Bridging the Gap: Bringing Science to the Public Imagination

00:00 Adam

Welcome curious minds to another captivating episode of This Anthro Life, the podcast that takes you on a journey through the fascinating intersection of anthropology, culture, and the human experience. I'm your host  Adam Gamwell. Today we have a special treat for all the science enthusiasts out there. We're diving into the realm of knowledge, discovery, and the complex web of interactions between science, society, and culture. So imagine a world where scientific breakthroughs aren't limited to laboratories, but are embedded in our everyday lives. From vaccines to artificial intelligence to the shifting tides of public skepticism, our conversation delves into the real-world impact of scientific advancement. Today I'm joined by Dr. Nick Dirks, an internationally renowned anthropologist and scientist, as well as the president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences. He leads the Academy in promoting science-based solutions to world challenges including pandemics and global warming. And he also recently helped launch the International Science Reserve, or ISR, with partners including IBM, Pfizer, and Google. The ISR is building a network of scientists to contribute solutions to international crises, as well as it compiles technical and human resources that scientists can call upon for further research in times of crisis. In this episode, we embark on an intellectual odyssey surrounding the process of scientific discovery, the influence of cultural perspectives, and the importance of embracing diverse ways of knowing. We deep dive questions that have haunted scientists and public thinkers for centuries by journeying through worlds of anthropology, genomics, and the human experience. Here's a few questions that shape our conversation. How can we bridge the gap between scientific discovery and public understanding? And what role do trust and skepticism play in our perceptions of science? How can we use the power of storytelling in the scientific realm to tackle the challenges of sharing both the successes and the failures of science and our need to communicate the non-linear nature of scientific discovery? Rarely does it go from idea to experimentation to positive outcome. What is the concept of scientific expertise, and how can it be earned, sustained, and trusted in the eyes of the public? And perhaps most importantly, how can we engage with complex scientific concepts while remaining grounded in the realities of our everyday lives? In other words, how can the blend of science, culture, and anthropology help us make sense of the complexity of our rapidly changing world, including things like the rise of artificial intelligence and the ethical conundrums that it presents? So by the end of this episode, you'll have a newfound appreciation for the social dimensions of science and the critical role that they play in shaping our world. Now, I know you're itching to get to it and explore these topics alongside with us. So make sure you hit that subscribe button and join the Vibrant Disanther Life community. And by leaving us a review or sharing this podcast, you can help contribute to the rich tapestry of conversations that inspire us to think differently and unravel the mysteries of our human existence. Let's dive on in. To kick us off, Nick, I want to say thank you so much for joining me on this Anthro Life. We have a shared mission of bringing public science and social science for good for the public. That's why I was particularly excited to get to talk with you today.

02:49 Dirks

Terrific. This Anthro Life obviously suggests both your background and the way you've taken it into trying to apply it to a whole variety of different kinds of institutional and behavioral and life things. Kudos to you, really given the fact that anthropology is not always the most expanding part of the university these days.

03:07 Adam

Well, thank you. But then also, I was curious with that too, I mean, both as an anthropologist and historian, how you might approach that? Because also working in the New York Academy of Sciences, obviously there's a huge emphasis on STEM. And then as a, do you see a bit of your work as bringing the A, the STEAM, the A of STEAM in there, kind of for anthropology or historian, I don't know how an H would work in STEM, S-T-H-E-M. But just these ideas in terms of both liberal arts, but then also the humanities. Do you, have you had conversations or thought through this arena with folks in the organization or beyond of what is the role of humanities and social sciences? When we talk about science broadly, especially science communication, bringing science to Brown public policy and more public imaginations. Do you see that too? Is there the, this kind of tension between what we're seeing in the Academy or the shrinkage sometimes in liberal arts and social sciences? Is that a similar conversation that's happening over in kind of the public policy, public good, public awareness space, or is it separate?

04:01 Dirks

Yeah, no, it's, it's actually been interesting to me because when I was first approached about the New York Academy, I was actually approached by somebody who has a PhD in religion as well as a law degree, also happens to be the former president of NYU. who is an old friend of mine, but who, as I say, had been hardly a STEM scientist in his career. But he was chair of the board here for four or five years in the aughts. And this is John Saxton, and he's somebody who's always been very concerned about questions of value and the kind of ethical dimensions of scientific as well as any other practice. The way in was initially without that kind of sense of having to figure that, the answer to that question out. But most of the activities of the Academy when I first arrived were pretty formally within a STEM kind of space. So I did two things. One is I went back not just to the history of Sexton, but to an earlier time in the Academy when Franz Boas was president of the Academy, Margaret Mead was actually vice president of the Academy for many years in the 50s and 60s. There's been a long anthropology section, or a long history of association with an anthropology section in the academy, which continues to the present day. One of the few discussion sections that actually continues. But that's just a way of saying the kind of legitimacy of the pedigree. But to your question, What's interesting now is that everybody is thinking about a broader set of questions. And I think that we can talk about this on the podcast, but that was certainly something that COVID made everybody aware of. You can develop the most miraculous vaccine in the world, but you have to make people take it. And the behavioral and social and cultural and so on questions were just forced on people in the biomedical profession in a way that I think was palpable. And now, whether you're thinking about AI or climate, Same is true. So I think there's a kind of recognition, perhaps every place other than within the university itself, of the importance of these fields. But again, that's a, that's another conversation.

06:08 Adam

There is this interesting question of, are scientists and are folks facing new challenges today? I think it's really interesting to dive into your work at the New York Academy of Sciences, as well as some of the projects that worked on before that, both being at Columbia and California Berkeley as Chancellor, as Professor, and now working at, again, the New York Academy of Sciences. And it's interesting because across these, there's this thread of helping experts, scientists, faculty, teachers, educators, be able to do their work the best way possible to have the most kind of impact. And so I'd love to, as we open up, think about this question of how, how has the idea of helping impact and helping experts, scientists and folks do their work? Like how has that shaped the way that you approach science and how we communicate that and what does it mean to help facilitate? the pathways of expertise, we might say, for folks to be able to do their work and bring it out into wider circles.

