 What I'd like to talk about just for a second is why I write about science. I'm a journalist. I have been for many, many years. I've covered politics. I've covered the international political scene as a correspondent in Africa and Asia. I've covered the White House. I've had a really wonderful and rich career, but nothing has been more interesting than covering science. The reason is because basically all of those things that I covered, and it was very kind of restless moving from one topic to another, even my books are that way, but it's all unified by one theme, which is a fascination with that moment of discovery and that moment when technology begins to change our society and begins to change individuals. I probably have settled in this for the rest of my career and the rest of my life. Meeting the scientists, the people on the leading edge of technology, as a correspondent for Nightline, as my work on NPR and other places, has been an incredible privilege. And I think if you look back in time as a student of history, these moments when technology and science begin to shift paradigms is when civilizations rise and fall. We're in a moment like that right now, I believe. It's an incredibly important moment. And as a writer and a communicator trying to understand what's happening here and to basically in some ways beat people over the head a little bit, not too hard, but get them to understand just how important this era is. These stories I just described to you, three incredibly important areas all around swirling around science and also how we communicate it and talk about it. And I think we have an amazing panel here to give us different points of view. Basically, I think virtually every medium is represented here from fiction to radio and television. And I'm going to hand it off to the panel here and let's see here on the introductions. Start out with Peter Loffer. And Peter is an award-winning independent journalist, broadcaster and documentary filmmaker. He was a correspondent for NBC News, anchored the radio program National Geographic World Talk and on Sundays still hosts the Peter Loffer show on the San Francisco Clear Channel radio station Green 960. And he's written for Mother Jones, lots of other magazines, authored several books on a really unbelievably wide variety of topics, including a science book, his last one, called The Dangerous World of Butterflies. And I believe he's working on a sequel as well, but Peter, take it away. Okay, it's terrific to be here. And I love speaking right after your assessment of how you got into science writing and how you embrace it and how important it is because I come to it completely by happenstance and have no reason to be on this panel that is legitimate along the lines of the rest of you guys. This book, The Dangerous World of Butterflies, which is absolutely a natural history book, it's science journalism because of the subject matter. But the reason that I wrote it is that I was in an environment much like this. It was a bookstore signing in Bellingham, Washington at a terrific independent bookstore, village books. And the speech was shot by C-SPAN. And toward the end of the reading about an hour in, and I imagine you all have had this experience, somebody raised their hand and it was a hot miserable day with no air conditioning and I had a tie on and I was wired for television so I couldn't take my jacket off. And somebody asked me what my next book was going to be about. You get this question for some reason, I don't quite understand why that question comes, but I said the book I was talking about, which dealt with soldiers coming back from the Iraq war who came back opposed to the war and this was a series of profiles of those soldiers with such a difficult book to research and write. The stories were so hard to listen to that that book was so difficult to write emotionally that my next book would be about butterflies and flowers. I have absolutely no clue where that came from. It was an escape line. I needed to get off the stage and it worked. There was a little titter as there was just now here in this room. I said thank you very much. Exit stage left and then C-SPAN broadcast the speech including that bit and in the lower third was my email address, website. And they recycle these things on C-SPAN often and so for the next several days, weeks, I was on the receiving end of an avalanche of email. About half of the email said that I was a traitor and should leave the country. And the other half said that this was a heroic book to write to give voice to these guys. And one email in the middle of that said there was a joke line where you said your next book was going to be about butterflies and flowers. My husband and I operate a butterfly preserve here in Granada, Nicaragua. You were making a joke, but in fact there's a story there. And the story is here. And if you come down to Nicaragua, we will introduce you to what's beneath the veneer and the butterfly world. And of course as journalists we know there's always a veneer. There's a story everywhere. There are no slow news days, only slow news reporters. And only pushy wives. And my wife shoved me onto an airplane. She said this is too good. It's serendipitous. It's a gift from the muse and the news gods. And I went down to this butterfly reserve and in fact was introduced to what became the subject matter of this book. A phenomenal world of smuggling, of organized crime, of extraordinary controversy between those who believe in the captive breeding of butterflies for a variety of reasons and those who oppose it because of their concerns for the purity of the species. Industries that are developing like the butterfly release industry for weddings and funerals. I traveled all over the place, made an amazing array of people and have learned in fact that there is a dangerous world of butterflies. How dangerous? Really