 I'm watching on the live stream as well. My name is Alison Snyder. I'm a managing editor with Axios. We're a media company based in Washington, DC, relatively new, and I'm thrilled to be here today to talk with this esteemed panel about the intersection of science and politics. And if you were able to read a little bit about the session, the idea is that through street-level activism and running for public office, scientists are really finding their political voice. And the core question that we're going to explore today is, how can scientists engage in politics without politicizing science? And so I'll introduce the panel that's going to help us do this. Starting on the very end there is Dr. Jean Pierre Bourguignon. He's the president of the European Research Council. Nita Ferhani is the professor of law and philosophy at Duke University, where she also directs Duke's Science and Society Institute. And next to me is Alex Thompson, who is a physicist and lecturer at Imperial College London. I thank you all for being here. And I'm going to come to the audience pretty quickly for questions, so please have your questions ready. And I'll be there in a minute. And you can also read more about the speakers in top link, which I would encourage you to do so. So my first question is, in the context of this forum's theme of shaping innovative societies and the fourth industrial revolution, why is this question that we're here today to answer important? Why does it matter? And maybe I'll start with you. Sure. So it matters because I think everyone will agree that we want to get as much evidence into policy as possible. And at present, I think scientists are starting to engage with policy, but I don't think they do so as much as they could possibly. So trying to get more expert voices involved in the debate and trying to get more evidence onto the table is very important. So that's the key reason, but I think getting scientists involved goes beyond just getting more evidence on the table and getting more sort of expert opinion on the table. There's also the idea that scientists maybe are trained to think critically about any given problem. So what we do on a day-to-day basis is try and solve problems, try and look at them in an objective, removed sort of manner. And that's totally applicable to policy as well. So looking at a particular policy problem, taking a step back and thinking, what is the best way to solve this, regardless of your political leanings, which way you will solve it and will provide the most equitable solution, scientists can definitely help there. So trying to get more of them involved, but trying to do so without compromising the scientific process is a really important question. That's the line. Yeah. OK. And what do you think in terms of this question? So I think we're at a moment in society where the public has very little trust for the news, has very little trust for science, has very little trust of scientists more generally. And I think historically, scientists have approached politics and approached policymaking with the perspective that it wasn't necessarily their responsibility or their duty to engage. That their responsibility was to produce good science and that policy makers had the duty then to consume that science and to integrate it in ways that led to evidence-based policymaking. And I think what we've learned is that there's this huge gap between the public and between scientists and policymakers. And in that gap, there is a lack of common language and a lack of an ability to understand one another. So scientists haven't been given the skills or the training to be able to communicate the science in a way that is accessible to the public and in a way that can inform policymaking. Policymakers and the public haven't been adequately trained in the scientific disciplines to be able to better understand and engage with the scientist. And the result is that we have this collapse of trust and understanding and policies which aren't based on evidence-based decision making. And so it's a critical moment because I think we realize that we have to develop the skills for scientists and we have to develop the skills for policymakers to be able to bridge that gap, to enable them to come together, to create forums for doing so, to create effective science communication training for scientists, to create effective platforms for the public to engage in, and for there to be a way that people are trained and understand how to meet in the middle. Maybe what is really the critical new characteristic of the moment is really the speed at which things are happening, which have several consequences. I mean, one of them is, of course, that we are actually practicing ourselves all the time. We want to have quick access to information, but also we are not willing to dedicate too much time to this. And still, if you are a scientist, you know that to get some ideas right means a long effort, sometimes a number of trials and errors. And so therefore, you do summarize something which really required a huge amount of reflection, a huge amount of effort into just one or two sentences. It's basically a challenge which you cannot face. That's one thing. The next thing is also on the side of the policymakers. They have the feeling that things are going so quickly that if they don't immediately get solutions, then they are wasting their time, which, of course, is not correct. Of course, some problems needs to be addressed quickly. But then if you focus all your attention and all your resources to this short-term view, then you are going to miss the next step. Because of this contraction, I think we have both with the public and with the policymakers a new type of phenomenon. So I don't think I'm sharing the view that for the moment, the efforts by scientists to communicate have not been enough. It has not been viewed by the scientific community as with of sufficient value, which means that tens in some communities like mine, I'm a mathematician, tend to say that a mathematician dedicated too much time to this is not doing any more real mathematics, which I think is not necessarily true. So one has to give more value to this, but also to accept the idea that the setting is a new one. Because of this, the fact that the short things have so much advantage of our longer things, and there are really things that are subtle enough that you cannot make short, mid-term short. So I think one has to be very careful about a general thing, which is a general problem, which just