Speaker 1:	Well, thank you very much for that most kind introduction. I must say I've had a very nice two days, tiring but extremely enjoyable and I've particularly enjoyed meeting the students. Having talked to a number of you over the past few days, I would like to leave you with one piece of advice. If you remember nothing else from my visit, I hope you'll remember this, you guys should aim high, okay. You're real good. You've had a real good foundation here. Don't sell yourselves short. Don't be too non-ambitious. Aim high, you can do it.
	This drawing was done for me by one of the publications I wrote for. The particular article in question was about some of the disasters that can happen to you at scientific meetings, ranging from mosquitoes the size of F-17 fighter planes, to the lobster of doom, about which I shall remain mercifully silent. So the nice thing about being involved in the public communication of science, is that you get to meet people you wouldn't meet otherwise. This same artist did a caricature of me that I used for many years as the sort of theme logo for my column. And it's terrific to actually step outside the lab occasionally and recognize that not only is there a larger world out there, but that the larger world actually does a lot of things that are fun.
	I want to start this particular talk with a question, sort of a riddle if you will. So the riddle is a simple one. It is, what do Goldie Hawn, the actress, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States, and the actor Forest Whitaker have in common with each other and what do they also have in common with me? No, these are not people who have taken out restraining orders against me, though that would have been a good guess. Yeah.
Speaker 2:	I'm going to go basic and say they're all human.
Speaker 1:	Nope. That's not a bad guess either. I'll tell you what the answer is- yeah, you got one?
Speaker 3:	They're all over 60.
Speaker 1:	They're all over 60. Yeah, well I wouldn't say that in the presence of Goldie Hawn even though it happens to be true. No, I'll tell you what the answer is. The answer is, all five of us, those four and me, were standing around talking in Carmel, California immediately following my TED talk on the risk of neurodegenerative diseases, which you heard referred to a moment ago. 
	One of the reasons it's enormous fun to do a talk at TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and which has literally thousands of talks on the web, is the extraordinary diversity, the audience that you have in the auditorium when you're speaking. And then, of course, the hundreds of thousands of people who download your talk and listen to it on the web for years thereafter. I think this one has been downloaded almost 700,000 times. Who can reach that kind of audience giving talks? That's good, okay. In fact, it's great. But you don't get to this point sort of automatically. 
	And I thought it'd be interesting to spend a few minutes explaining how I got there. Why was I asked to come and talk to these people? And it has to do almost entirely with the columns I was writing that you heard about. But it also wouldn't have happened at all if, years before I started writing the columns, I hadn't started to worry about a serious problem. The serious problem was the aging of the population. The population's getting a lot older. Our lifespan is much longer. We're not producing as many children as we used to. And the net effect of that on society both economically and in terms of human health, was starting to really concern me. And the question was, how could I communicate that concern outside the narrow confines of the academy? How could I get politicians, civic leaders, and the average person concerned about it? And I began to try to find ways to do that. And I learned a lot about how you should and shouldn't go about doing that. So I'll tell you a little about that.
	I started by doing it the way a scientist would do it. I mean, I'm a scientist. A lot of you are science students, some of you are not, but I think you understand, even if you're not, that scientists are driven by data. We're in an evidence based profession. This is a good thing. And so my first instinct was to bombard people with data. And I started giving talks in which I gave a lot of statistics. Alzheimer's is the sixth leading cause of death in the US and so forth and some of these were pretty impressive statistics like someone develops Alzheimer's every 72 seconds, and a huge number of Alzheimer's patients in the United States by 2050. All of these facts seemed to me to be compelling and they are, okay. But I learned very quickly that you can't start with this as a way of engaging someone who isn't a scientist. You can at some point get them to understand and appreciate these things, but first you have to reach them at a very different level. Not an intellectual level, but an emotional level. That's the secret.
	And it took me a while to learn that. And then I began to communicate these sort of concerns in a very different way. So now when I talk about this, I start by showing a picture of a comet about to hit the earth, okay, and explain that I'm going to talk about a coming epidemic that is as severe in its consequences, right, as a comet about to hit the earth. I did that for quite a while. And that did shake people up and get them interested. But that doesn't work either initially, okay. Both the facts and the comet I still use, but they come into my talks later now.