07:00 Dirks
Yeah,  Adam, I think one of the kinds of founding principles of the New York Academy is that science is important. It needs support. It needs ways of getting out to the public. It needs to engage the public in broader and better ways. That's actually how it was founded in the 19th century. But over the course of the 206 year history of the academy, that relationship between science proper and the broader kind of context within which science operates has changed and has changed in all kinds of ways. And of course, the 20th century was a time of specialization, a time when science became increasingly technical, and in which, as C.P. Snow argued in his Reid lectures in the 1950s, really the two cultures began to diverge and really become very separate from each other. That is to say, the cultures of the arts and humanities and social sciences on the one side and the sciences on the other. And when I first was approached about the New York Academy of Sciences, I was told that the primary thing we do is we just support science. And there were various slogans that were used at the Academy at the time, which were also general slogans that were used and became quite current during the pandemic in particular. around, let's just support the science, let's follow the science. And we heard various people say that during COVID. But we've also recognized, I think over the last three, four years in a way that we've known before, but we really had to take seriously in a different kind of way. that science is not just a singular thing that is all about established truth. Science is actually about a process, it's about an attitude to truth, and it's really about experimentation and discovery. and a process that proceeds as much by failure as by success, and always by revision, always by testing, and again, always by being open and ready to change what it is one thinks about whatever the particular field of science one is engaged on. In that sense, you don't follow the science. You think about science in a somewhat broader, in a broader way. And again, this became so clear when we saw the development of miraculous vaccines in record time, and there was vaccine hesitancy that grew and grew and grew. And of course, people in the scientific profession just said, listen to the experts. But I think we also saw during the pandemic that listening to the experts is not always as simple an injunction and it's not as clear a thing as many scientists would like. We saw that science changed, or that is to say, we saw that the scientific understanding of COVID changed. We began by thinking that we had to wipe down all of the packages that were delivered to our house or grocery bags we scrubbed with isopropyl alcohol. And then, of course, we realized, oh, it's not being spread by fomites. It's being spread by as an aerosol by through the air. And then all of a sudden we began to focus on wearing masks, social distance and and other other measures that help to deal with a different kind of understanding of what this virus was and how it spread, how it worked. And again, as as people in the public were given different kinds of instructions over time, Many of them became frustrated because on the one hand, you follow the science, but wait a second, it's following something that's moving in a zigzag, which of course is the way science really moves. I say that because I think it's important to understand that even as the two cultures separated off in the 20th century in major ways, I think in the 21st century, we're seeing the need for these two cultures to come much closer together and to really interact in a much more engaged way. And I think the challenges of science today are twofold. One, of course, getting the kind of support needed to continue to make the extraordinary discoveries that we're seeing in fields ranging from vaccinology and structural biology and biomedical science more generally, CRISPR-Cas9, you name it, there's one amazing discovery after the next. In fields in computer science and technology, we see the rapid expansion and development of AI, particularly in the last 10-15 years with new discoveries about neural networks and the possibility of using bigger and bigger data sets and much more computational power. You know, we see the scientific accumulation of concern about climate and climate change, but again, that we're now beginning to witness every day in our lives in ways that makes both the science more critical and understanding perhaps of how to begin to mitigate some of the effects of all the use of fossil fuels over the last centuries as it has closed with respect to climate. But all of these things are no longer just about supporting the science. And the other side of it is, of course, that we need to really take seriously public skepticism and concern about different kinds of messages that are coming from scientists and scientific institutions about things like what is the cost-benefit analysis of a vaccine? What are the great things that can happen with CRISPR-Cas9? What are the kinds of terrible things that might happen if we start thinking about designer-based AI. It can make for a more efficient world. It can do all kinds of things that are extraordinary. It might even be able to write my term paper for next to Symetz Bureau in Anthropology 101. But it also is being associated increasingly with notions of existential risk and indeed even possible extinction events. And of course, we see the worries about climate. So I think the position of science right now is one in which we need to attend to both how you support science itself, but also how you situate, engage, and connect science much more effectively across not only all the discipline, but with the public more broadly. And that certainly is how I see the kind of mission today of the New York Academy of Science.