needs to be addressed in terms of enough attention, enough respect to communication with a large public, but at the same time that we are also in a situation which I think is new. And with this, for example, one thing which probably people have not thought enough about is the value of images over text. And of course, an image, the way you grab it, is very emotionally, very globally. When a text, there is really a discourse with a line of argument. And of course, for many young people, images are everything. And texts are really secondary. And the long text, then, is unthinkable. And of course, as a result, I mean, I know that some really serious mathematical papers are several hundred pages. And you have to read these several hundred pages to really get to the proof. And so how do you communicate that? So I think there's two things. The community has to agree on making more efforts, giving more respect to this activity. At the same time, we probably have to recognize that there are some new features which are new challenges that we need to face. So you've mentioned the timeline and speed of science. And this is something that we hear a fair bit about how the funding priorities will change with a different party or administration. What can be done there? I mean, how can funding agencies, I guess, help to steer science through the ebbs and flows of political priorities? Well, I think, first of all, we see many countries in which really short-term funding of research is really priorities are set and with no room for totally blue sky research, which I think is definitely a mistake. There should be a good balance between short-term vision and long-term vision. And in some system, it's easy. In some other systems, not so easy. Fortunately, at the level of the European Commission and the European Union, the program for the support of research is fixed seven years in advance and with a certain share. So in the case of the European Research Council, the share of the budget we have is 17%. We, of course, dreaming of a larger share. But still, it's a significant share. And for us, because we have the responsibility as scientists to design the program, it's strict bottom-up. We just respect the project by researchers. There is no priority setting. Of course, in all the parts of the program, there are some priorities setting. But in our case, we are really in this what some people consider a dream world where you just let the scientists propose their greatest ideas and the most ambitious ideas. So I think for governments to understand the need to reserve some space where there is totally open possibility for people to submit projects is fundamental. And China is doing it, by the way. Can you, for some of the others in the audience, can you tell us a little bit about what China's in that regard? Well, I mean, first of all, the investment of China in the science has been growing very steadily and continues to grow. And I think you see that the resources which are available in labs, if you visit labs, really are substantially better than it used to be. And at the same time, the quality of the science produced in China is also growing at least in my discipline. I can be judging universally, but really very significantly increasing with really now some of the institutions here in China among the leading institution worldwide. That's the situation. Can you each talk about some of the, you're interested obviously in politics and becoming more active. And I'm curious about, as a scientist, like what that turning point maybe was for you or how the two sort of came together. But then also to all of you, what are the tools that are available today to address some of the issues that you brought up about scientists needing to do more to engage and educate? So I wouldn't know when I first decided I was interested in politics and wanted to get involved. I suppose it was possibly to do with government policies that affect science and hearing about them, working in science and thinking about, yeah, the sort of long term view of funding and that sort of thing. But in terms of tools to engage, I think this forum here, the World Economic Forum, the Young Sciences Community is a really good example of that, but I would certainly say that we need more of those. You need arenas for people to come together and share ideas and discuss things to attract people to do this. Otherwise, if you just rely on individuals to put themselves forward, to talk about their opinions on policy, talk about the evidence that's come out of their research that can affect policy, then you're gonna limit yourself to a restricted view, you're not gonna have many people engaging, you're gonna only have the most interested people engaging, which is fine to some degree, but you wanna expand that as far as possible. So I think working to grow more policies and schemes and forums like this one that bring scientists into the fold and into conversations with policymakers, people in business, that sort of thing would be a really big help. But what it would also do, I think, is it would sort of protect against this idea of politicization of science. If you have a large, well-renowned institute that's putting a rubber stamp on something and saying we've had this large group of scientists come together and come to a consensus on a particular matter, that makes it much harder for any critic to politicize that opinion that's been put out there, that policy suggestion that's put out there. So things like this are great, but I think we can have more of them and I think we should do. So I'm gonna headline this first by saying scipaul.org is a thing that we've just launched at the Duke Initiative for Science and Society. I'm gonna come back to that for a second and explain to you why we got there, which is a number of years ago it became clear to me that scientists who I like very much and appreciate the work that they do for society had some communication challenges when they spoke to the rest of us. And so I started a program called SICOM Training at Duke to train scientists to be able to engage with the public. And there are a number of these programs that are happening around the world and I think they're fantastic because they really help scientists who are interested learn the tools necessary to be able to take what they do and explain it in English. Instead of having the 100 page mathematic proof that you have to read through all of it and have the scientific training to do so, you can distill it and have your elevator pitch to