dangerous for some people. So dangerous. Well there's a guy in here who did two years in federal prison for bringing butterflies in that are in violation, trafficking in them is in violation of international treaty and federal law. Amazing federal fish and wildlife service agent who tracked this guy for three years went undercover and feigned interest in him, romantic interest in order to lure him to this country from Japan and arrest him at LAX as he came thinking he was going to have a date with a guy that was also an illegal butterfly trafficker but in fact was a federal cop. That dangerous. Well Peter, thank you. This is a really good example. In fact the panel is a good example of taking a subject that literally started as a throwaway line and making a book out of it. We all know about books about salt and cod and these seemingly, how could a book be that interesting about cod? Well it turns out cod was a major force in history and making a book out of butterflies and fascinating and interesting is part of what being a science writer is all about. And I think we have next there Douglas Carlton Abrams as a former editor at the University of California Press in Harper San Francisco. His first book, The Lost Diary of Don Juan and before this I was telling him boy you've gone a long way from Don Juan. It's been published in 30 countries and it's recently optioned for a film. His new novel is the fact-based eco thriller Eye of the Whale. And Doug is also the co-founder of Idea Architects, a book and media development agency that works with the likes of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and primatologist Franz DeWall and another stellar list. So Doug from Don Juan to Whales. Well thank you. It's a privilege to be here and on this panel and it's great to follow on Peter's comments because my journey to writing Eye of the Whale was serendipitous as well. I don't start out with an answer or with a genre. I start out with a question. And in this case I was sitting one winter morning with my twin daughters reading them a book about Humphrey the Whale that many of you have probably seen or certainly heard about Humphrey. And a friend of ours was visiting from college who's a public health PhD and she was telling me about these quite extraordinary environmental threats that I had not heard about. And the question that occurred as I was sitting there reading to my children was, was there a world, a question that I'm sure many of you have asked yourself, is there a world that we're going to be able to give to our children and what is that world going to be like? And ultimately, is there something stronger in our nature than fear, greed and ignorance and denial? And that was the question that really sparked this journey. The journey took me to swimming with the whales in Tonga to working with some of the world's leading marine biologists. The man who discovered whale song to swimming with the great white sharks to working with environmental toxicologists. And it was an incredible journey. The story is about a, I think we were supposed to tell a little bit about it. I mean, I'm the only, I guess, fiction writer up here. And it was, one of the things we can talk about a little later is the challenge of having a fact-based fiction and the relationship between fact and fiction. But all the stories in, all the facts in the novel are actually true. And the places we were pushing the envelope a little were several, we were hypothesizing a couple of things particularly about whale communication that were actually found to be true by scientists. They were discovered as I was working on the novel. So that was quite an amazing experience. The story is about a marine biologist who must risk everything to crack the code of humpback whale communication and rescue a trapped whale. And her neonatologist husband who's discovering that what's happening in the water and happening to animals in the water is also happening on land to our own children. And unfortunately, many of the things that, the facts that are in the novel are the facts of our world and I think we're going to talk about that some more as well. Thanks very much. Thanks Doug. And finally at the end there is Susan Frankel and she's a science writer whose work has appeared in Discover, Readers Digest, Smithsonian, The New York Times and others. And she's the author of American Chestnut, The Life, Death and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree. It's another one of those topics that writers can pull something like a tree and make it fascinating. She's currently working on a book about the world of plastics which I'm very interested in reading. I guess she turns it in and we have to wait until the end of next year to, yeah, unfortunately. First day 2011. In 2005 she was awarded an Alicia Patterson Fellowship which allowed her to conduct the research for American Chestnut. Well, I guess I'm the fourth person here who fell into science writing with no background. And listening to you guys talk, it reminded me, I come from a science family. My parents were both academic physicians that goes back actually a couple of generations. And, you know, science was very much a part of growing up and the dinner table conversation. And I sort of absorbed it, but I wasn't good at math. I was really bad at math. And I think, you know, we live in a world that bisects and you're either good at math and you go to medical school or you're bad at math and you go to law school. So that kind of, you know, set my path. I wasn't going to go to medical school and I ended up not going to law school but instead writing about lawyers for a long time. And I fell into science writing through writing about health and medicine. Again, just sort of serendipitously. But what I discovered when I started writing about science is I really liked it. I really liked the world of scientists. I liked the