Posted on by ScientistSim

The dangers of misinformation and miscommunication

I will start this article, I’m fairly confident, the way that no good story has ever started:

I was standing in the line at home affairs last week. I happened to strike up the usual conversation one has at these places; “Why is the line so long? Do you need photos?  (It amazes me that no one ever knows the answer to this question!) Are we going to be here so long that the sun will absorb all of our moisture and when our families come looking for us all that will remain is our tortured souls still hoping for our passports?” Having run out of things to complain about, I asked my fellow brave soul what he did for a living. He was a very high powered investment banker who also had a PhD. I learnt that day that education truly is not enough when ignorance is a dominating plague.

I wish I had told this man I was a struggling actor or an astronaut – but then again he would have had an opinion on that too. “An astronaut? Really? I heard the earth is flat and the moon is Gorgonzola. Is that true? Wait, I know it’s true. So don’t respond.” I didn’t though. Sadly I said I was a HIV researcher and his face darkened. A frown dug its way into his forehead and I could hear the 10 ton piano that was about to fall on me strain in its support. “You know,” he said in a suddenly condescending tone, “I don’t buy this whole ‘HIV’ thing. (He actually did the inverted commas with his fingers, which somehow made the whole thing worse.) I heard that it was the Americans.” I realised by the way he sneered the last part of his sentence that nothing I said was ever going to change his opinion. Valiantly I tried to explain that HIV was a zoonosis and had jumped species on at least 3 different occasions. (Read more about why this doesn’t happen that often.) I spent what felt like an entire lifetime trying to convince him about the scientific evidence. And in the end, the best line emerging from this conversation was his, “Well, you can have your opinion and I will have mine.”

The benefit of having a science degree is knowing that the most popular opinion is not always the right one. Having been trained to question everything, I’ve since understood, is not a skill everyone has. In society, the loudest (most obnoxious!) person is the one who gets heard (once again think Donald Trump) while in science you will get laughed off of a conference stage without any data. This is possibly the root of misunderstandings in science. The people listen to the strongest voice and all the while the white coats are in a corner throwing around statistics. Even when scientists are completely right, some rapper may still convince a few people the earth is flat (see this hilarious exchange between B.O.B and Neil Degrasse Tyson – thank goodness for him!).

Another huge contributor to the hall of misunderstanding and strange theories is the media. Now let me be clear; it is not just the journalists who misinterpret. It is the job of a scientist to simplify and explain their work. One of my science heroines Françoise Barré-Sinoussi (co-discover of HIV), who I was privileged to hear speak, said that at the end of your life you do not remember the journal articles you published or how high their impact number was, but the lives you have changed with the work. If you can’t communicate and translate your work, who will it ever truly benefit? I find that if you can explain your project to your Granny so she understands why you are doing it and how it may help the world, you really understand it yourself.

As a postgrad it’s easy to feel lost; to feel that your work is too far removed from any kind of real-world application. It is easy to think that you’re just doing this to get a degree. However, it’s good to communicate your science for lots of reasons: 1) you can prevent misinterpretation, 2) you can make people feel that they can engage with science and not have their heads explode, 3) you can help scientists in queues at Home Affairs retain their sanity when non-scientists begin to ask questions and 4) you can feel relevant. It’s important to remember it really is our duty to not lock ourselves in a lab, but to reach out: to teach not only the uneducated but the ignorant too. It’s up to scientists to add their voice, otherwise we may be drowned out by the loudest opinions. It’s up to us to build public trust in science. If we are only heard when there is crisis then we are never heard in calm (see this article by Tolu Oni).