13:03 Adam

I think that's such an important range of topics that you're bringing to the fore here, as we think about that, on the one hand, we are finding ourselves having to wrestle with both some new sounding or new feeling problems and concerns. Obviously one of the big ones is the rise of artificial intelligence and AI as a technology that's affecting us on a very consumer level now, we might say. AI is not new, but of course how we think about it and how people are interacting with things like chat GPT, right, can help me. improve or write my term paper for class next semester. I'm not recommending that by the way. Not an endorsement, right? But this kind of idea of got the one hand we have new interactions with technologies, but also again, things like vaccines too, which also are a form of technology, CRISPR-Cas9 too, of what we can do with gene editing. So we have these interesting I guess areas that are changing the way that we can interact with ourselves, what we know about ourselves, how we can engage with the world, but what does it mean when something like a pandemic happens and we can actually very quickly do an mRNA vaccine research turnaround time? That's one of the incredible parts about the rise of the COVID vaccine is how quickly it was able to be synthesized. Even that though, I mean, I recall during that time, as a non-medical person myself, as I'm an anthropologist. My partner is actually a molecular biologist, so I learned a lot through them in terms of what was happening, but that mRNA vaccines themselves are also not new, right? It was the first time the public had heard about that, the ability to synthesize a vaccine that way. So even that raised this interesting question of how and when do the stories of what science and scientific achievement can accomplish get told? And then on the other side, I think you raised a really valid and important point of when do we see a rise of skepticism around scientific achievement and endorsement, and how do we know what we can follow? And so I think even you said this right at the top too, this really important piece that I'm curious to dive a little more into is how do we be aware, both the scientists and people that promote scientific thinking and scientific literacy, to help be more public, to help increase public awareness around that science does not proceed by success, but oftentimes it's failure. It's through discovery, it's through going back and forth. And it's a Mandarin, I like your visualization of zigzagging, right? It's a moving target. in terms of as we were figuring things out and just making new discoveries, but it's not this kind of straightforward one to the next. I'm thinking about this too, we teach it, we educate our kids and youth to think this way too, that we discovered that the, turns out the earth is not the center of the universe, that we actually revolve around the sun and that gravity is this thing that keeps us on the planet. So we talk about the broad scientific discoveries as if it was like one and done. But then obviously, that's where our point is that it's never really been like that. People don't like what Galileo was saying in his processes. All these scientific discoveries, right? There weren't these one-offs. And so that's an interesting question because I'm reflecting on this in conversation with Tom Nichols' book, The Death of Expertise, which is talking about the rise of these ideas in terms of the kind of movement to undermine expertise as a form of authority. And that's like, there's a bunch of different pushes in terms of social media and kind of filter bubbles in terms of who we are paying attention to and we're being algorithms are helping push us into paying more attention to just folks that agree with us. Then also this other, the other side of this kind of the zigzagging nature of science. So I'm just curious, I don't have an answer to this and I'm curious if this is something that you've run across too, but how do we think about this idea of Are there other ways that you've seen, whether through your time at the academy, in different university positions before that too, in how we communicate the non-linear necessarily nature of scientific discovery? And so folks are not expecting, oh, I have a vaccine now, I can do this amazing thing, right? Because when we take into account that kind of skepticism that can come from public that is not as scientific literate or maybe not as interested in being scientifically literate, which is a different problem we could talk about. How do we help communicate the, I guess, the zigzaggy nature, we might say, of this kind of scientific work in a world that expects one answer?

16:58  Dirks

Yeah, no, it's a real challenge and no easy answer to it. I think on the one hand, it's absolutely right what you just said. Most people want science to know the answer and they want to hear it from the scientists and they expect that science has accomplished all sorts of great things. It's figured out how airplanes can stay aloft, how You can work with gravity and still have, still have airplanes stay in the air among so many other things. And we live in a world in which technology has completely transformed our everyday lives. So we, we accept at some level that, that science has figured some stuff out. But then, when it comes to something new like the pandemic, or for that matter, when it comes to climate, there seem to be so many uncertainties. And the moment you introduce uncertainty, and certainly when you change your mind, of course, stories from scientific trials or experiments that are done, which recommend one week a diet of this sort, and the next week you're told, no, actually, you're not supposed to eat just protein. You really have to eat a mix of things. Exercise was the same thing. this particular trace element is going to cause cancer, this is going to do that. And then you find out that the tests or the experiments are partial, they're not conclusive. A lot of the things you're hearing, particularly in press releases about new work being done in science, it turns out to be changing all the time. So it's a very destabilizing kind of context in which to develop a great deal of trust. So how do we deal with that? In some ways, the right answer is we're more honest about the scientific process. Kids are taught the scientific method in school, and the scientific method doesn't mention the truth at the end. It actually talks about how you formulate a hypothesis, how you test for that, how you look either to confirm and verify or to falsify and move on to a different experiment. So there's already a kind of foundation for thinking more about the process of science than the end result. But it doesn't mean that necessarily inspires a lot of confidence. And particularly the things, of course, that we're talking about, whether it's a vaccine on the one side or recent things that get covered in the press, this is where science is hardly established. Science is getting established, perhaps, but it's not established in the same way that Bernoulli's principle is an established fact of science, which does in fact keep our airplanes aloft because of the wingspan and the differential airflow and pressure between the top of the wing and the bottom of the wing. So that's pretty established. And every time we take off in an airplane, just assume that, and it seems to work most of the time. But scientists will, on the one hand, talk about real facts, real truths. They'll be often very direct about their sense that science really is about established truth. On the one side, they'll say that. While on the other, what they really like to talk about is their own work, which is really basically one experiment after the next. And which, again, as I said before, there's a lot of failure along with success. This is not for talking to the public, but it's a little departure from the main question, but it's related to it. I've recently been rereading the work of Thomas Kuhn. Now, Thomas Kuhn, in 1962, wrote a really extraordinary book called The Structure of Scientific Revelation. and he writes about the Copernican Revolution, he writes about Galileo, he writes about Einstein, he writes about major moments where the entire what he calls paradigm of scientific knowledge shifts. And it shifts because the old paradigm begins to have more and more anomalies that make it impossible to continue. For example, in the case of the relationship of the Earth and the Sun to believe that it is the Earth that is at the center of the solar system and the Sun is revolving around it. Copernicus began to figure that out and there were epicycles and this and that finally had to be resolved in Galileo. But Galileo when he came out with, and you mentioned him and that's why I was thinking of it, when he came out with his heliocentric version of the solar system, was condemned to house imprisonment for his entire life and wasn't very popular. It's a big, hard thing to shift. paradigms. But in fact, that's how science proceeds. And what Kuhn wrote in his book is that these revolutionary transformations are so significant that you're actually moving from one way of looking at the world to another. And it's revolutionary. But what Kuhn also noted in his work is that scientists don't really think about truth. They really think about testing and about experimentation all the time. And what he did is he took a kind of approach that privileged practice. Not so much what do scientists think, but what do scientists do? And this, in fact, has now spawned, after Kuhn, a whole field of the sociology of science and technology. And there are a lot of people who have done this work. Bruno Latour, great French sociologist who just recently died, did an empirical study with a British sociologist back in the 80s of the Salk Institute and found the same kinds of things, namely that when you really look at how science proceeds, it's pretty much like any other human activity or human endeavor. And first of all, people have to be working within a particular framework. That framework can change. It can seem even arbitrary. And then some things work, some things don't. The group works together to constitute the sense of what is important to do and what isn't. And again, it's like any other kind of human activity. What does that do? It gives us a much more accurate picture of how science proceeds, but it also, and it was certainly in the case of Kuhn, it did this, it also undermines our sense of the authority of science. There were huge reactions when Kuhn came out with his book in 1962. People said, this relativist, he's completely abandoned any idea of universal meaning. He doesn't even believe in the independent existence of the world. That was not true, but that was the kind of charge that was made. And effectively, you have two choices. Either you believe in universals or you believe that everything is relative. Now, as an anthropologist, you'll know that ideas of relativism actually began not with Kuhn, but with notions of relativism, probably go back to Herodotus. But in modern times, they go back to Franz Boas. who used the notion of cultural particularity to argue against racial prejudice and the idea that race was encoded in some kind of biological natural order of things. And he argued against that. He was actually a social activist as well as an apologist who collaborated with W.E.B. Du Bois in the creation of the NAACP. But he introduced relativism for a kind of scientific reason, but also for a reason associated with social justice at the time, namely, really trying to work against this notion that racial difference is in some way biologically coded and therefore biologically justified. And I say that because in some contexts, to see that things change over time and place can be seen as a very progressive thing that can actually help you make great arguments. But in the case of science, it literally began to erode the idea of science as authority. So how do we get that back? How do we get that back and be honest about how science really works? How do we say that science is, in fact, a human activity done by humans, but also say there's a difference between what a group of scientists and a jointly authored paper will publish in Nature or Science and what, just to pull some name out of the hat, what RFK Jr. who's now running for president and polling very well, is saying when he goes after science and criticizes everything from vaccines to scientific expertise more general. How do you go against that and still be honest about how science actually is conducted?