way they thought. I liked the kind of passion that most of them brought to their work. I liked them much better than lawyers. They seemed much more sort of straightforward to me. And, you know, and so I just sort of moved into it more and more through the years. And this book, like others, was kind of, you know, a serendipity. I was working on a story about sudden oak death, which some of you might remember was killing a lot of the oak trees in Northern California in the late 90s. And I was working on a story with the scientists who were trying to unravel what it was that was killing the oak trees. And their point of reference, they kept telling me these stories about this earlier epidemic back in the early part of the 20th century, which had wiped out all the American chestnut trees. And I had never heard of American chestnuts. I had never heard of chestnut blight. I didn't really know anything about trees, to be quite honest. But I started talking with people and started digging around. And I just became fascinated by it. And I wasn't even really sure when I decided to write the book what it was I was so interested in. I kept telling people, you know, it's about the tree, it's about landscape, how landscape changes, you know, it was pretty boring to most people. And it took me a while in terms of writing and working and researching, where I started to realize that what I was really looking at and what was really drawing me in were the people who had become kind of enraptured with this tree, where it was the folks in Appalachia who were very connected to the tree and who relied on it very much for their livelihood in the late 19th century and were just grief-stricken when the trees started to die. And you would, you know, read these, you know, things that were like eulogies when the trees started to die to the scientists who were trying to figure it out contemporaneously as the trees were dying or the ones who were currently working on it, who were just these people who had put so much of their lives and so much energy into it. There was this one guy right about Phil Rudder, who is, he lives in this one-room cabin in the northern Minnesota woods and, you know, doesn't have running water. His wife says we have walking water. They walk to the well. You know, he has a tree farm and he just knows everything there is to know about chestnuts and can just sort of go on and on about, you know, why they grow the way they grow. He thinks they're the most fascinating organism on earth and he makes a really good case for why they are. And I guess the point that I'm getting at is what drew me in and I think what's so interesting and actually incredibly important in terms of dealing with the kinds of problems that we have now is that these are scientists who feel a great sense of connectivity to the whole biotic web that we exist in. And they tend to recognize that we are not just, you know, at the top of the food chain but we're part of this web and that what we do has great impact and that how we conduct ourselves in this broader biotic world has incredible influence and incredible importance. So I'll stop there. That connects back to your point. No, thank you. And it's interesting when I, you know, when I heard about your book, it reminded me when I was a very, very small boy growing up in Kansas City. They, you know, it's a prairie town basically but they grew chestnuts all over the city and I can remember the canopies of, you would go down any major street in the downtown and it was the shade trees almost like, it was almost like a cathedral, these canopies of chestnuts. And then that went away. I mean I was very little when it happened so I don't really even remember it but I could remember when it was brought to my attention that that's gone now, you know, that you see the sky and there are other kinds of trees that tend to grow straight up instead of that canopy. So that brought back a particular memory for me but I wanted to ask the whole panel here. You know, I think a lot about how to communicate science in these stories and it's very, very difficult at times whether you're a scientist or a non-scientist to be able to tell these stories in a compelling way. I mean you're competing with all the other topics out there. How would you grade science writing right now? I mean how we're doing. And fiction as well, I mean imparting the facts and also the, I mean one of the interesting things about science facts of course is that they can change. I mean, you know, basic facts seldom do but they're mostly hypotheses and theories and they're constantly being challenged and changing. And how do you think we're doing, Peter? Well again, I feel, I feel, what am I doing here? And so let me answer it slightly differently. Yes, and if I could answer it slightly differently which is how did I, or to answer a slightly different question, how did I approach it since I didn't have any background, I did not come at it figuring I'm going to write a book that deals with science and wanting to make what I was learning because it was so amazing, accessible as best I could to an audience and so since I started from zero and was on a quest that had been essentially assigned to me that there was something here and I was finding it out from the beginning going down to Nicaragua, meeting these people who started to tease me by telling me the things they know and knew and know and telling me the names of people that I should take a look at and places I should go, I made the book into a quest and I go from this moment in this bookstore in Washington State where I make what I think is a marginal joke and it becomes an assignment that I accept and so since I am learning about something I know nothing about I think it makes it accessible to the reader to join me on this adventure as our knowledge builds and by the end of the book I have at least a primer on the