	Now when I talk about this, I start by showing a picture of my grandson. And I show a picture of his great-grandfather. And I mention the fact that I barely knew my grandparents because they died in their 50s. But nowadays, people are living much, much longer. And most children born today will have known one or more of their great-grandparents. And then I go on to explain that at the moment, there are a significant number of countries in the world where more than 20% of the population is, by our standards, getting on in life. But that when my grandson is 40, that is going to look quite different. It's going to look like this, okay.
	And now I find, I have begun to reach the people at an emotional level. Their children, their grandchildren go live in this world, okay. And what's this world going to be like and why is this happening? So I found ways to show why it's happening that involve data but that involve a painless way of showing data. So you can start something like this- this is a movie that I show, I'm not going to show it as a movie now. But it's a movie that I show where you have a large number of people with five or more children. And in the 1800s that was typical because there was a lot of infant mortality and the human life expectancy was low, it was in the 30s. But by the time you get to the 21st Century, most of these circles are up here at this end of the graph. And you end up with less than 2.5 children per fertile woman and the life expectancy being 75 or 80 years of age in much of the world. 
	And that allows me to talk about population pyramid. And again, you notice, I'm showing data but in a very visual way, not in the textual way that I started with. And if you show it as a pyramid, you realize that for 20,000 years or more, we were in a situation where, okay, there were a very small number of sick, old people and a large number of healthy, young people working to take care of them. And economically that was sustainable. Now it's looking a little less sustainable and by the time my grandson is 40, it's going to be unsustainable. Again, this gets people's attention. You're talking at a very visceral level about the world your children and your grandchildren are going to live in.
	So having said that, okay, now I can say something about the statistics but not bombard them with statistics, simply point out that we've got 5 million people with Alzheimer's today and 13.8 million by the time my grandson is 40 and, and this is the key point, that happens to be the population of the state of Illinois, which includes Chicago, okay. 
	So now you have a very direct way of thinking about this problem. Imagine a world in which essentially the entire state of Illinois is filled with Alzheimer's patients. And that's just in the US, similar things happening in other countries. By the way, this explains a lot about Illinois politics, but we won't discuss that.
	All right, so do you see how this is beginning to develop? This is what I've been doing. I've come to realize that you can't engage someone in an intellectual level until you first engage their emotions. And so much of what I do in my talks about this subject, sometimes a third or more of the talk is devoted to just doing that. To engage their spirit, their heart, their soul before I start to work on their minds.
	And that includes talking about something that may be of direct relevance to them, which is the fact that, it's not just the Alzheimer's patient who suffers with this disease, but it's their family because most Alzheimer's patients are cared for at home. Three caregivers, on average, per Alzheimer's patients and the caregivers are just worn out physically, emotionally, and financially by the burden of caring for their loved ones. Now I can talk about the money, I can talk about the statistics, and I can talk about the science because now they care. And that's how you have to reach people for an issue like this.
	The good news is, they're already predisposed to listen. There have been polls recently, this was in 2014, which asked people things like, "How would you feel if your son or daughter grew up to be a scientist?" And an astonishing percentage, okay, would be thrilled if this were true, all right. And you can see that- and it used to be, obviously a significant gender difference because girls were told they shouldn't be scientists, that they couldn't be scientists, but now you notice that's disappeared. This is a tremendous thing, all right. It means you are already trying to plant your seeds on fertile ground. People think science is important. People believe that scientists are important people. That's a good start for any kind of public communication. And yet, the actual knowledge about science just isn't what it should be, okay. Most Americans can't name a living scientist. The few who do, usually come up with Stephen Hawking. But two-thirds haven't got any idea of any living scientist. And that's kind of astonishing. Yes.
Speaker 4:	Donald Prothero.
Speaker 1:	You've got to yell. I'm somewhat hard of hearing.
Speaker 4:	Donald Prothero, for a great paleontologists.
Speaker 1:	Say that again.
Speaker 4:	Donald Prothero for a great paleontologists.
Speaker 1:	Your voice- it's not your fault. Your voice is in a frequency range I've lost, okay? So I'll read your lips. Say it again.
Speaker 4:	Donald Prothero for a great paleontologist.