say this is what I do and how it's relevant to society and why it matters. And so that was great as a starting point and I was able to through a great team at Science and Society reach a number of scientists and we continue to do so. But then it became clear that we needed another step because even once you train scientists to be able to effectively communicate, they still don't know necessarily how to engage in policy and the public more generally doesn't know how to engage in policy. And so we launched this website a week ago, it finally went live, which is great, so check it out, scipaul.org, which is a place to track science policy and to turn it into English. And it's starting just with US federal policy because it's a pretty big endeavor. But we take everything that's happening at the US federal level from court cases to regulations to agency actions to congressional actions to executive orders and we explain in hopefully plain English what it does, what the policy is and then we create a little link that says and here's all the ways you can engage with that policy whether it's to write a comment or call a legislator or do some other thing, whatever the action items are, start a sign a change.org petition, whatever it is, create one, a list of possibilities. And then we realize of course we can tell you here all the ways you can engage, but unless we create the tools to train you how to do that, that might not be that useful either. So there's a whole learn section on the website to try to train people how to do those things as well, how to write a comment, how to engage, how to give a talk, how to attend a hearing, how to follow a webcast, things like that. And we hope that this is a tool that will work for scientists as well as the public to bring people together. And on the politicizing science that's the hardest part. So what we've been building this site for the past couple of years and the biggest challenge is how do you write about science policy in a way that's unbiased and especially because there's one feature on the site that we include something called PsyTalk, it's like a scoring system for each piece of policy to say what's the science underlying it? Is it emerging science? Is it hotly contested science? Is it junk science? Is it widely accepted science? And you can imagine how tricky it gets to score a piece of legislation in the science under it without being politically motivated, especially because one of the topical areas that we cover is energy, robotics and AI. There's a lot of politics that are built into the scientific policy making and decision making that's happening. And so it's something we have to check every moment of every day. How do you score it? So we score it by having a panel that we, first it was figuring out, is the scoring gonna be good science, bad science? No, because that includes all kinds of normative judgments. Instead we decided to score it along, is it emerging science? Is it junk science? Is it hotly contested or widely accepted? Those are the four categories that we're using. But we went through lots of conversations with scientists and policymakers to figure out how could we de-bias that scoring system as well. But even just in writing up a description of what a piece of policy is, it's so easy to have a slant, right? You don't like what it is that somebody's doing. It's so easy to describe it with negative language. The word choice you use is so easy to change perspective on it. And so we have found that that's the biggest challenge which is we want to engage policymakers, we want to engage scientists, we want to engage the public, but we believe that in order to do so, you have to build trust. And politicizing science weaponizes science rather than using it to inform policymaking as evidence. And so it's a delicate balance to encourage scientists to engage in policymaking, but to try to encourage them to do so without manipulating their science to inform the public and to inform policymaking because we all have political biases and views. And so how do you engage without twisting the science when you do so? That's the kind of perennial challenge that we're having as we develop Cypaul.org. And we believe by keeping it at an educational institution, we are able to at least have, not have the outside forces that act as much on it, but even academia has political biases and political assignments that are given to it as well. What do you think about the last question she made that Nita just said about how do you sort of keep that balance? Well, it's a very difficult issue because as usual, I mean, to build trust is a long effort. So as soon as you raise one bad moment, then the trust falls. So there is this effort to you take a long time, long effort, and then you can have just one incident which immediately destroys things. So it's a very, very tricky business and we see this as a funding agency that you just need one or two attacks on something which has been absolutely perfect for hundreds of cases and immediately you really have to react quickly and in the right way. So this is always this thing, it's not a symmetric thing. So it's well and then or an incident, you correct it? No, no. So you have to be extremely careful with this. There's one dimension which has not been brought forward for the moment which I think is for me extremely important because I think it's very often missed with science which is scientists are many of them are creators. So I think we should also develop good relation with people who are recognized naturally by society as creators, namely artists. So I think also extending connection to artists is very important because first of all, it's interesting to force you to get out of your lab and your usual activity to people who have totally different ways of approaching things but also reciprocally, you also get the artist to get interested and all of a sudden realize that maybe there is something to share. Personally, I have been exposed to two such adventures, a filmmaker who wanted to make a movie on mathematics which is what do you want to do? And then actually we did the documentary which has been quite successful. That was one. But the other one was an unbelievable challenge from the director of the Foundation Cartier or L'Art Contemporain in Paris who wanted to also in the same way build an exhibit on mathematics at the Foundation Cartier which first time he came to me he said what do you want to do? And then it ended up being really some kind of a twinning between artists and