25:22 Adam That is, I'm really glad you brought this idea up because I think this is one of the most interesting challenges that We as social scientists, and then also as life science allies, we might say, there's some of us that are biological anthropologists, we may kind of mix ourselves together in different ways. How do we approach this kind of challenge? Because I think you're right, as you were talking about Thomas Kuhn's work, I was remembering back to Anthropology Theory 201. But then also this idea, right, Brenda Latour's work on laboratory life and even thinking of Paul Rabinow's work on making PCR to looking at the same kind of thing. Like how do we see what's the process by which scientists come to discover how to do this kind of genetic reading or reading of different kinds of genomes. And I think that this is one of the fundamentally interesting and challenging questions of both by humanizing and showing that the social processes through which science is made, like everything else that we do as people. How do we then wrestle with the fact that I can undermine the fact of this sort of authority from on high? And part of it, I'm thinking through that we, this is obviously very broad here, but oftentimes like how the Western world approaches knowledge, right? As the sort of externalized thing that we capture that's out there, right? That the reasons individual mind is that can they think through and rationalize and see, put the pieces together and say, here's the answer. that we've arrived upon, and we tend to treat knowledge a bit more statically, even though science as a process changes. And I'm just contrasting this again, this is like super broad sweeps, but thinking with some other pieces I've been reading recently, like Tyson Yungaporta, who wrote a book called Sand Talk, which is on Aboriginal indigenous ways of knowing, but reflecting on them kind of in the, how do we reflect indigenous thinking back on the kind of Western world is a little bit of his work. And both as an indigenous scholar and kind of arts practitioner, this is one of the pieces that has sat with me. And I saw this also in Braiding Sweetgrass with Robin Wall Kimmerer and some other of these kinds of similar works. We're talking about knowledge as more explicitly relational and that it's built between individuals. And it's not that Western thought doesn't do that, but it, I think it's an interesting question. There, there seems to be less questioning of knowledge itself when it's, we see it as built by the community and by the group and where we're tending to treat science as, go listen to Anthony Fauci. He says, do this one thing. And then every single conservative will then get on a pitchfork against that idea. Every liberal will say, he said it, we got to go do it. And so it's also this, we're looking for authority to know what to do or what to rally against. But either way, the knowledge is treated as a thing that was handed down. I'm thinking about this idea of authority and hierarchy as another, as perhaps one piece to share this challenge question of that. We need to humanize science in the process, but then at the same time, still recognize that it also does have authority because of that process, right? Because we went through the experimentation process together, we helped knock out, understand when there was not a result or a null result, and when there was a positive change or not, and being able to build that knowledge. So I wonder, I'm curious your thoughts about this too, in that, is there a kind of ways that we either talk about the knowledge itself or begin the story of that knowledge? I think you're, I think you're right on there too. That we have to also find, I guess, as the dual challenge of also holding up relativism, right? As like cultural relativism, but then also understanding that that also doesn't mean that it's not true. Like relativism doesn't mean not true. And yeah, I'm. Try to think through this because the other piece I've seen that came to mind as we're talking about this is that there has been some interesting studies, kind of like meta studies of science, right? That there's a positive publication bias in a lot of nature and sell a lot of publication journals that we want to show the idea that there was an active change or something that we found. versus the much higher instance of we found no change, which is actually just as important when it comes to science, right? It's fundamentally important that we understand there was no change when I introduced this molecule, but when I introduced a different molecule, there was a change. And so we have to, we need both those not just that we know that adding molecule X caused a kind of change. And so I think this is interesting too, that we, when we're also, I guess there's a bit of a publication bias towards having more positive results. And so even this too, that we always. narrate scientific knowledge as showing change versus saying, we're actually establishing the parameters by which change does not happen, the other side of that. I think it's an interesting kind of piece to think about when like both what's the relation between the scientist and the science that's being made in like, how are we narrating that? Are we only showing positive results? And keeping relativism in that piece, this is obviously, this is a huge conundrum we're unpacking here, but I'm curious. Yeah. Like how can we think about this, this idea too, that I guess I'm wondering, we have other venues again, like kind of these publication venues. So one answer may be to have more kind of negative results in publications, but the average public is not going to read those. So I'm sure, I'm not sure how far that's going to go. How's it thinking about that?