Speaker 1:	Yeah, so you named one. Great. Okay, super. You better be able to, you're at Swarthmore
Speaker 4:	[inaudible 00:12:46]
Speaker 1:	Good. All right, excellent.
	Yeah, so here's the problem, right? People believe that science matters, but they don't actually know anything about science. And so you have to deal with that and I've shown you one way in which it's important to start trying.
	Of course, nowadays most people get their information about science from television. Some from print newspapers and internet but an astonishing number of people get virtually all of their information from science about television. It won't come as a shock to you that most scientists are a bit left of center politically, all right. An enormous amount of television is right of center politically. So scientists have tended to ignore things like Fox Network and CNN as sources of communication with the public. What I'm trying to show you is, that's a big mistake, okay. It's not easy to engage with the right-wing media, but it actually is possible, okay. It takes effort, it takes patience. I'm not a patient person so this is a problem. But the fact is, you absolutely have to do it. Otherwise, you are cutting yourself off from the only information channel that a huge segment of the American public depends upon for learning about things. And often learning about things that aren't true.
	Now you heard about the columns that I wrote. It's true. The first 120 of them are available in book form on Amazon.com for the astonishing price of 99 cents. You get what you pay for. When my publisher said to me, "You know, we're going to put a book of your columns as an eBook." I said, "That's fantastic." They said, "And it only going to cost 99 cents." I said, "What?" But anyway, it turns out it's been downloaded a lot. People seem to enjoy it and I'm thrilled about that. The columns were what got people interested in having me go and speak at TED. And also what got people interested in having me do things like Phi Beta Kappa lecture tour, which is why I'm here. So it's a good way to reach people and I wrote them originally, the first year or two, for a fairly narrow audience, mostly other academics. And then I discovered a lot of people who weren't academics were reading them or finding them when they were getting reprinted in various places, usually illegally but that was fine. And then I started to branch out in what I covered. 
	And so over the years, I covered a lot of topics. So I actually wrote about global warming. I wrote a lot about evolution versus creationism. And by the way, the moment you write about evolution, the nuts come out of the woodwork and you start getting all kinds of really interesting emails. I wrote about the Atkins Diet and in order to write about the Atkins Diet, I went on the Atkins Diet, okay. And the column was entitled Live and Let Diet. And in order to do this, I actually interviewed the human being who had gone the longest without food in recorded history. A man named Laurence McKeown who's Irish, he was a prisoner in the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland, prisoner of the British for a number of years and he went on a hunger strike. And he lived over 60 days without food and survived without any significant long-term health issues, which nobody else has ever done. And so that was part of the column and it was fascinating to talk to him, okay.
	I wrote about Larry Summers, the President of Harvard when he made disparaging remarks about women's ability to do science. I entitled that particular column Feet in Mouth Disease. I wrote a column about the importance of a Liberal Arts education, more on that in a moment. I wrote a lot about the life of a scientist, so that people would know what it was like to be scientist. Like the difficulties you have at cocktail parties or dinner parties when somebody says, "What do you do?" And you say, "I'm a biophysical chemist." And they go, "I'm sorry, I'd like to talk to you more, but I've got to go have a root canal."
	I wrote about the evolutionary biology of terrorism, how strange it is that people would go and blow themselves up when that is completely contrary to what your genes are trying to force you to do, which is to stay alive and reproduce. I wrote about the futility of stealing an academic scientist's identity. "I wasn't worried about identity theft," I said, "because if someone was dumb enough to that, they would get themselves then a job then at some small university using my identity. And they would find within the first few days that students would come in demanding to have their grades changed. Okay, referees would come chasing after them for things. They would get bugged by journal editors looking for their own review reports. Grants would be rejected." I basically ended the column by saying, "So if someone wants to steal my identity, by my guest. My feeling is, within a week, two weeks at the outside, they'll be back on their knees, begging me to take it back." So it was fun to write about these things. 
	You can write about in a way that you can't write about in scientific papers, but I have to be honest with you, the columns that were guest written by my two dogs, Mink and Clifford, were much more popular than the columns I wrote. See it's tough to produce a column on a deadline and sometimes I just couldn't do it. And when that happened, my two dogs, noble creatures that they are, okay, jumped in and wrote for me. Now being dogs, they tended to write a lot about subjects that are relevant to dogs like food, domesticating human beings, how genes control hair versus fur. These were things that interested them. Insane human eating habits, and whether or not it was possible to actually breed better people. They wrote about lots of stuff like this. 