mathematicians and the way it worked was that the religious fascinated each other and which I think was in the end a very successful exhibit. So this confrontation with people from another world is also a good way of putting yourself outside of your context. And I know for this exhibit, for example, that some politicians who visited it actually saw another dimension, I'm sorry it's focused on mathematics but that's my profession, but completely other dimension of something they never imagined would happen. So I think also putting people in a different context and to finish with an example with what scientists can gain from that, an example from ERC, one of the programs we made in order to make the projects of ERC Guantismo visible is we had an agreement with an organization to do what we call ERC comics which are web comics and so of course there are a number of stories about the projects by scientists which are in this but what I really find interesting that several of them after the project was finished the artist and the scientists continued to work together which I really found interesting showed that the two creating a group really found that there was some value to this which could be actually exploited further. So I think this idea of putting yourself outside of your normal context is also a very good way of creating you were looking for tools, I think a good tool to really force yourself outside of your own world and maybe through this way you can actually get back to the policymakers. Well and I think this goes back to your point that text versus images, right? Images are a much more powerful way of communicating. When we are working with scientists on training scientists for science communication part of it is working with artists, working with people in improv and in theater and in different mediums who communicate in different ways, right? Because I think if you can explain your science to different groups and different audiences but also understand those different groups and different audiences can help you depict what you do in really different mediums it's incredibly powerful. I'm gonna come to the audience for a question just after one more question from me and that is I hear from so many scientists to talk about how scientists become so specialized it's so highly technical that they have a hard time talking to one another let alone to the public or to policymakers. How, when we start talking about things like quantum computing and artificial intelligence where the barrier to entry is quite high from a technical standpoint like how do you go about addressing that? I think that's a really important question. I think you're right within science we're now very, very specialized but in any given field you should still be working towards a situation where you can always explain your scientific work to you know a lay person to your own grandmother whatever it might be and if you can't then maybe you don't understand it properly but we've got a strange situation in the way we communicate in the science community so I think which is where we're moving towards this open access model of publication which makes perfect sense because any publicly funded research should maybe be publicly accessible and now lots of research is publicly accessible in terms of you can go online you can download the paper but it's not accessible in terms of being able to read it so I think we need more setups like Neeta's where we can teach scientists how to communicate their research and more of them should be trying to do it themselves but I think what it boils down to is we probably need a different publication model we shouldn't be publishing open access papers that are only accessible never mind just to the scientific community but just to a particular niche within the scientific community we should be publishing open access papers with some sort of additional explanatory aid to help a lay person engage and look at it and find out whether they're interested in it the way it works at the moment is my experience at Imperial is if we think we've got a particularly interesting piece of research then maybe for that one paper we will put out a press release and we'll say let's put out an easily understandable summary of this research that will be taken up by news outlets now that's a backwards way of looking at it from my opinion what we should be doing is doing that for all of our research as often as possible and as frequently as possible and letting the public decide what they are interested in maybe we're completely wrong to think that they're interested in this new step forward in robotics or this new step forward in diagnostics they might be interested in something completely different and if we just gave them the information to make that decision then that could really help this debate become a lot more open and a lot more widespread it's so interesting what science gets viral so on our I oversee our science coverage and it's always amazing to me what gets picked up it's not the things I always expect okay let's go to the audience for a couple of questions I would just ask that you please just state who you are and how about right here to start yep sorry Mike so thank you for the interesting discussion so as was mentioned we haven't been doing a good job of communicating with the public and I think part of that is because there's a problem of incentives and right now we are not incentivized to do this actually can damage our career because we have to spend time publishing and doing other things so my question is very general what has been done are there good examples of this problem being attacked somewhere what can be done what should be done in this regard it's a great question and it's a problem that the young scientist here at the forum have been working on as well I mean people worldwide are working on this problem but one approach to that I had the opportunity to work with the young scientist for the past couple of years on something that they've launched called the code of ethics for scientists which specifically incorporates as duty the duty to make accessible research with the understanding of what the principles are that guide that so scientists are enabled by society they're enabled by society through public funding they're enabled by society to take risks that the rest of us aren't taking and they give back in terms of the research that they provide but they also are answerable for the funding and the support and the freedom that they have to explore these