 

Scientist news cycle
How science communication works… (www.phdcomics.com)

There have been miscommunications that have done very serious damage too. One is most certainly the notion that vaccinating your child will result in autism (read here why this isn’t true). This has resulted in 100s of unnecessary deaths from measles in small children. Another is that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, perpetuated by our very own ex-president Thabo Mbeki. Some “facts” are even started out of fear as a rumour: in a small town called Vulindela, wonderful things are being done by the organisation we work with (CAPRISA), to try to reduce unwanted pregnancies and HIV incidence. One of the proposed ways to do this was to insert IUDs into young girls following extensive education on the matter. The programme had to be stopped because one of the girls told all her peers that maggots would grow internally. Naturally teenage girls were then hesitant about IUDs. A far more famous case of misinformation is what happened to Hendrietta Lacks in 1951. With questionable ethical practice, doctors treating this woman took samples of her cervical cancer and made a cell line (cells that are descended from one cell and have the same genetic features) that was able to be kept in culture indefinitely. This cell line is one of the most widely used in clinical trials today; a form of which we use to test the efficacy of HIV vaccines. This woman had no idea what these doctors and scientists were doing and many years later, her family thought that she was still alive because scientists had “immortalised” her cells (Read more about this incredible story in Rebecca Skoot’s novel).

Miscommunications in science can be deadly and disturbing and we have to find ways of changing this. As a PhD student it is my job to pick the hard questions and find answers but, it is imperative that I find ways to explain the hard questions in a way that anyone can engage with them. Solutions can come from the strangest places, even the line in home affairs.

Posted on by Odi

#FeesMustFall: Re-imagining the University

The closing months of 2015 were marked by unprecedented student protests calling for both free tertiary education and the end to outsourcing of domestic and security workers within the university sector. It has become clear in 2016, as the #FeesMustFall movement continues and protests become angrier, South African universities are being re-imagined and altered. Undoubtedly, a change is necessary but the voice of post-graduate students in all of this seems to be mute.


Photo credit: barbourians via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA

The truth is that university fees are out of reach for most South Africans. But, this piece is not intended to argue the merits or demerits of the current swell of student protests. It is becoming clear that no matter how these protests end, universities in South Africa are being forced to change. Professor Vuyisile Msila wrote an interesting opinion piece on the current wave of student protests and the need for the discussions around the social implications of symbols and knowledge systems. The main point that I got from his piece is that we still need to grapple with what higher education means at a societal level.

The media focus has weighed heavily on undergraduate fees, but that is just a tiny part of the equation. We are research leaders on our continent, but South Africans are powerfully affected by the state of international growth and global trends in research and education. With the global economy coming to a screeching halt and rapid digitization of knowledge, we haven’t really addressed how universities in South Africa can adapt and where post-graduates studies fit in addressing the challenges ahead.

We need to be asking — at least I know that I am – what is the purpose of being in a university or studying further, if it is not to help Africa meet its current challenges? Universities need to house innovation hubs, cross-disciplinary projects and overall be ahead of the developmental curve. Yet we are at a point where all of this could fall away if the change is not managed intentionally.

At the height of the protest, our department was warned that we have to be more financially prudent because of anticipated reductions in funding for non-critical projects. To be honest, I didn’t really feel the difference because my programme head has always been extremely cautious with funding. But, I wonder what the impact of the quality of tertiary education, at all levels, would be if appropriate funding couldn’t be found. Globally, there has been increasing pressure on the knowledge economy owing to increasingly scare funding. This has profound implications for African universities who are tasked with finding solutions to Africa’s various social and developmental challenges.

The university funding crisis also has implications with regards to talent rentention.          In European ,and American universities,the lack of appropriate funding has seen tenured positions become scarce. Similarly, South Africa faces an increasing risk that young graduates– particularly those who are black and/or female — would be co-opted in the university system without the prospect of getting a full time job. It is understood that you are likely to start your working career at a university in a contract or ad hoc position-which has a smaller pay package than that of full-time staff. What is clear, however, in the aftermath of the fees must fall, is that full-time opportunities are going to dry up and that teaching would likely be undertaken by staff from historically marginalised groups. This does not sound horrible at face value, but these “adjunct” lecturers will receive considerably less pay with little to no prospects of change. Such a system is running rampant in the USA, with devastating consequences for researchers. In South Africa too, brilliant academics of all persuasions would leave the universities for the private sector because of their inability to meet their basic needs.

Surely, we don’t want to simply repeat the mistakes being made by our international competitors. I leave this piece with two questions: What should the ‘new’ South African university look like? And, where do post-graduates fit in in creating the new academy?