	Now you would have thought, producing stuff from two dogs in a serious publication would've gotten me a flood of email about how ridiculous I was being and how dare I do that. And you'd be right in the sense that I got a flood of email, but I never got a single complaint. The emails were always on the order of, "Can the dogs write more of the columns? The dogs write much better columns than you do."
	My favorite of the columns that they wrote, was the one about the Higgs boson. Mink and Clifford were fascinated by the fact that the physicists were drumming up so much hype about the hunt for the Higgs boson. And so they wrote a column in which they reminded people that the fact that a dog's nose is always cold, violates the second law of thermodynamics because [rikes 00:19:52] shouldn't corroborate with surrounding temperature. But this problem was solved by the great German physicist, Herman Briggs in 1929 who postulated the existence of a particle that would carry heat away from the dog's nose. I am referring of course to the Briggs Noseon. Things sort of deteriorated from that.
	That column produced, and I'm not joking, a hundred emails from outraged physicists. To which my answer was always the same, "Hey, talk to the dogs. I'm just their literary agent. Here's their email address." It's actually amazing what you can get away with saying under the cover of two dogs. So the take home message of this is, apart from the fact that I'm clearly insane, is that it's sometimes great to have a persona, a cover for some of the things you want to do, okay. And also, if you're going to have a persona, please try not to make it a persona that doesn't work for peanuts but wants to work instead for steak. Okay.
	Now I want to tell you some things I've learned from doing this that have been enormously valuable to me as a scientist as well as, as a citizen because I've learned a lot from thinking about communicating with the public, hearing what public misconceptions are like and wondering how people get the ideas they get. And these are some of the important ones, one of them is, it's really hard to keep an open mind but you have to try because if you think you know what the answer should be, you're going to probably come up with that answer. You're going to manipulate things or twist things in your head to support that answer even if it's wrong. Another thing I've learned is that data really does matter. It matters a lot more than people's opinion. And so you've got to use it and you've got to get people to respect it. But you've got to figure out how to do it right, okay. You should absolutely look at everything. Don't take anything for granted. Not everything's what you think it is or what other people tell you it is or what it seems to be, all right.
	Now this does not mean you should be a cynic. Cynics never get invited to good parties. You should be a skeptic. There's a big difference, okay, a big difference. And you should avoid hubris like the plague because if you think you're smart you're not, okay. And that which makes you can also break you. Part of a corollary from this is that you want to be careful never to make assumptions and facts substitute for each other. An assumption is not a fact. A lot of things that people know are true, are not true. The moment you hear somebody say, "Oh everybody knows that." There should be a red flag that jumps up in your brain and says, "Wait a minute." In all probability nobody really knows this at all, okay. They just think it's true.
	I can't tell you the number of times I've interrupted somebody who's said that and asked for the basis by which everybody knows that and found that there was none. It happens all the time. And finally, be aware of assuming that tomorrow will be like today, okay. That just because something has happened means it's going to happen again or it's going to happen in the same way. In a world governed by chance and with unpredictable human beings running around bumping into each other, that just isn't true, all right. And the good news is it also applies to your own life. Trend is not destiny. The mistake you make today doesn't have to be repeated tomorrow. It's not how you start, it's how you finish. This is a marathon, not a sprint. The only thing that matters is where you are when you end up.
	Okay, now I learned very, very early that it was critical as Aristotle said to get the metaphor. So that comet about to hit the earth is a good metaphor, all right, it's critical. If you can't get a good metaphor, you're going to have trouble getting complex ideas across to people. So work very hard at that, trying to figure out what metaphors make sense and what metaphors you can use to communicate. And if you do this, by the way, you're going to be a much better teacher because I found all of a sudden once I started doing this in my writing, I started doing it in my teaching and it's a good tool as a teacher. I hadn't been using it.