things by being able to communicate that science as well so it's trying to develop a code of ethics but then trying to have that code of ethics permeates so that it's part of the incentive structure so that we understand that what it means to do science is to do good science and to do good science includes a responsibility to mentor a responsibility to communicate to the public a responsibility to be able to provide information that can inform policy making and by incorporating that explicitly into what we understand it means to be a good scientist and encouraging institutions to adopt that and incorporate it and to change their incentive structures to align with it is essential so a starting point is to recognize that very problem which is that the incentive structure is completely designed against having scientists truly engage in to learn to communicate and to spend their time being answerable to the public and engaging with policy making and to try to change that incentive system and address it at its roots and at the institutional level at journals kind of across the board that's one approach there are many other approaches as well but I think the incentives are the key there right you can have a code of ethics and that's all well and good but people need to be incentivized to follow that code of ethics that's right so unless it's incorporated and unless it's part of the expectations of the community and unless it's part of the expectations of journals for publication and institutions for an advancement or funding agencies it doesn't go anywhere I think with funding agencies it is going in the right direction though and John Pierre will be able to talk about this more but funding agencies are starting to ask for evidence of outreach policies and you know evidence that you're explaining research to the general public that sort of thing but I don't think that's permeated institutions or journals even close I hope it will but they need to take that step as well funding bodies are starting to do it but you know institutions are not employing people based on their outreach work they're employing people based on their publication record and yeah journals have something to answer for there as well so they need to get involved in that debate too great just down here in front thank you very much just a quick question I am one of the young scientists here in this forum and I would like to challenge the assumption that politicization is something which we would like to steer clear of because it's going to happen whether we like it or not so even by such a simple decision as having science outreach we are generating markets you know this can rise to very admirable initiatives such as podcasts, TV shows about science which really popularize science but can also give and it gave rise to parasitic journals yeah which are clearly trying to capitalize on our wishes to reach out you know there are glossy journals who sell you for 2000 to 9000 pounds per two page article yeah access to European decision makers so obviously there is a will and people get tricked into that and fork out that money so obviously the wish to have this kind of access is there so my question is here really if we want to prevent maybe the partisanship of science but want to foster politicize well political engagement of scientists who's going to be our lobby I mean do we have a lobby I think in that respect the European Research Council is potentially the closest thing which we have in Europe you are, you should be our lobby and take care of a soft power trickle down approach of good policy making towards institutions and individuals I mean like so my question to sum up this somewhat lengthy elaborate statement is who's going to serve as a lobby for the scientists why do you need a lobby in order to prevent bad bad policy making and also bad politicization of science and also also to counteract bad developments out of the markets which we generate with our initiatives and actions so I think those are all good concerns I would suggest that it's not a lobby that is necessary to address it it is engagement and tools of engagement of scientists who are able to explain but not politicize their science when I say don't politicize I mean don't manipulate or distort the science right accurately represent the science fairly and truthfully rather than having a lobbying for a particular perspective unless that perspective is simply to try to put the facts into the marketplace of ideas so that policy making is better informed by evidence based decision making I think that there are lobbies for funding for science at least in the US there are a number of organizations and large scientific organizations that do lobby for funding and that I think makes good sense but they don't lobby for a particular slanted view of science they lobby for the increase of the part of the pie of money that goes to science I'm not sure whether to succumb to that I think maybe when you said lobby you're not sure that's exactly what you meant I think what is true we don't necessarily need lobbies because that inherently does politicize science right but what we possibly do need to support structures so ways to engage that can back up a scientist if they get into trouble in this sort of situation because if you're individually engaging then you do put yourself in a position where even if you don't politicize the science yourself you can be attacked by someone who has a different opinion right so there was an example of this PhD student in Germany recently called Britt Hermes who is a I can't remember what her field is but she has a blog talking about naturopathy and exposing the sort of protocols that they have in this field of sort of pseudo medicine if you like but she was sued by a naturopath in the United States and she had no one to back her up so it ended up with a charity in Australia trying to bring funding together to support her legal costs so I definitely don't think we need lobbies but perhaps we do need more forums that people can engage through so that if there are you know okay this is a particularly bad problem but if there are situations like that then there's a support structure to you know to back them up and say look this person's not manipulating evidence we've got 50 people to assess that and back that up and you know maybe we can pay for a lawyer for them if it really comes worst comes to worst yeah my hope is that institutions you know whether they're educational institutions or others in which scientists are