What’s it for?

In 1989 the LEP accelerator at CERN was about to start up, and I had just begun my job as head of press at the laboratory. In the enormous LEP tunnel, now used for the LHC, I watched a young journalist from the BBC interviewing a senior physicist. “This is the world’s largest piece of scientific equipment; it has cost the British taxpayer 40 million pounds. . . . What’s it for?”

Twelve times the physicist tried to answer the question, but each time he reverted to specialized concepts and terminology. The reporter realized she was going home with nothing useable, and the physicist realized he could not explain the machine on which he had spent a good part of his career. The frustration was too much and both began to weep.

As they wept deep under the Franco-Swiss border, I realized that here was a fascinating career: equipping scientists so that when asked “What’s it for?"—whether by politicians, funding agencies, the media, or their mothers—they could answer with such enthusiasm and clarity that the only possible response would be, “Wow, that’s amazing!”

Now, 22 years later, I work as senior adviser in communication at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, a spanking new multidisciplinary graduate university that will soon admit its first students. Before coming to OIST, I had posts at some of the world’s most exciting science facilities: 12 years as head of press and publications at CERN in Geneva, 6 years as director of communications at SLAC in California, and nearly 3 years as head of communication at ITER, based in the south of France, the global effort to show that fusion is a feasible energy source.

In this piece I cover the nature of science communication, the changes that have taken place in that field, the different expectations in different regions, and why OIST seems to be just about the most exciting place to be doing science communication right now.

“So you work in PR”

I may be overly sensitive about it, but the term “PR professional” makes me bridle. For me it conjures up images of suave, good-looking people in suits, who work out of slick offices and take their clients to fancy, expense-account lunches. None of that has ever described me.

I do what might be called strategic communication for science. The job entails working with senior management in defining what the lab’s vision and goal should be and then devising a strategy to make them happen. In fact, the main goal of communication is more practical than that description and in my experience always comes down to the same thing: ensuring that your institute is correctly funded, whether publicly, privately, or both, to allow the best scientists to do the best research. To paraphrase Bill Clinton, “It’s the funding, stupid.”

All communication roads should lead to the golden city of funding, but there are many roads; some are narrow lanes, and some are six-lane highways. Identifying the audiences you want as allies and the tools you need to bring those audiences onto your team is a crucial part of the job. Potential allies may include neighbors, funding agencies, government representatives and their staff, high-school students, your own organization’s staff, local politicians, industry, scientists in the same field, and scientists in different fields. Each group may need a different set of communication tools, from traditional media through to Facebook, Twitter, and other rapidly expanding online media. There is little point in sending brochures to a TV channel or a mini DVD of cool animations to a staffer on Capitol Hill. How do you know what is the right tool for the right audience?

Judy Jackson, former director of communication at Fermilab and the most outstanding science communicator over the past decade, came up with a breakthrough of embarrassing simplicity. “Why don’t we ask them?” No one had really done that before. Everyone—I mean everyone—has their own ideas on how to communicate and what people want. Judy introduced an extra stage in the process by insisting that at all levels we ask the audience, “What do you want?” The replies were almost always different from our assumptions. Communicators first have to be listeners.

Listening to the audiences is just one of the big changes in the past 22 years. Has communicating science gotten easier in that time? No. I think it is much more complex now but also much more fun. In 1989 the options for getting news out were strictly limited. You could print a press release on a sheet of paper, fold it, stuff it in an envelope, stamp it, and put it in a mailbox. A couple of days later, or much longer for international mail, it would arrive, hopefully on the right person’s desk.

You could put up posters or send out brochures and annual reports. You also had telex, but that was about it. You hoped to lure journalists to the lab because telex was faster for them; they could phone in stories. It was a slow, cozy world with the means of production firmly in the hands of the press offices and the journalists.

Tim Berners Lee came to my office at CERN in about 1991 and tried to explain to me what the World Wide Web was. I listened for a while but, understanding nothing, I grumpily said something like, “Okay, let me know if something happens and maybe we can put it in the CERN Bulletin.” I cringe when I think about it.

Smarter, faster, communication

Now communicators have to be a lot smarter, faster, more plugged in, and more vigilant. We have lost control of the means of production. Anyone with a computer and an iPhone can run his or her own communication office. Anyone can pump out blogs, podcasts, video clips, photos, animations, websites, e-newsletters, and all the rest, and have them arrive instantly anywhere in the world. To compete, the professional communicator has to be better. It’s Darwinian: The quality of science communicators is much higher than it was two decades ago.

Besides being smarter, communicators in labs and institutes now have to listen to the message of the Good Book. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” In bygone days CERN communication staff tried to sell CERN, not particle physics. Each lab was an independent city-state that had little contact with other labs beyond occasional squabbles. Judy Jackson, Petra Folkerts from DESY , and I changed this outlook by setting up the Interactions collaboration.