	Okay, here's some metaphors that I've done that have really worked well. One of them is a metaphor for the zombie idea, okay. I wanted to figure out how to convince people that there were things people cling to despite evidence to the contrary. Ideas that should have died out a long time ago, creationism being one of them, and that you really should torpedo but that they just come back shambling forward to eat our brains, okay. And so I came up with the idea of the zombie idea. And here are some zombie ideas, all right. Right now in economics one of them is austerity can be used to promote growth. Ask anybody in Greece if that's true. Ask most of the rest of Europe if that's true. Yet somehow the Germans haven't figured out that this is a zombie idea, all right.
	Here's one in the United States that I'd love to see done away with, the idea that market forces should control everything. That there should be a kind of Darwinian selection for everything we do. It's not only wrong, it's unbelievably cruel. We should be better than that, okay. By the way a somewhat corollary of this is that Universities should be run like businesses. I can't think of anything that should less be run like a business than a university. Anybody who comes up with this idea, either has never been at a university or didn't do well when they were at one or hates them for some other reason, okay, because this will kill universities faster than just about anything. This idea needs to die, it needs to have a stake thrust through it's heart and it needs to be buried in a coffin with its native soil, all right.
	Somewhat of a corollary of this, is that universities should train people to meet the demands of industry. Community colleges should and some technical schools should, absolutely, but not a university, a university's different. It can do this as a by-product of what it does, but this is not its main function. And somebody needs to tell this to the Governor of Wisconsin who seems to think that this is true. It's a zombie idea, all right.
	Again, only subjects of practical value have value? No. Not true, all right. I could give you a million reasons why, but I think you mostly know, okay. And here's one that I think is particularly insidious, the idea that the only thing that matters is stem training. Training people in science and technology subjects and nothing else is worthwhile, okay. I've known a lot of people who've been trained in stem subjects. Most of them end up working for people who haven't been. It's great to have an expertise and it's great to be knowledgeable in one thing, but the world is run by generalists. And if you want to be one of those people who runs things, you should have a broad education, as broad as you possibly can. Now you're in a great place for that, so take advantage of it.
	This leads to [Petsico's 00:27:43] third law, which is that there's no such thing as useless information. In my life I have made use of just about everything I've ever learned no matter how irrelevant it seemed at the time. And part of this was used to create this column. This was the one that got so much press. This is called a Faustian Bargain and it was the most, last time I looked, the most sited and downloaded column on Biomed Central. I wrote this one when the President of the University of Albany, the State University of New York at Albany, decided to abolish a number of humanities and theater and arts departments at his University in order to, partly to save money and partly to refocus the campus on more practical subjects. 
	I wrote it as a polynomic based on Zola's famous polynomic as J'accuse about the Dreyfus incident. If you don't know what that's about go look it up, it's fascinating, all right. And this thing has been reprinted in just about every significant educational publication on the planet. And last time I looked it's been translated into about 40 languages. And I think the reason is that I'm a scientist and here I am arguing for the value of the arts and the humanities. If arts and humanities professors argued for that, they would be seen as self-serving. Whereas if you're a scientist and you do it, it has some real meat behind it. And this taught me, so this was back in 2010, this taught me something really valuable, which is, you can have an impact on things far outside your own discipline, okay. In fact, sometimes you can have more of an impact than people within the discipline can. You just need to be sure of your facts. Make sure your own hands are clean and then take a stand.
	Again, you look for metaphors. Here's one I liked. There's the church of Santa Croce in Florence, one of my favorite churches in that remarkably beautiful city. If you walk inside and you look on the left just as you enter the main aisle, you will find the tomb of Galileo, great scientist of the Renaissance. And directly across the aisle from him, as close to him practically, as you and I are the aisles a little bigger, but not much, okay, is the tomb of Michelangelo. These two enormous figures of the Renaissance never actually met, okay, one died before the other was born, but they're buried opposite each other, so close their hands could touch. The Renaissance Italians saw no difference between the arts and sciences. They belonged together. That's a good metaphor, it works.
