The scientist’s civil responsibility is to democratize knowledge beyond geopolitical limits, that is, to make all knowledge accessible to everyone as a world citizen (as a complementary view to this point, it was recently argued that the benefits of scientific progress ought to be a cosmopolitan right3).

This is no different to any social transaction between two or more social actors: the scientist, appealing to their role in the society, engage productively in the public debate by sharing knowledge through specific means for transmitting information, e.g., digital or paper-based mass media, popular books, podcasts and radio, etc., or even during the daily informal debate. Multilingual scientists are further encouraged to democratize knowledge in different languages so as to reduce knowledge-access bias4. Note that the scientist’s engagement is not meant to be indoctrinating or patronizing, but rather humble, self-critical and transparent. The scientist’s part in the collective aim of societal wellness rests on its voluntary involvement in the public sphere acknowledging that its interventions have a political nature. This includes active and clear communication about why the research is relevant or interesting, what are the implications of the findings of their research, what remains unknown, and, especially important, how to (and how not to) interpret the findings. It would not be excessive to say that public engagement, and transparent communication, could save lives both in the short and long term5.

Science and scientists cannot be apolitical. On the one hand, scientists are social and political actors in the stage of the public sphere, even while most of them are not politicians per se. On the other hand, like every social and collective endeavor, science is co-produced by society. Science is the result of the collective and coordinated effort of citizens towards making sense of the world.

  1. Habermas, J. The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964). New Ger. Crit. 3, (1974).
  2. Levins, R. & Lewontin, R. The dialectical biologist. (Harvard University Press., 1985).
  3. Massimi, M. Perspectives on scientific progress. Nat. Phys. 1–3 (2022).
  4. Amano, T., González-Varo, J. P. & Sutherland, W. J. Languages Are Still a Major Barrier to Global Science. PLoS Biol. 14, 1–8 (2016).
  5. Petersen, M. B., Bor, A., Jørgensen, F., & Lindholt, M. F. Transparent communication about negative features of COVID-19 vaccines decreases acceptance but increases trust. PNAS 118, (2021).