This weekend’s Science and Society conference that took place at the Westin Copley Place Hotel in Boston brought together an interesting assortment of people interested in science and science communication. Scientists, documentary filmmakers, high school teachers and college science professors, science museum workers, science communication specialists, students…the list goes on! It was wondeful to see such a diverse group of science-philes interested in ways to increase scientific literacy amongst the general public.

As a science journalist, I was particularly interested in listening to Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and professor of science journalism at one of my alma maters, the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Blum was on a “Science in the Media” panel, along with science writer Timothy Ferris, NOVA/WGBH science program producer Larry Klein, and Howard University Television’s Jennifer Lawson.

Blum noted a disturbing trend over the last decade or so: science sections of newspapers, once considered trendy, are becoming less prominent, and more likely to contain news you can use, health- and medical-oriented stories at the expense of articles on basic research. This seems like a huge problem to me, since stories about basic research can give what most people at the conference think is painfully missing amongst the public: an understanding of how scientists think, how they reach conclusions, what it means to provide a scientific explanation over other kinds of explanations, and the like.

Blum also noted that the loss of science sections is not a 100% tragedy, as long as science appears elsewhere in the newspaper, and it does, including on the front page, along with political, economic, and other kinds of page 1 news. In some ways, this is a really good thing: to view science as part of the normal state of things, as a factor as important to the fabric of our lives as other factors, is a way to reduce the gap between science and the public.

What is the nature of that gap, and is it unique to science? Stay tuned for the next post…