practicing have this support and you know to the extent that the incentive structure is aligned with them actually engaging that means also standing behind them right yeah that's right and providing the tools but also providing the you know legal support if that's what's necessary to do so quickly yes I I want just to give an example of a result of a lobbying by scientists you know for a number of years research was not a shared responsibility of the European Commission at the European Union level and at some point people felt that so this prevented for example the possibility the possibility of funding directly researchers people were supported either through a network because it was contributing cohesion or through joint work with industry because it was contributing to wealth creation but the support of research was not possible at the European level so scientists got together in in the 90s to create initiative for science in Europe which was really a lobbying structure of many different groups of people scientists and in the end 2007 the European Research Council was created so it took 12 years to get it off the ground and particularly a change in the treaty which really made research a shared responsibility at European level so of course in the US these things existed for many years because the country exists for many years but in the case of the European Union which is under construction or under threat at the moment but under construction or deconstruction right definitely there was a need for a group to organize itself and finally bring this up as a collective issue and we won we had to be patient but it worked in the back here the gentleman in the back thank you very much my name is Karsten Otto from Germany Keisen Institute and I'm an associate professor in University Heidelberg my question to you is following I valued here the international experience in the front more than in the past politics influence universities in Germany in the last three four years I have a question based on your experience is it serious and allowed to use science for transportation of political messages or and emotion or is it strictly to split it means should science absolute neutral without emotions without transportation of political messages in the universities what's your experience please who wants to take that one I'm happy to start you know if the question is it's almost impossible I think for people to truly put all of their biases aside right I mean the more we learn about implicit biases the more we understand that implicit biases come into everything we do they inform scientific work as much as they inform any other kind of work but my own personal opinion is that the way to increase public trust of science is for scientists to do their best to reduce those sources of bias to not use science to try to achieve a particular outcome now I say that with one caveat which is if you know for example that some piece of policy or the direction of policy the way it's going is based on bad science and you wish to try to create good science to change the direction of that policy and do so faithful to the scientific process of finding truthful facts about the world and try to sway policies in that way I think that's terrific I'm all for more facts and more evidence to be able to create better outcomes but I think my hope and my understanding of public opinion is the less politicized science is the less that it's used to manipulate outcomes and the more it remains true to factual discoveries about the world the more likely the public is to accept it as facts rather than opinions and that I think is an essential starting point we need public trust in science in order for policies to be based on good evidence rather than simply discarded as yet another piece of political fiction designed for a particular outcome I think it comes back to communication again doesn't it my experience of particularly universities is that universities certainly in the UK are at pains to not be influenced by by governments and by lobbies and that sort of thing and we have a lot of checks and balances in place to make sure that the research is not affected by a particular policy right we have peer review you know if you if you publish a paper that is not based on good science then you'll get found out pretty soon by another research group but the problem is that perhaps the public don't necessarily trust that and so that comes right back to the communication issue we need to be communicated more frequently and in a more open manner and in a more accessible manner with the general public so that they you know have that opinion as well they think well if this scientist is standing up and saying this and I trust him and I believe that he may have particular political leanings but at least the science he's talking about the evidence he's talking about is real and it's true and we can trust it can we take a question from over here Hi there thank you I'm a science writer and based in the UK and I don't know if this is a UK thing or whether it's across the board but I find whenever I'm asking a scientist for a comment for an article or something and most of the time met with some kind of real trepidation or fear and kind of a real reluctance for making any actual statement even if they've done the research and even if there is fact so how can myself as a member of the media better I guess encourage scientists to be happy to comment on things when I'm writing something about artificial intelligence you get millions of business people giving you their opinions and they're the ones that get heard because they're happy to give them but scientists tend not want to or even retract them after you've written part of it I think is effective media training for scientists and part of it is better training of science writers to not sensationalize the science I think that scientists have pretty regularly been burned because really boring science doesn't sell good stories and so a lot of times if they're unused to talking to the media they don't realize that they have to be careful whereas a lot of people who are in business are pretty careful about the words that they choose because they're more comfortable and used to speaking with the media and so I think there's trepidation because they see other scientists being burned by sensationalization of the science and I think it's kind of on both sides we have to figure out a way to not have to sensationalize science in order to sell good science articles and we need to