30:01 Dirks

I think you're raising a lot of different issues, but let's talk about the publication issue. What is the incentive structure for scientists? Now, on the one side, as you say, they have to find something that's a little different, either a chain or a change from some experiment that was conducted before that will show you a few additional elements that you hadn't seen before. Yeah, a chain, it has to be different. It can't just be what X, Y, and Z published back in 2018 turns out to be It's true. Everything they did, I've just confirmed it. Of course, we now see with the cases of scientific fraudulence that there is a need to actually confirm a lot of the experiments that are done and to have the check work that really is required to have a robust field and a general confidence in the integrity of the process. But there's also in publication and in the incentive instructions around it, a tendency to keep people in their lanes so that they have to continue to work pretty much in the same. So you have to have chain, but you can't really change right out of your field completely. because then you have different referees for the papers, you have a different set of entry barriers that come, and sometimes you can't make the kind of leap that intellectually you can make, but that you're not allowed to in order to actually publish the work. How do you deal with that? And I think there are a lot of people now who are suggesting that we need to have different ways to support science and to support both the kind of PI-driven science that is done by people who are progressively working on a single set of problems over the course of their scientific career, but also to find ways to make pretty big bets on some bold idea that doesn't have any kind of prehistory in terms either of the work of the particular scientist or the field in which it's being done, so that you can support science that is going to be particularly risky. Because the other thing you don't get in publications or published papers about failure, and sometimes it's the failure that is, as I said before, as important as the success. A colleague of mine at Columbia wrote a wonderful book. He's a biologist who wrote a book called Ignorance. And his argument is that science really proceeds through recognizing what you don't know. That's really the most important predicate for doing really important scientific work. This is Stuart Barrasting. It's a great book he wrote a few years ago. But all of those are, are built in. limitations to the way in which science is conducted. Now, of course, why do we ask people to have a track record in their fields before we fund them to do research? Of course, because we want them to know a thing or two about the field, because it is highly specialized, because success in working in a particular area of molecular biology usually requires years and years of pre-work in that very field. Neither is this a kind of invitation to just open up and allow anybody to do anything. But that brings us back to this question of expertise, right? And how it is constituted. What kinds of conditions make it particularly important and powerful? And what are the issues that expertise either gets wrong or limits us from proceeding to explore? And again, the refrain for me is always to go back to the larger scientific community, to believe that if you have a robust, heterogeneous, diverse, a community of scientists, diverse in every possible sense, diverse in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, diverse in terms of national backgrounds, class origins, diverse in terms of discipline, diverse in terms of life experience. These things are going to help make for a much richer community of people who are going to have different views, and they're going to argue about them, and they're going to contest them, but they're also going to do so within a space of scientific rigor, that is what ultimately distinguishes science from non-science. That is to say, there are expectations about how your experiments are run. You have to have controls. You have to be transparent about what your assumptions were, what your experiments were, what your findings were. And you have ultimately to be answerable to the views and perspectives of colleagues who know something about the field and can weigh in as per peer review as to whether or not this is something worth publishing and funding. That's a way of responding with respect to both the difficulties in the space, but also ultimately kind of thing that makes it distinct, that actually confers in my view, the right to expertise and not just the titles and the names and the institutional affiliations that go along with success in a particular scientific career.

34:48 Adam I think that's a really important part and something that it brings to mind as a topic area to build on with this is What is it that science is doing in the world? And partially that's in public perception and part of it is how are we building the scientific canon of knowledge? And through, again, I think you wonderfully set the idea of having the right kinds of rigor and expectations and both how the science is done. Are we transparent in biases and assumptions and pieces like this? But then the kind of other piece is this that I'm getting towards is like the building of the International Science Reserve that you put together through NIOS with your partners. And this idea of how do we help bring scientists into both policy conversations, into actual action, whether it's on the ground, science without borders, mentality and methodology, scientific contributions to global emergency responses. Obviously COVID was a watershed moment in terms of the global community had to come together. And we saw again, these like both fascinating and kind of incredible speed through which we were able to produce a vaccine. And then on top of that too, the kind of responses that go with it. So I'm interested to hear a little bit about this story too, in terms of building the reserve and what does it mean to. keep in place all the pieces that we're talking about in terms of the scientific rigor and expectations of how science gets done, but then helping scientists be more on the forefront of engaging, especially when we have global crises that require more cooperation across borders.