world of butterflies, why it's dangerous what's going on with the butterflies what the controversies are there and there has been a bit of an adventure along the way for me that the reader can vicariously participate in and from the standpoint of constructing a book and trying to get a sense of how to attract the reader I am currently in the midst of a bit of a problem along the lines of what you address which as you mentioned there is another book coming along and the book that I am working on now which is due next month deals with exotic pets exotic pets defined as pets that are not native or for some reason or another are unusual to have specifically I am looking at big cats, long snakes and great apes there are for example as best anybody can tell more tigers in Texas than in India right now and it's a bizarre reality these are captive bred tigers you can have them in your backyard there's almost no restriction so there's story there, there's information there there's science there and what I am trying to grapple with is how am I going to tell it because I can't use that trick again I used it and what exactly am I going to do and this is due next month okay this might have been another friend of mine his book is due next month and he's still in his third or fourth chapter but anyway well as a long time media person and before you started writing about science you know you read the stories how do you think we are getting the message out there I think we are doing pretty well in getting the message out there and part of it I think is one of the reasons why this book is appealing and why it was appealing to me to write not to suggest that it isn't important to report about soldiers in Iraq but there is an exhaustion in some of the news that we that we tend to need to report because it's going on but has a sense of continuity a depressing sense of continuity the same things are going on and so as consumers of nonfiction and fiction also I think we are looking for other stuff that will satisfy that Jones and science certainly fits that as we grapple with what is going on around us I think we are doing a pretty good job there is a lot of really amazing stuff out there can I take a swipe at this one as well sure absolutely one of the main character in my novel the hero who is actually a heroine is trying to get the media to pay attention to the story that she is telling and she says she looks down at the cover of the newspaper which is all about war and murder down by the river and she says this is not new this has been happening since for all of human history what's new is what's happening on this planet for the first time in human history that's news and I think that part of the challenge is that we have I think the speaking or the writing is only as good as the listening and the reading and we have this assumption in our society that science is something that is done and understood by scientists and in fact I would argue that science is too important to leave to the scientists and I think that we really have I went to one of an excellent university but I was a humanities major and I feel that one of the my education was enormously deficient in not teaching me to be more science literate and I think that we cannot I mean I think you've seen in the prior administration how when you have this kind of illiteracy of round science in the populace you can make fundamental political decisions ignoring the science to the detriment of the entire society so I think it's absolutely essential that we increase the receptivity the awareness and the ability to understand science so that and I think that so to your question about how are we doing in the science writing I would say as a society we're doing very poorly in the educating and dissemination of that science to recognize that this is not a specialization science is about the world we live in and this marriage between the arts and the science I think is absolutely vital and that's why it was so exciting and challenging to embark on a novel that tries to marry the creative arts and science but as media we're doing pretty well I disagree I mean I think there's more science media out there than there was 20 years ago but I think a couple of things one is I think it still is tends to get marginalized I think that science moves at a different pace than other parts of the world and there's this desire to constantly the screw turns very slowly but the news media wants things to move quickly and so I think there's sort of this constant effort to build up results in ways that aren't accurate to make things look simpler than they are to disconnect what are very interconnected problems and issues and then I think what ends up happening is you tack that on top of what's fundamentally a scientifically illiterate population and I'm as guilty as this is anybody and people have inaccurate expectations skewed expectations they don't really fully understand it and it becomes very easy to manipulate people as the Bush administration did and it's profoundly anti-scientific policies and I think we're facing problems that are really complicated and really hard and there's not quick easy technological fixes and we don't really understand that so I don't think we're doing that well I think there's more out there but I'm still sort of frustrated by it and I'm not a scientist I have to tell you one quick story and then I'd love to add something to your sentence so I was with Robert Reich the former Clinton Labor Secretary last weekend and he told this story if he was on one of those shouting screamer talk shows and into his earpiece the producer said get angrier so I love that we have a little bit of controversy here but I don't think we're going to start shouting but I do it could though you know this is very polite company but I would say that I think that the problem with the way the news cycle works and the way