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5 Incentives in Science Communication
Pages 31-40

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From page 31...
... • Revision of tenure guidelines could move toward integrated systems that combine elements of public outreach, traditional tenure criteria, and a candidate's overall impact on a field. (Scheufele)
From page 32...
... , nothing is going to change." Many academic scientists believe that it is important for the public to know more about science but think that they will not benefit personally by engaging in science communication, noted Hoffman. According to a poll of University of Michigan faculty conducted in 2015, 56 percent thought that public engagement is not valued by tenure committees, 41 percent thought it was time consuming and distracting, and 34 percent believed that public engagement is dangerous because sources are often misquoted.
From page 33...
... As part of a National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Traineeship program, the center aims to train graduate students to communicate about their research through policy internships, opportunities to meet with policy makers, writing workshops, interactions with professionals in the field, and outreach to high school linguistic classes.
From page 34...
... "It is impossible to do that unless technical professionals collaborate and communicate with broader audiences." As a graduate student, Taylor was involved in the Science and Engineering Ambassadors program, an initiative of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering to better equip scientists and engineers to be able to communicate and then to create dialogues between scientists and engineers and the broader communities in which they live. Similarly, as a technical consultant for Energetics, Incorporated, he works with public- and private-sector organizations to create technology road maps and strategic plans.
From page 35...
... Since then, Donahue and his colleagues have been working with Baruch Fischhoff and Illah Nourbakhsh at Carnegie Mellon University to engage communities in Pittsburgh around the questions about air pollution. The Science and Engineering Ambassadors program has been particularly valuable in this effort, he said, because it has engaged people in industry and in national laboratories "to get the dialogue going."
From page 36...
... That committee recommended what he called an "integrated case" that combines elements of public outreach, traditional tenure criteria, and a candidate's overall impact on the field. In particular, working with communities and other stakeholders would become a larger part of a tenure package.
From page 37...
... "It's not quite do-it-yourself in the garage, despite the advertisements, but essentially any lab with reasonable molecular biology experience can do this," said Porteus. Porteus and his colleagues have been using the procedure in an attempt to cure sickle cell disease, which is caused by a single change in the nucleotide sequence of the gene that encodes a protein called beta-globin.
From page 38...
... In December 2015 the Organizing Committee for the Internation al Summit on Human Gene Editing, which was an international effort involving the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, The Royal Society, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, re leased a statement that it would be irresponsible to proceed with germline gene editing unless a broad societal consensus is achieved about the appropriateness of this work and its proposed applications. The com mittee said that a wide variety of people should be involved in these
From page 39...
... "Political and societal discourse about technologies will take place in this environment." A religious lens often colors how people in the United States view new technologies. For example, Scheufele pointed out, survey respondents are more likely to think that synthetic biology conflicts with moral or religious views and blurs the line between humans and God than is the case with nanotechnology (Akin et al., 2017)


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