36:14 Dirks

Yeah, we, as you just suggested, we got the idea for the International Science Reserve during the pandemic. It actually came out of a smaller enterprise that was called the High Performance Computing Consortium that brought together industry, national labs, the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House, universities, technology companies, and so on, basically to make available surplus computational capacity for projects that were directly related to dealing with COVID, but that were simply not able to go forward on the basis of waiting till you got a grant application through NEH or not through NSF or NIH or whatever. And the, the HPC was, was really extraordinarily successful. And we thought, well, look, in the event of future. catastrophes, and unfortunately we know there are going to be future pandemics, but also future catastrophes of all kinds, in which science and scientists can play a very important role. But again, there are all these kinds of barriers that are attached to science as it's done in normal times. You wait for your next grant cycle in order to begin very specified research. You can't actually, according to the rules of many grants, you can't actually use your laboratory for any purpose other than that that you put in your proposal two years ago. And if you do it, you have to find alternative sources of funding. For example, at Berkeley, Jennifer Doudna, the wonderful scientist who developed CRISPR-Cas9 with Emmanuel Charpentier and got the Nobel Prize a couple of years ago for that work, has this wonderful lab doing work in CRISPR-Cas9 at Berkeley. In the third week of March, she just made the decision and Berkeley helped make available resources to support this. that she would stop the work on CRISPR-Cas9 and develop a test for COVID. And initially not even using CRISPR-Cas9, although in time they worked on a CRISPR-Cas9 COVID test as well. But the point is that they did it because there were resources. And we have recognized by learning as a society from what went right, but also what went wrong during the pandemic, that we need to be much more prepared in the future for things that might go wrong. And let's learn from the pandemic. Right now, we're in a kind of stage of forgetting. Everybody, I think, wants to just say that the pandemic is over in its most acute and active phase. Of course, it is. But COVID is not gone, and people still get it. And people without being vaccinated are still vulnerable for all kinds of really serious disease as a result. But the point is that even as we want to move on and get past and forget about the pandemic, we believe it's important to remember the lesson. So we constituted around a much broader mandate, this idea of the International Science Reserve, which is a network of scientists and scientific resources and institutions that connect up around a variety of kinds of scenarios that we put together for the future. And initially, we actually did a project on wildfire, major wildfires that would be climate related, that would cross borders. because we actually don't have mechanisms whereby scientists in different nations will work together necessarily if there is a transnational catastrophe of that kind. More recently, we've been working on floods. As just before we started the podcast, I saw big news reports about huge floods in North India. And there are actually some pretty big floods in the Hudson Valley, just north of where I am right now, that brought things to a complete crashing halt last night. And we know that the kinds of catastrophes that we see, whether it's related to heat or whatever, connected to wildfire, connected to flood, connected to drought. And we also know that we need to mobilize scientific resources to be ready to help deal with these things, both in the long term, of course, but in the short term. And that was the impetus for starting what we call the ISR. But it's also, and your question raised this issue too, it's also about orienting scientists to think differently, both about how they work together and We're creating these kinds of networks that are across borders, across universities, across industry, across nonprofits and for-profits, across every conceivable border you could think about. But also always with respect to an idea of engaging the public good. And everything that was done by the HPC was pro bono. There were no legal MOUs. It was just people pitching in. And everything we're doing in the ISR is pro bono as well. The idea is there are points where you just suspend not just usual life, but the usual practices that support our institutional lives as well. So in doing that, we have indeed begun to think more broadly about what it takes to really make everyone with expertise of a scientific kind, aware of the need to think more broadly about the obligations they have to the wider society. And I think probably there, these questions about legitimacy and trust and skepticism probably reside as much as they do anyplace else, which is to say, the more institutions, the more individuals, scientific, academic, you name it, the more they are broadly engaged, with projects of different kinds that are motivated primarily by issues around the public good. The more likely, when something like a pandemic takes place, the more likely people will be to trust them. And I think there's been, in the course of the last 20, 30, 40 years, a growing sense that universities have gotten too rich. Certainly, they're charging too much money. Pharmaceutical companies have gotten too rich. They charge too much for drugs. And a lot of the complaints and concerns are real, but then they feed into a general sense that even science is not exempt from a certain kind of capitalist greed that is just, again, another indication that you can't trust people because they're really in it for themselves. So, indeed, why shouldn't I be? And rekindling of a sense of public obligation, of public service, and building that into the core of who we are and what we do on a day-in and day-out basis is, I think, critical, and it's certainly one of the underwriting missions of the International Science Reserve.

42:56 Adam

There's something to do with familiarity in terms of trust, but also firmly with our social scientist hats on, just thinking about even in some previous interviews and work that you've talked about too, that both growing up in India for a time, as well as in doing your studies and asking the questions of what does it mean to be kind of an American born studying in India, right? In a different country. And how do we understand politics, dynamics, economics? And myself, I'm also born in the US and did field research in Southern Peru for a some academic studies as part of my PhD in this. I'm ever deeply wrestling with this question, both as a student and then also just as a human being living in a village somewhere else, right? And always being a bit of the outsider, right? There's an emic edict perspective that we talked about in anthropology, right? Having the insider's view and the outsider's view. And it's, to me, I think we have such an interesting opportunity today also as we reflect about this in terms of building public conversations around science and what does it mean to have this need. And so I think you're 100% right in terms of visibility and kind of telling those stories in public arenas. Is this is very important. I mean, I'm, I'm also just thinking about this metaphor of the computational project is inspiring. Like we have extra computational brainpower of science. Let's help take a surplus of that and move it outwards. As a way to build that conversation, that trust, because a parallel to is one of the challenges that I would see in Southern Peru, but then we also will see in any kind of international development context. I was working with an international development NGO on quinoa productions, basically sort of improving agrobiodiversity for conservation for climate change. There's a lot loaded in what that even is, but of course, like where and what level do farmers, do scientists trust in international organization versus a local one? And so this idea that as I think many of us as ethnographers learn in process, we can't just walk into the field, walk into someone else's home and say, hi, we're here to do this thing. Here's our Western expertise, our science expertise, and we're going to tell you how this works. This has been documented time and time again, thinking of James Scott's work here in particular, but this is the, this is important piece in terms of building community and again, building relationality with people. And there, I think there's, I think you're right on there and talking about both the ISR in terms of bringing science more into both the public imagination sets of conversations is making both the human more visible, but then talking about what does it mean to be part of your tribe, your village, wherever that is in a broadly construed sense. And even this idea of bringing out, again, I think there is strength in the cultural relativist perspective that we can say, we are, knowledge is not necessarily this universal piece, but we can learn and build this together. We build trust because we're building it together. And I'm thinking about this because the idea, as you noted too, that there can be this pushback against whether universities, northern science. scientific institutions inside of them may have gotten too wealthy or too well off and that there's a distrust about that. It's curious to me that a lot of businesses are nonetheless still getting some of that ire now from the public by saying, what are you doing to help society business? I know, yes, you sell me underpants, but you're also destroying the rainforest in the process. So it's interesting to note that on the one hand, science is not immune from that public kind of questioning of like, how are you actually helping? But at the same time, it feels a little bit better to also know businesses are getting that kind of smack also, right? So it's not just saying science, you can't do that. Because there is always this interesting conversation between inside of academia that if you're going to go work for the big bad man and outside an industry, then you sold out in essence, right? But then the flip side of saying businesses are not immune from people saying, what is actually, what are you doing here too? And I think in the idea of development of AI is one of the great cases of this too, in terms of where there's a huge business case for it. Is there a good human case for it? This is the kind of the in-between that we're wrestling right now. Maybe that can be a piece we can, we can dig into here a little bit is this, the AI as a theme about this and just as both the ton of scientific research, computational research going into what this kind of technology can do. There's a lot of ethical questions of how might we make sure that this actually does good? And then what does it mean to build relationships between those two, whether it's computer scientists, social scientists, by helping build the public face of what does it mean to do AI, have it be applied for good only. It's been sitting with me too, because this is like one of our big pieces. We just went through a pandemic together as a species. Now we're building a new kind of hugely, potentially huge change in the next, next 10 years or less. But I'm throwing a lot at you there, but I think this is an interesting set of questions that we could, that we can discuss in that space.