that science cycle which is what you are alluding to fundamentally incompatible and that the whole premise of which has served journalism extremely well and I feel like I'm a bit of an interlocutor here an imposter here with the three of you but this premise of well we're going to get the pros and we're going to get the cons and we're going to give them equal weight does not serve in a scientific in scientific reporting always and I think that's what we saw with climate change in the long time was there was like well these people say yes these people say no and in fact when 99 say yes and one says no you can find the one guy who may I just one thing in response I have to defend myself but first I have to match your story with Robert Reich which is that on another book I was invited on the Bill O'Reilly show speaking of your screamers and that same earpiece was in my ear and during the commercial prior to my segment I heard Peter yeah, Bill here okay here's what's going to happen I'm going to give you 30 seconds to make your point and then I'm going to make fun of you that's what he told me during the commercial right prior to going on so yes the screaming is fun but I don't disagree with the two of you I just feel that that news cycle and to your question what's out there are two different things and too often as a society we are relying on that news cycle on those Bill O'Reilly's and that the onus should be on the consumer and when the onus is on the consumer the material is there and that's what I mean when I say that we're doing better there is there is science stuff out there that's accessible if the consumer wishes to get it I'd say that the science writing is actually quite superb and I think the media coverage of the science unfortunately is a service I'll be a good moderator I'll be a good moderator and jump I think it's the best of times and worst of times in a lot of ways the best of times is that we do have the science literature has become a real genre and everybody from Dawkins to late Carl Sagan there's wonderful writing both in fiction and non-fiction also in magazines I mean there's somewhat few and far between but every year there are several dozen absolutely brilliant pieces the problem I have is that we are in a literate country scientifically literate country it goes back to education the issues I have when I go to an editor with a story say on the stem cells or the genetic impact of the environment which is something I write on a lot you get this sort of glazed look like oh we wrote about that last month and there's a sense that and climate change actually has a story I was talking to an editor about this the other day it's evolved from that criteria where oh we did a climate story last spring we don't need to do another one how could it have changed that much to suddenly now it's about every other day there's a climate story it's a big deal because it's become much larger as a story it's not just a science story it's a political story possibly the survival of our species but my biggest issue is throughout the society is educating people and this is not just students but also politicians people have to make these decisions business people all across the spectrum and it does slowly happen the environmental movement is a good example of it took a generation but it's now sunk in much deeper than I would have ever imagined with my radical environmentalist mother growing up in the 60s and 70s she was insane we were in Kansas too she was the only radical environmentalist I think in the entire Midwest at the time but her points of view have become mainstream now so you do have an evolution of these things but we have to be constantly working especially to tell the story all of you had a common theme in that answer which is it's about storytelling and if you can tell a great story and scientists like Craig Venner or James Watson writing about genetics these people are crazy people they're fascinating characters and I think that's one way to tell it but let me ask in the title of the talk here the word humane was in there how do you make it real how do you make it humane I always struggle with this a little bit because in some ways science is what it is if our son goes nova there's nothing particularly humane about that but it's just nature at work do you all think that the two are actually compatible having a sense of being humane and being true to the science I think it comes out in what you just said for me it's the characters and that's where the humane and the human both are and if the characters are rich and the story can be told through the voices and the actions of rich characters in intriguing places doing strange things then that works, then that combines anybody else want to yeah, I would say in my novel that science is part of the villainy and part of the heroism they won't ask you about the villains that it's so much the empirical method is just the empirical method it's just a process of inquiry and it can be used for good or for ill depending on the motivations of those who are and it's amazing when you find some of the fraudulent discover what's happening in terms of some of the fraudulent science and some of the commercially driven science to demonstrate and prove points that justify certain profits so I think that it's as you said, science itself is not humanistic in the sense but there is no reason that science and humanism can't coexist and one of my favorite characters in the novel is a marine biologist based on a man named Roger Payne who was the discoverer of whale song that he discovered in the humpback whale sing and the novel starts out with a scene of a cello playing scientist who's playing along with the whale song and this is actually Roger Payne is a great cellist and he is a model for me of a great scientist humanist someone who understands that while the conclusions that we draw from