Our most recent Tuesday Talks / Dining with Dinosaurs event presented an interesting twist on the usual format. With Reuben’s own Dr JC Niala, Official Fellow in Public Engagement with Research, Culture and Heritage (and also the Head of Research, Teaching and Collections at the History of Science Museum), we were presented with an opportunity to reflect on the human side of scientific progress: how scientific progress has shaped our lives, how the lives of scientists have shaped progress, and, crucially, how those stories are told – or not told.
An initial introduction told us Dr Niala’s own path to her present position, drawing on her own family’s history and traditions, to understand how a dedication to education and service has led her to work in collections and heritage to better understand and make accessible the human stories trapped in collections around the world. This invited us to reflect on our own journeys to date, and how our backgrounds and stories have influenced our work – as well as, thought provokingly, how we would distill those stories into objects to tell them to future generations.
This curated presentation of complex histories was further explored through the history of medical developments in antibiotics; a complex reality often presented to the public as a simplified narrative of individual heroes. The absence of stories can be as telling as those in the popular consciousness, and we discussed the value of diversity in science, individual contributions in a broader narrative, and how the telling of these stories is coloured by both the people involved and the public’s own biases. Should we care about the private affairs of prominent scientists? Are they not people whose lives have influenced their work? Does acknowledging their humanity diminish their work in some way?
We finished the discussion with a transition to COVID19 – the impact of the pandemic and how these stories are being told and will be told. We discussed how the scientists working on vaccines – setting out to “save the world”, the heroes of the popular narrative – were equally affected in their personal lives. Carrying out ground-breaking work under impossible conditions, we discussed the human impact of their work. We saw how communities came together. We saw that these stories can mask other, more inconvenient stories; those people left behind by our path out of isolation and lockdowns. We discussed how these stories are told – and what stories the public are ready to face. Again, is this progress diminished by the acknowledgement that not all progressed equally? We had the opportunity to further reflect on this with an adapted installation of this display within the Dining Hall before and after the meal.
Having already been primed by interaction throughout, we were launched into discussions during our meal on scientific breakthroughs in our own fields, the human stories involved, and how we can tell those stories. We reported back from our table discussions about Charles Darwin’s work on evolution and the gradual shaping of those ideas, the application of CRISPR and the dilemmas that can pose, the translation of scientific progress into human progress, and the development of baby formula and the very human ethical issues associated with this.
Through these discussions, over the expected high standard of food and, crucially, chocolates provided by Dr Niala, we faced the human side of scientific progress; how this impacts our own fields, how we will be of service in our own work, how we would want the stories of our own work and fields to be preserved and, importantly, that it is not always quite so simple. Science communication and the records of history often require simplification, compromise and acknowledgement that the public is not always ready for the messy, complex stories that lie behind the popular narratives of progress.