	And I use this constantly to contradict the notion, which was very popular at the time that I was a student because of the writings of this man, CP Snow, that there are two cultures. There's the culture of the arts and there's the culture of the sciences- the arts and humanities and the culture of the sciences and that building a bridge between them is hard work and almost impossible. I don't think any of that's true. I don't think they're two cultures at all. I think that's utter nonsense. Most people do science as a form of self expression. Exactly the reason an artist paints, right, or somebody studies history. You do it because it expresses the values you have as a person. There's tremendous common ground. We don't need to build bridges they exist already. We just have to not be afraid to walk across them. Snow had the metaphor right, he just had the fundamental idea wrong. 
	There's art that's inspired by science, but there's also science that's inspired by art. The classic example of this is the discovery of the structure of benzene by Kekule. People couldn't figure out the structure of benzene. They tried all kinds of linear structures for this molecule, but they kept coming up with the wrong formula. They couldn't figure out how you could make a molecule that had the same number of hydrogens as carbons. And Kekule couldn't either until he came up with the answer, which is of course it's a ring structure. Nobody had thought that molecules could form rings before. But this is a great leap, but Kekule didn't get it out of nowhere, he got it from thinking about something he'd learned when he'd studied classics, which is the ouroboros, okay. The snake biting its own tail, a common design in classics all over the world. Ancient art, ancient literature talks about it all the time. Kekule drew that out of the recesses of his memory and it inspired him to figure out what the structure of benzene should be. 
	I took a lot of science courses in college, that's true. Not a single one of these has been of any use to me in my career. There are a number of reasons for that. One is that I did badly in some of them. Another reason is that a lot of the information there has been superseded because it turns out science is constantly overturning old paradigms. And another was I probably didn't pay enough attention. 
	Here are the courses I should have taken, okay, but before I do that, I'll tell you the courses I took that have been of value. Art history was fantastic when I went to Europe, went to museums, saw all these wonderful works of art and I actually knew what they were about and who painted them and why and what kind of century they were in and what the cultural stuff was going on. That was fabulous. Politics, yeah. Economics certainly. My father was an economist so it allowed me to have a conversation with him of the likes of which I could have never had before. Sociology yes, European history was wonderful, classics took a lot of classics courses, started out as a classics major. Creative writing and music appreciation, I am not musical at all, but I understand it a lot better because I took a course in it.
	But I should have taken less science courses and more of these kind of courses. In particular, I should have taken a course in, just to give you an example, okay, abnormal psychology. I was a department chair. You need abnormal psychology, okay. But because of this I've been able to draw on these things in my writing.
	So one of my more popular columns was one about the allegory of a cave. It was a column called Shadows on the Wall. How many of you know Plato's allegory of a cave? All right, good, you're at a Liberal Arts school. For those of you who don't, all right, this is an allegory about how we get fooled into thinking the world is one way when it's not. He proposes- it's an imaginary dialogue between Socrates and Gloucon- by the way, most of Mink and Clifford, my dog's columns are in the form of imaginary dialogues like the one between Socrates and Gloucon. And there are some classical scholars who believe that Plato actually borrowed the idea from Mink and Clifford. But anyway, we can discuss that in the break if you want. 
	But here was the idea, the idea's imagine a race of people who would live forever in a cave. They sit in one chair all the time and they face the back wall of the cave. Behind them is a large fire out of the mouth of the cave and people pass between- people in the outside world, people, animals, horse carts, whatever pass between the fire and the mouth of the cave so all the people in the cave, all the cave people ever see of the world are the shadows thrown on the wall by these passing things. Plato says, "Wouldn't the people who see this, wouldn't they believe that reality is shadows on the wall? That's all they know of reality." 
	And that makes perfect sense, right. And then he goes further. He says, "Now let's take one of these people, take them out of the cave. Let's show them what the world really is like. That they were only looking at shadows. That the real people are three-dimensional and they have colors and the world is very different from what you think it is. And there are things that you've never seen cast shadows." Well, he said the person would first be astonished, but at some point having seen enough of it, he would realize that this was reality and that everybody in the cave was fooled, right. And Plato goes one step further. He says, "Now let's let the person go back into the cave and convince all the people who live in the cave, that what they're looking at, their reality is nothing but shadows on the wall." And Plato says, "If he does that, they'll kill him." 