science may not be scientific they are the point of science and so the scientific method just takes us to discover the facts and then the humanism and the humane quality of this then is based on how we interpret those facts and what we do with those facts and that remembering that always I think is vital yeah I mean I absolutely feel the two go side by side like most people gotten to journalism I love stories and stories are I think the essence of what make us human and what drew me into writing about the American chestnut was the underlying story of how people related to this tree and how people dealt with this disease and the pathogen and these kind of very quirky eccentric individual characters I mean I knew I wanted to do a book when I did a profile of this biologist who is a chestnut breeder who loved chestnuts so much that when he was a graduate student in Bloomington, Indiana he used to plant little chestnut seedlings and take them around to homeless communities so he would give them to people who were you know sleeping on the street and tell them this will provide food for you one day I mean you know so you have to love people like that and the stories that go behind it and I think that that's I mean actually I think it's one of going back to the issue of how you have four people who didn't grow up as scientists doing this in some ways I think that gives us a great advantage in being able to see and make those connections yeah science though is famously a double-edged sword it can give us wonders it also has the capacity these days to literally destroy us probably atomic power being the example of that you know how do we cope with those dangers Susan I may start with you your next book on plastic I mean you know how many things do you have in your pockets and in this room are made from plastic and this is something I've researched a bit myself too I mean they're finding fish whose guts are half full of plastic and half full of food and these little they break down they don't biodegrade but they break down in these tiny little particles and they're literally we're drowning in it around the planet and you know we have to cope with this at some point we've got to deal with it I mean we're trying to recycle things like that but I mean how do we deal with something that really is one of the most wonderful materials ever created and makes our society possible in many ways but how do we deal with this rather steep downward decline that it may cause us later on you know I mean that's a key question in my upcoming book and I think plastic is the perfect poster child for this question and it's interesting to look at there I think there's this growing realization that we have come to surround ourselves with these materials which are wonders but also you know could be potentially very dangerous and the first thing that I see happening is technological fixes you know people are trying to figure out how to make bio-based plastics get away from fossil fuels how to make you know new methods of burning plastic and it's this idea that somehow we can get out of this very this technology that you know we greeted with such a sense of wonder through new technologies which bring their own possible hazards and I think you know so one place I think you start is with a sense of humility that you know we may think that we're figuring it out but are we really figuring out in the case of plastics I think it really does come back to an idea of you know William McDonough's cradle to cradle you don't put things out there that can't either be recycled back technologically back into new valuable equipment or back to nature but I think you know in some ways I also think it starts with us I mean in plastics I think plastics enabled a tremendous you know sort of consumer fever that we're going to have to reckon with because it's also at the root of climate change to some extent as well so I you know I don't think science offers answers but it's only as good as our ability to use it wisely let me've been a question just slightly more for you two guys you know we are as I said earlier you know homo sapien the wise creature the wise man are we clever enough to actually overcome and solve the problems caused by our own cleverness we don't know anything I think it's clear we don't know anything we named ourselves that though of course we named ourselves that in a modest moment modest moment and we don't know what we're doing and we think we know what we're doing maybe and we try to figure it out and we certainly don't know here at this panel whether we're figuring it out properly and or at all but there's a as there always is an example out of the butterfly world and and there really are examples in the butterfly world for most everything I'm learning to my great satisfaction but there's a current controversy in the world of butterflies between the so called or my I call the breeders and the huggers and there are butterfly breeders how many of you have been to a wedding or a funeral where butterflies have been released and one and that's because this is a relatively new industry and it is the breeding of butterflies and then the shipping of these butterflies in a holding pattern state to you for your event often a wedding or a funeral and then the butterflies are theoretically successfully released and they fly up to the heavens and symbolize what you wish them to symbolize within the butterfly community to your question there is this controversy is this a wonderful use of this animal for our gratification and inspiration or is it a perverted commodification and commercialization of something that's wild in nature with the possible negative effect of some kind of cross-breeding crisis that is a scientific horror nobody knows and who regulates this the government maybe slightly if they're paying attention at the moment we'll try to keep a company from doing one