47:19     Dirks

Yeah. Yeah. Let me just begin where you started and to say that I think, you know, I think it really is important that scientists and indeed experts of any kind understand that you have to lead with humility. Uh, and I do think you're right that one of the things you rec, you, we've come to realize in the world of anthropology is that you don't just pop into another culture and immediately have the trust of the people who are there. You have to earn it. And, and you earn it in fact, by, in part, by, by, by being patient, by being open about what you're doing and so on. But you also learn it, you earn it by virtue of the fact that you're out there really trying to learn from someone. And, but it's even there only possible to convey authenticity. if you really are trying to learn, and if you're not simply trying to suck something up and then digest it immediately into a usable form of research that you advance your career with. And there's been lots of debate within our field about how, what are the ethical obligations, as it were, of scientific, social scientific practice. But these ethical obligations, they go everywhere and affect everything. And now I'm going to shift to, as you did, to AI. Because it is remarkable what has developed. AI has been developing for a long time, to be sure. With the work of Jeff Hinton and his colleagues at the University of Toronto back around 2011, 2012, things just exploded. And now with the release of the large language models and ChatGPT, everybody is talking about AI. Everybody is aware all of a sudden that AI has extraordinary power. And it has power to do some good things, but it has power to do some really extraordinarily bad things. And often those bad things begin by simply reproducing at some level, human biases that pre-exist AI. Everybody was upset when some of the first AI facial recognition systems or, or identification processes began to make invidious distinctions between and among races. But what they were doing was reproducing from their machine learning training data, they're reproducing human attitudes that exist outside of technology as well. And that are obviously rife on the internet. But they made us aware of the fact that just because AI is, is operating and making distinctions, it's not going to take care of all of the issues of human bias. It's, if anything, it can possibly make it worse. Now, I recently read Brian Christian's book, The Alignment Problem. where he shows the extent to which AI has already been used before, this is well before the release of GPT, used to evaluate bail requests, prison sentences, bank loans for houses, all kinds of routine business transactions in which, you know, over and over again, judgments that are made by AI seem to, if anything, exacerbate the human bias. And lo and behold, it's the African-American kid, not the white kid who's not getting their request for bail granted solely because the expectation for recidivism algorithm encodes data that is full of a preexisting set of problems in our policing systems, et cetera, where there are issues there. And we know that we have an ethical obligation to try to make our technology work in a way that doesn't encode all of these forms of human bias. But this is a complicated, this is more complicated than simply retraining an algorithm. Because at the end of the day, it does actually require having a much richer sense of who an individual is than their race or their gender or their, the kind of basic profile. that that is going to be used to write these algorithms and, and to apply them. And in that respect, I want to bring this back to anthropology. I actually think. ethnological understandings of the complexity of human life, of the richness of different kinds of cultural systems, of the relativism of certain areas of our lives in terms of everything from aesthetic judgment to social arrangements, kinship systems, etc. All of these things actually are about producing a more complex understanding of our human society, of our human world. And what we need to be able to think about is not just the ethical obligations in the narrow sense of AI, but the ethical obligations in a broader sense to try to find ways in which if we're going to use this new technology, we use it to capture the full complexity of human, of human existence. Which is, which is not something that is the first thing that comes to mind for a computer coder or computer scientist somewhere writing an algorithm for a particular purpose. So I think there's a kind of basic ethical obligation to begin with, but then I'd like to broaden that to make it into a kind of almost anthropological imperative to think very differently about how one uses technology to make judgments about, to interact with, to engage all these different kinds of areas that are going to range pretty quickly across the full totality of everything we do. It's going to be business transactions. It's going to be, we're joking about writing papers for Afro 101, but it's going to be, it's already causing all kinds of crises in the world of the arts and the question of intellectual property and how we think about who owns what data. who is doing what, where agency resides. And of course, agency is always related in that context to, to the rights of creators in the broader world. I don't know if I'm being coherent here, but I think there is a kind of, there is a kind of role for anthropology to play here. And that then leads me to say more broadly that again, and I said this earlier, this is the perfect moment for humanists and social scientists and engineers to begin to talk to each other. and to begin to talk to each other in a way that we really have lost the capacity to do. We need to develop, I'll call it a bilingualism between science and the arts, just to make my point, but it's about really learning to engage in forms of translation that are not just about word for word, but actually fluency. across different worlds that will enable a broader sense of understanding and ultimately respect for other humans. Maybe anthropology has a role to play there.

54:07 Adam Hey, amen, amen to that. And I appreciated your pieces in Scientific American over the years looking at this too, because you have helped raise this set of thinking In this case around AI and ethics, but then also I've seen you make a kind of a similar clarion call for why we need not just a medical scientific revolution, but we need a social scientific revolution to go with that too. Understanding when things are palatable to people, when wouldn't they be? And it's not just about the simple question of do I trust it or distrust it or is mid-journey making it easier or harder for me to make a living as an artist? But I think, I like the way you're saying this here too, is that this broader necessity of understanding the, you know, the broader ethical kind of necessity or imperative of like, how do we take into account a fuller human complexity and design and build towards that versus reducing it to a simple, can a large language model guess the next best word? And that helps me write a term paper, but what is this, how do we thinking about what's the best way to communicate what we're creating as students, as scholars, as artists, as scientists? And also this idea of putting those, the groups that typically may be working in parallel into more conversation with one another, I think is fundamentally important. I really like this point as well, that we have such an opportunity today to help bring those conversations together. I guess I was thinking about, is this something that you are envisioning as, or perhaps it already is, and if it is, forgive my ignorance here, that it's already a mandate that are you implementing this through the Academy of Sciences? Is this something that is on its way to more formalization? Can I sign up to be on a council? That sounds cool. I'm kind of curious about this process in terms of how might we help see this become more and more to fruition of these, bringing these conversations together?