	It's a great piece because isn't that exactly what happens when you try to challenge people's cherished beliefs even when those beliefs are patently wrong? Don't you get an enormously hostile reaction? Here more than 2,000 years ago, Plato tells you all you need to know about that. And if you're writing for the public about science and society, you need to understand this. So I wrote a column about it so that other people would learn. But if I hadn't taken classics, I wouldn't have known to use this metaphor, it's the right metaphor. There are a lot of shadows on the wall and we'll go into that some other time.
	There are other reasons for taking humanities courses. How many of you have heard of the Tuskegee Syphalus study? Yeah. Okay. How many of you learned this in biology class? Right. Almost none of you, okay. Almost-
Speaker 5:	[inaudible 00:38:06]
Speaker 1:	Right. But most of biology students, most science students never hear of this, okay. This was when poor blacks were used as human guinea pigs and given syphilis without knowing they had it. Or were not told that they had it. They weren't given treatment for it and they were allowed to progress, in some cases, to horrible ends in the name of so called science. I learned about this in history class, American history class. You can't depend on just your own subject to tell you about the world and the way your subject interacts with the world. You need to know, more than that you need to understand more than that.
	Again, looking for metaphors about this sort of thing. Let me suggest one to you. Thomas Edison, when he invented the light bulb, in order to convince people that this was the way things should be, offered to light New York City. The problem with that, is that there existed in the world at that time no dynamo powerful enough to provide enough electricity to light a city like that. 
	So Edison had to build one and because even a single gigantic dynamo wasn't enough, Edison built two dynamos and connected them up. He initially connected them up in series, okay, which would have worked if the two dynamos were perfectly the same, but of course it's very hard to build two dynamos that run exactly the right. And so what started to happen when he threw the switch to connect them up was that one dynamo began pulling the other like a motor. And the whole thing threatened to explode into sparks and flames. Now what he needed to do was to hook them in parallel but to connect them as well, okay. Connect them across so that they ran in balance because when two dynamos get out of balance, it's a disaster. But when they come into balance, then you get the power that you need.
	Now that's a metaphor you can use because I believe that many people think, and they might even be partly right, that the dynamo of our ingenuity, our intellect, our inventiveness, is threatening to run away with the dynamo of our humanity. And we need to construct education and society so that those dynamos are in balance. If they do, we can light the world. If we don't, the world might be plunged into darkness.
	One of the biggest enemies of a scientist who wants to communicate with people, is the blind trust people have in authority, all right. That authority might be politicians, it's more often religious leaders, or leaders of other types of cults, or television figures, celebrities, people who seem to have some basis for knowing things. This is an example, of course, William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow at the Scopes Monkey Trial, the evolutionary trial in Tennessee in 1925. People have a blind trust in authority and so in fact they believed what their religious leaders told them about the evils of evolution and it lead to this famous trial.
	I wrote a column about this because there's a lot of things about this trial that people think are true that are not true, okay. And it's worth reading the column to learn about that, if you're interested because I read the entire transcript of the trial in order to write that column. 
	But the point I'm trying to make here doesn't depend on you knowing that. It is that you want to constantly campaign against the blind trust in authority. And there's an interesting intellectual trap in that because as a scientist, you seem to be speaking as an authority, okay. And people should not trust you because you're a scientist anymore than they should trust a religious leader because they're a religious leader. They need to trust you because you have studied the subject, you've thought about it, and you know your facts and you need to be able to support that and show it to them in a way they can understand. And then you will earn their trust. But if you earn their trust just because you're a scientist, okay, it's the wrong kind of trust to earn. They won't be educated at that sense in how trust is earned and whom they can trust reliably. So you have to be careful and it took me a long time to learn this and I'm still learning it because it's easy to fall into the trap of seeming to be authoritative about subjects you know. 
	A lot of times people confuse correlation with causality. They confuse the fact that because two things happen at the same time, one must cause the other. Or what happens immediately after the other it must be caused by that. There are a set of rules that I've written about which I've mentioned here that you need to apply to situations like that to see if there really is a likely relationship between the two events. In what I've written, I tend to apply them to things like cigarette smoking and lung cancer because it's an easy example that people can understand and it fits this perfectly, okay. It satisfies every one of those criteria. You'd be amazed how many things we think are causal that you can't fit to all of these. Some of you can fit to two or three or maybe even four. But there are not that many things that fit all five reliably. The good news is cigarette smoking and lung cancer's one of them. And so that's something that's rock solid.