Interactions brings together the communicators from all particle-physics labs, which now work as a team for the benefit of the field rather than as individuals for the benefit of their own lab. They all help each other, warn each other of upcoming difficulties, and consult on press releases. Interactions has a dedicated website , where you can get all the information you want about particle physics worldwide. The synchrotron radiation community followed the particle physicists’ lead and now has a collaboration among communicators and a central online resource for all light-source-related information.

Does this new way of doing things work? The proof is in the pudding; and for the particle-physics community the pudding was the truly amazing media coverage of the LHC startup. The CERN press team did an outstanding job, and communicators in all the particle-physics labs around the world backed them up. Everyone worked to promote the LHC and particle physics—no squabbling, just support. The result was the biggest science story since the first Moon landing.

Changing continents

Times have changed, techniques have changed, and I have also been lucky enough to have changed continents. Communication style and practice differ markedly between Europe and the US; I think one big difference is the concept of entitlement. In the US the budget cycle is annual. The budget is always there, either in preparation, in negotiation, or, as was the case every year I was at SLAC, in continuing resolution. A research lab spends significant amounts of taxpayers’ money and has to show the government that its money is well spent. Labs and researchers are entitled to nothing.

Communication from the labs is therefore focused on government funding agencies. Reports are written specifically for the agencies’ benefit, with the format and content that they want. Take a look at the Quantum Universe series.

Groups of scientists would go to Washington, DC, to thank legislators for their support and to explain why that support should continue. Scientists knew that they needed to be able to answer clearly, in language a legislator would understand, the same old question, “What’s it for?” The necessity of answering that one question has created a cadre of excellent communicators among US scientific staff.

Europe is different. The budget cycle tends to be longer. At CERN it was five years. The European Commission has seven-year framework programs. I think the longer funding time scale has to some extent disassociated the researcher from the source of funding. Budget discussions continue for a period and then fade away. Researchers do not have the same imperative to go out and hustle for support; rather, they have a sense of entitlement and complain if the funds do not arrive. Scientists do not visit government representatives to ask for support. That would be seen as lobbying—a vulgar and vaguely nondemocratic activity.

The lack of direct contact between scientists and government officials in Europe inflates the importance of the media. The idea behind that phenomenon is that politicians or their staff members read, watch, or listen to the media, so that is the channel for influencing them. The press is minutely scanned every day, and each tiny article is analyzed and discussed—a waste of time and energy, especially in our era of internet media.

Anyone can set up a press website today. An online newspaper calling itself, for example, “The Science Times” can actually be the product of one person on a beach with a good 3G signal. When you search the Web for mentions of your lab, articles from “The Science Times” will show up in the same way as articles from the New York Times. If the articles are negative or critical, they can cause totally unnecessary angst as they are shared online with sadistic glee. However, press articles have little influence on major decisions in science. The people with influence know the facts before they are published in the media. Press reports are like Robert Burns’s snowflake on a river, “a moment here then lost forever.”

Spanking new opportunity

The Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) will be a brand new graduate school. The main campus buildings are finished, and we are currently building a second laboratory wing and an auditorium complex. With admirable vision, the Japanese government has set up OIST as an international, cross-disciplinary, graduate university with the ambition of creating one of the world’s leading research centers.

In November 2011 OIST will gain accreditation as a university, and the first teaching year will start in September 2012. I am here because OIST is new and different. The greatest attractions for me are the science itself but also the way of doing it. OIST is at the interfacial frontiers of molecular biology, neuroscience, materials science, genomics, environmental science, and evolutionary biology. I want to help catalyze the growth of these subjects.

Visitors to OIST will see neurobiologists working with physicists, molecular biologists with computer specialists, marine scientists with chemists and crystallographers, and many other cross-field collaborations. The recognized academic subject boundaries are being broken down, and a new, powerful cocktail is being mixed. Toss international faculty and students—more than 50% of each must be from outside Japan—into the mix and you have something unique and potent.

The vision for science at OIST is driven by both the needs and the possibilities of the 21st century. Okinawa is also geographically smack in the middle of a zone of change and development. It is roughly equidistant from the cities of Tokyo, Shanghai, Seoul, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Manila. The tremendous growth all around is evident, and it sets a perfect backdrop to the new approach at OIST.

OIST is a new graduate university with new ideas in a burgeoning part of the world. The ingredients needed to do groundbreaking communication work are combined at OIST—we are international, the science is outstanding, Asia is ready for new development, and we can get it right, from the start, with the communications technologies of the 21st century. So come to OIST and ask us, “What’s it for?”