thing or another and there are only certain butterflies that are supposed to be trans-shipped cost state lines if they are native to the state where they're going but there we are muddling along doing this without any idea what's going to happen I'm guessing these are the same people that have the tigers down in Texas these are people that are very much like the people with tigers in Texas but I have yet to find any weddings or funerals that are releasing tigers there might be a law of diminishing returns on that Doug I don't know if you have any comment on this this is I think a really important question and one of the themes in the novel is the nature of intelligence because I'm dealing with whale intelligence animal intelligence and had to work a lot with the different scientists I work with to make sure I was treating whale intelligence as whale intelligence and not anthropomorphizing it as some kind form of human intelligence and so there's a fundamental question that runs through the novel which is what is the nature of intelligence and what is the relationship between our intelligence and the rest of intelligence in the biosphere and ultimately what I came to was that the true definition of intelligence sapiens is the ability to survive and with that definition of intelligence the experiment in human consciousness has not yet been proven successful I mean there are lots of species that are doing just fine with surviving in their environment and we're not one of them and so I think that this is goes to the point of if we are going to really be homo sapiens if we are really going to discover a wisdom that is true to what we know about the biological world it's about recognizing what you alluded to before which is that we are connected not just in some kind of spiritual belief but at a biochemical level when we share 70% of our DNA with fruit flies and much more with other species it's quite an enormous amount of hubris that has to be maintained to keep us from recognizing that what we do to them will ultimately be done to us we've talked a little bit about politics and science here the Bush administration has been mentioned and what I would say at least was a virtual war on science at least where it fit in ideologically or politically with that particular administration's goals however there is always a raging debate and it happens more in Europe because they tend to be less ideological than we are about science but is science does it really represent truth I mean as we've also said there's a certain fluidity to the scientific process if we had a scientist on the panel we could ask them to talk about that scientific method that a lot of people don't really understand the hypothesis driven kind of science that we have and even evolution which is obviously was a large part of what happened over the last eight years creative design versus evolution etc you know you have a situation where there's a misunderstanding of a basic tenet of science which is your facts and truth are based on what the latest observations and evidence suggest but they're mutable, they're changeable and how do we as communicators we want both the facts I mean we want something like there was a website I think it was Health and Human Services actually had up that abortions cause breast cancer and there's absolutely no proof of that but they kept putting up this information and then they would be told to take it down they would take it down for a few days some of us are even monitoring this but how do you impart to people now that may be a fact but even that is potentially changeable based on evidence how do we communicate that how do you do it in fiction how do you draw that line I think the again part of this goes back to the just fundamental literacy that I shared in embarking on this novel about what science is and what it can tell us but I think that what you discover is that science is this iterative process where you test something and you find a result and then you test it again and test it again and that's part of what you were talking about with the problem with the news cycle where sometimes we'll say oh this study has found this and so therefore that's the fact and then ultimately we see that other studies show different things one of some of the research that I was looking at for this novel and this goes back to the villainy issue a little bit I think it was something like there were 93 studies that were done how many of you have heard of BPA chemical plastic chemical that's very controversial right now because of its because of its role in affecting our biology, our physiology and particularly in endocrine disruption and so there were 93 studies that were done by educational institutions and government about 95% of them showed some powerful physiological effect there were 7 studies that were done by industry and none of them showed an effect so I think what this I'm kind of coming at your question in a slightly slanted way which is that the science can be slanted and that we have to have a very careful understanding about what we mean by facts and how we go about reporting on those facts demonstrating those facts and I think that in fiction the particular challenge is you're always having to first serve the story it has to be a dramatic exciting story and I'm sure in some way in nonfiction that's the case as well but even more in fiction the facts are considered peripheral I mean you've got Michael Crichton and others who would just say well if the story needs dinosaurs well damn it we'll have dinosaurs well come dinosaurs no problem and so the challenge with doing fact based fiction like this was riding that edge of you had kind of two masters that I was serving at all times one was serving the story gods the muse and the other was serving the science and making sure that the storyline had to cut its path between those two can I just just