	One of the things that doesn't quite fit yet is global warming. If fits most of them, but it doesn't fit all of them. Not the fact of global warming, the fact of global warming, that fits them fine. It's that global warming is caused by human beings, by the actions of society not by long term changes in the climate or sunspots or things that are outside of human activity. It's tough to prove that here. 
	And so I came up, at one point, with the argument that it shouldn't matter, okay, whether global warming is caused by people or not should make no difference, all right. It's still bad. We've built our entire society on the assumption that climate is going to be fairly stable and if it becomes unstable for whatever reason, we're in trouble. So we should try to take every step that we can take to mitigate that process regardless of where it's coming from. And clearly changing CO2 levels in the atmosphere is one of the things we can do that will have an effect. So it doesn't matter whether those come from trees or seafloor release of methane or whatever, you don't have to get in the wrong argument.
	What I'm saying is if you're going to get in a fight, make sure you're fighting on the right field. Don'' let the other side ever define the terms of the debate. Define it in the right way. For global warming- I believe the terms of the debate should never have been allowed to be that human beings cause it because it's really hard to prove that. I think the terms of the debate should be okay, it's clearly happening what can human beings do about it. And I think that argument can actually work. Be careful, don't ever let the other side tell you what you should be arguing about. And pay attention. Always pay attention to the data. 
	The field of epidemiology was created by CP Snow- sorry John Snow, Dr. John Snow, when he noticed that he could plot the deaths in London during a cholera epidemic and that they tended to cluster largely around this central point, which turned out to be the location of a contaminated water pump. And then, being a great scientist and a great man, he did the experiment. He stole the handle of a water pump and hid it so that people couldn't drink from that pump, okay and the cholera deaths dropped like a stone. And in one fell swoop he A, proved that cholera was caused by contaminated water, which it is, all right. And B, he proved that he invented the science of epidemiology, which basically looks at things like this and then draws conclusions from it. 
	If you're ever in London, go to the site of the Broad Street pump and you will find a pub called the John Snow and inside the pump- the pub, on the wall you will see the handle of the Broad Street pump that he stole. It's a trip worth making. Go there and say how you do to a great man.
	Okay. Let me leave you finally with one comment. The comment is this, in trying to write things for the general public, I've had to run up against a lot of things where I couldn't get the data I needed. I couldn't figure out who was right or who was wrong on the basis on the facts available. Sometimes it's just because the facts were hidden. Sometimes it was just because there were no facts. And sometimes it was because the facts were inconclusive, all right. In those situations you do have to keep an open mind, but sometimes you're going to need to take a stand even if it's only to figure out who you should vote for because believe me voting is better than not voting.
	So what I do when I'm in this situation, is I always ask my old friend cui. Cui as in cui bono, which as some of you may know is Latin for who profits. Who is safe or sound or solvent or satisfied if I believe this? If I take this particular action, who gets money or fame or power? Who comes out on top? If you asked yourself this question, you will at least know which side you will be on when the dust clears. And that can tell you a lot, okay. That can tell you an awful lot because in the end, whether you communicate with science or simply use it in your own life, you're answerable to your own conscience. And this is one way you can at least let your conscience examine the consequences of what you might say or do. Never forget your old friend cui because someone is always profiting or trying to from every controversial situation.
	Look, human beings have a need for certainty. They don't like uncertainty. Scientists are much more comfortable with uncertainty. My favorite Robert Frost poem is The Road Not Taken, okay. A lot of people find that kind of spooky. I think at some point we need to find ways to make people a little bit more comfortable with uncertainty and not to depend so much on certainty because certainty is often provided by people who don't know what they're talking about. 
	And so I want to urge all of you who are scientists to try in the course of your scientific life to engage with the public because the public needs you whether it knows it or not. And I want to urge those of you who aren't scientists to learn as much as you can about science and science facts and to recognize that you need science and you need to listen to it when it's properly presented in a way that's respectful and that you can understand it. And if you do, someday you too may find yourself talking to Goldie Hawn, Jeff Bezos, Al Gore, and Forest Whitaker. And when you do, don't be surprised because Goldie Hawn will ask the best questions.
	Thank you very much.