provide better media training for scientists to be able to carefully engage in a dialogue that allows a good middle ground to be found so we have time for one more question that is down here in the front I think we'll see good yeah thank you Greg Engel University of Chicago I'm one of the young scientists at the forum I'm very curious about this approach to building trust with the science community it's been very clear from the talk what scientists can do to build that trust but trust is obviously a commodity in politics and if one builds this sort of trust it will be consumed by politicians who are thinking of interest balancing beyond merely consuming the evidence and as soon as we encourage scientists to engage in policy and policy makers have an obvious incentive to try to wield that trust and suggest that science is on their side it seems like that creates a lot of risk and I'm curious about things like change.org buttons on side poll and trying to get scientists engaged at the policy level one example in the U.S. where we see some bitter partisanship is climate and pulling out of the Paris Accords and one could argue some did that that has to do with different standards being applied to different countries others could argue that it's ignoring the science and it's ignoring the evidence but unfortunately that then quickly devolves into one of the types of incidents that destroy the public trust in science because some people will say that one party or the other is ignoring science another will say they're making a policy decision how does one create evidence for politicians to consume without actually politicizing the science because when it gets picked up by someone with a larger megaphone clearly the science ends up being tainted or the scientists end up being tainted and if they've participated in things like petitions it sure will look to the public like they are biased I think there's a bit of an elephant in the room here with this question which is that promoting engagement of scientists with policy and policy with science is obviously very important right but what you also need is engagement of the general public with evidence-based policy and that's a real challenge you have to be really interested in politics to hear a guy on the news at a you know speaking event talking about a particular policy and then to think to yourself okay you know what I'm going to do next I'm going to go away I'm going to research that particular policy I'm going to read three different articles on it and I'm going to make a judgment as to whether or not that is a policy that will be beneficial to me and my family so I think we we need to promote engagement in politics as well because if we don't have people voting based on evidence at least to some degree then there are always going to be politicians who will ignore evidence and go for a populist policy if they know that that populist policy will get them re-elected so while engagement of the science community with the political community is important promoting broader engagement with politics you know across the general public is possibly much more important and I think if we don't do that then the whole debate about evidence-based policy science engagement this sort of thing science communication is a bit of a moot point so we've got two minutes left and I want to just take those two minutes to ask each of you for your key takeaway from this conversation do we start with you on the end there Jean-Pierre well for me I think as I try to say in my introductory words one has to be careful about some things which are really general features which the one I mentioned about the fact that scientific community all together has not paid enough attention to some of these issues and something which are really very peculiar with specific features specific characteristics of the present situation which requires new thinking and new tools new approaches and I think we have to be careful that if we just confuse the two probably something which would be a good solution for long term may miss some new dimension which at the moment is appearing and for which not much thinking has been put I just gave this example of the overwhelming importance of the images of the text which I think for me in the long run is going to be extremely important and I don't think a lot of attention has been paid to that for me the biggest takeaway is that we need new tools to be able to engage the public to engage scientists and to engage policymakers at the intersection of science policy we have created one such tool Cypaul.org to the gentlemen who asked the question we have sought to try to create that as an unbiased opportunity for people to come together and I think it's important that we create checks and balances one of the checks and balances we created on Cypaul is the CyTalk score to say one science is incorporated into a policy how does it look did it become politicized so that it's actually junk science or is it something where it's based on good science so that as the public looks at any particular piece of policy they can have a kind of assessment in a way of being able to understand the science that's underlying the policy itself it requires that we be creative about this in society and come up with new tools besides Cypaul as ways for people to be able to engage and learn to trust and communicate across these different divides yeah in a similar vein I think certainly from the scientific side of this debate I think we need better communication and we need more frequent communication of science at every stage of the scientific process we need to be building trust in science amongst the general public so that if they see a particular scientist talking they don't immediately distrust that person they do the exact opposite and bringing them into the sort of scientific journey from the start talking about the science that we do at all points through the process is the way to do that and that needs to be thought about thank you all so much I will give my one parting thought as neither a scientist anymore or a politician and that is that the thing that I heard from you and you called the elephant in the room is that the importance of the public sort of seeing science as a civic understanding science as a civic duty and not just as education and sort of shifting into that realm and the need for ways to engage people to do that so thank you all thank you very much sorry I didn't get to everyone's questions but thank you and have a nice best of your day