really quick because I didn't need to jump into questions from the audience and if you all think about your questions okay so no go ahead well I was just going to say I mean in some ways you know the idea of being a bearer of truth feels a little like a bigger mantle than I particularly want to carry to some extent I keep coming back to this idea of hubris and which just is what seems to me keep tripping us up as a species and so you know in the research that I'm doing now in the plastics book one of the things that's interesting is that industry will say you know there's this great debate about the chemicals that we're exposed to in everyday life in our everyday products like Doug mentioned of BPA and one of the arguments that industry has made to fight regulation has been that you know the idea that these are toxic at low levels and wreak havoc with the way our hormones operate has not been proven well that's not how science operates science operates on disproving and but you know it's a very persuasive sounding argument and it's driven by an ideological position and I have the luxury of somebody writing books and not reporting for a daily newspaper of being able to say well that's not the point of view I'm going to take in the way that I want to write about this and I'm going to look at it in a different fashion and you know to me makes sense to be safer rather than sorry and I don't have a vested interest in you know I don't own stock in BPA so I guess that's a little bit different than truth but it feels to me in a way right and how you you know ultimately it's an interpretive process. Yeah I'm going to jump in here we have a few minutes for questions does anybody have any any questions out there? Yes Ego being one of the things that hasn't been addressed but it can't be thrown out of the equation here. Yeah I partly wrote my last book before the current one is Experimental Man the one before that was called Masterminds and it did it was all about Ego and ambition a lot of it I mean some wonderful scientists but when you get like James Watson you know Watson and Crick that discovered the shape of DNA a monstrous ego and yeah that's a huge huge part of it and Ego of course can be used to one's advantage too I mean if you come out at the end with something that's brilliant and helpful to society you know in some ways you might have to put up with Ego but it does get in the way all the time I mean every single day and in fact some of the barriers right now and the areas that I write about with genetics and environmental genetics and things is being blocked by a system that rewards certain activities and ambitions and not others and for instance geneticists don't speak very much with environmental toxicologists and they're completely different fields and the ego and ambitions in each of the fields is different and at a time when those two should be talking to each other so it can be an impediment as well. Yeah I would add to I saw a vivid example of this I don't know exactly Ego but at least the proprietoriness of scientific inquiry and the dangers of that where I was down in Tonga swimming with the whales with a marine biologist while researching the book we saw some quite extraordinary whale behavior underwater we were videotaping it and I just assumed that that would just be put on the web for every scientist to learn about and discover and hypothesize and investigate and it was like oh no no that's my data and this sense of where as you're saying ego and ambition get in the way of discovery. How about some good news? There's a guy that I dealt with trying to get some sense of understanding of flight dynamics of butterflies and he is one of the world's leading experts on flight dynamics in general and particularly the flight dynamics of butterflies and the line of questioning started to go into the replication of this and how there might be something to learn for human flight and for a man flight and he said that there's an extraordinary amount of money out there Defense Department money for that very purpose and that he refuses to engage takes none of it even though it's just on the table because he will have nothing to do with transferring as best he can protect it what he's learning into that world. That was nice when I met him. I like that. Let's go to another question. In the back. Scott just keep in mind that the fact wasn't invented until the late 1600s. And then he said prior to that we had something called truth. And then after the fact we have these things called information and data and then it's so hard to pose the question of what's next but every time I see a science debate on television it looks like two sides can be considered it looks like two sides can be formed in two camps one side says you know there's absolutely no evidence to suggest and the other side says what we need is more money to study decision. And at which point we're at this crossroads it seems between the intersection of politics and science and truth and just wanting to get your comments. I'll just answer that really quickly because that's one of the areas that I study as policy and then Jane is already up here I think giving you the high sign. I think that tension between those two areas has been going on probably forever. Galileo would go to the city fathers in Florence and say I need more money to study that and everybody would say you're full of it and I think that's been going on forever and hopefully it will continue because that's exactly what drives scientific inquiry and gives us material to write about. So with that I want to thank you so much David Ewing Duncan Peter Laufer, Susan Frankel and Douglas Carlton Abrams for your fantastic panel this was really fascinating and please come back in about five minutes we're going to start another panel called the value of the essay in the 21st century so thank you for coming and thank you.