When being right is not enough

Abstract

Who has not been in the situation where one has spent months, or even years, collecting data on their favorite protein, only to find themselves still putting together their slides while sitting in a train on their way to a meeting? This inability of biologists to appreciate the value of communicating their results is becoming a serious problem now that biology has entered the realms of politics and the economy. One frightening example of what can happen when scientists communicate badly to those who need to hear them comes from the study of the crisis of the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, which has gripped Europe.BSE was first reported in a bovine herd in Britain in 1987. If humans eat meat from infected cattle, there is a risk of acquiring a variant of the Creutzfeldt–Jacob syndrome, which is a neurodegenerative disease that has been linked to at least 82 deaths in Britain and two in France. Public fears and misunderstanding are now crushing the cattle industry in many European countries. For example, in France, during November 2000, beef sales plummeted by 40%, and the fate of 4.5 million cattle and half a million tons of cattle feed hangs in limbo.Although many political and economic factors led to the BSE crisis in Europe, scientists have now been officially cited as being partly responsible. The British inquiry on BSE by Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers states that, in 1989, British scientists had anticipated that BSE could be transmitted to humans and that the health consequences would be severe. The criticism of scientists in the BSE crisis was not about them being right or wrong but about their failure to communicate the significance of their findings to the government in 1989. The message from the government to biologists is clear: being right is not enough. Learning to communicate effectively will add to the pressures that influence biologists’ lives. It also means that we can search for new activities to fill the hours while traveling to give our well-prepared seminars. R.M.G.