55:50     Dirks

So in one particular domain, it is indeed what we're doing at the Academy. We're, we're setting up a new center for science, technology, and society in which we are beginning by focusing on artificial intelligence and, and the social world. We actually have collaborated with the, with the Arizona State University and Michael Crow is the president up there. Somebody I've known for a long time has made possible funding for some postdocs who are going to be starting at the Academy in September to begin to explore some of these issues in the field of AI. We hope to build with that, build on that, bring in fellows, not just postdocs, but also people who are, who've been in the business, but want to take some time off and think about some of the broader issues. whether it's technology, whether it's issues related to bioethics, for people working in fields related to genetic editing, genetic engineering, I think these issues are incredibly complex. You need to understand some part of the science, but you also need to be able to step away from the lab bench and think more broadly about how do you begin to really, even in a broad sense, understand what the distinctions might be between a medical intervention which is therapeutic and a medical intervention which is enhancement. And of course, all of these questions, whether you're talking about artificial intelligence or CRISPR-Cas9 and genetic editing, they raise questions about what is the human? What is the relationship between the human and the machine? What's the relationship between now the process of human evolution and the capacity to go in and eviscerate some gene or introduce another one in your DNA? chain and change your fundamental human signature. And all of these are vital questions that have become, I think, central to the conduct of science. So for me, the focus at the Academy is to obviously support science, We do it by education. We have a lot of educational programs where we try to excite young people about doing scientific work, give them some resources to do extracurricular work that might then feed into their own, their own studies in a broad sense. We, we administer awards for early career scientists and try to provide often unrestricted money for research. We put on conferences that bring scientists together as well as the public. to talk about recent advances, sometimes very technical, sometimes just about bringing scientific knowledge to the public, as we did, for example, in the early months of the pandemic. And then publications, and we have the International Science Reserve and other postdoctoral fellowships in neuroscience as well. But increasingly, what I'd like to do is to take all of these different activities and think about them in this broader sense that I've been describing to you, which is to say, how do we support science in this fuller sense? In a way, it takes us back to the origins of the academy in the 19th century, when everything was connected. It was before all the specialization that I talked about and that we all know has taken place. We're not going to roll back the specialization, but I do think we can use the academy as a genuine convening space, a kind of neutral, respected, neutral space where we can begin to raise these questions and ultimately help not just inform but infuse science with a broader understanding of what it might do to not only advance the knowledge that it is primarily concerned but do so, as I've said, in a way that really does take on board this kind of public obligation. I'm thinking about this also. We've given different examples, but it's July, and there's a movie coming out about the life of Robert Oppenheimer and Osherwell, and everybody's talking about it and so on. But it makes the point. Oppenheimer was a brilliant physicist. He was also a brilliant administrator. He was able to bring people together to work on different projects, which is why he was appointed to run the Manhattan Project and to basically direct the last years of work on the development of the atom bomb in Los Alamos. But he was also deeply troubled by the fact that while science was working inexorably to develop a greater understanding of what nuclear fission was all about, what it meant, could do, but on the other, that it was doing so in a way that was potentially creating this weapon of mass destruction. And he was tortured by it. And he was a man who was both a scientist and a kind of public figure who did flirt socialism in his early days. And certainly in his circle of acquaintances, had a lot of friends, including a lover at one point who were, if not members of the Communist Party, certainly very sympathetic with And of course, then he was destroyed by J. Edgar Hoover, the result. And in fact, if you follow the movie, it probably makes the argument that, I think, that his contest with Edward Teller, who wanted to develop the hydrogen bomb, which was even more destructive than the original atom bomb, was behind the fact that he was targeted for losing his security clearance and basically painting him as an unpatriotic American. When he was tortured by that, his career was not just disrupted, but he died young and lived a kind of tragic exemplification of both the best of science and the worries about what science can do. And so I take that in some sense as a kind of further illustration That the best, the best way to support science is actually to take all of that complexity on board and make it part of the mission of supporting science itself. And, and anyway, that's what I'm trying to do here at the New York Academy of Sciences.

01:01:45
Adam I love that. I think that's great. And I think it's such an important mission. TAL stands behind you, This Anthro Life. It's great work. And it's also just exciting. I think it's really important that we are at just at this important. Crossroads of today that it does require us as not that science gets bigger, but we are doing more atomic scale things or atomic bomb scale things. But I guess we can say we've been working with pandemics. We're working with now the always, always the threat of nuclear war, but. Again, things like AI technologies and decentralized web and even finance, right? All these pieces mean we're re-channeling technology into what it is that we could do, which could go in a positive direction or less positive direction. And so I think that it's exciting and to me, and it's good to hear and nice to hear. And I think that the listener community will also be on board with this idea too, that we have to bring these conversations together, right? And this is the right time to do it. I just want to, I applaud what you're doing and the kind of work that you're pulling forward and so I'm excited. Also to me, high five having anthropologists helping push forward. The Academy of Science is always cool too. Just a huge thank you for hopping on the podcast today and talking with me and to us listeners. And I'm excited to share the work and just as a side plug too, that the set of career resources that the Academy has is fantastic too. So I'll link up to all this on the show notes, but it's really great to see the conversations you have with different kinds of scientists. There's a marine biologist conversation coming up soon. But then in general too, like both what does it mean to work in STEM and how can you do that? What kind of work can you do in different parts of industry? Postdocs is part of that. So there's a ton of great resources too. I'll be sure to help share those as well. And so anyway, thanks for joining me on the pod today. Is there anything else that's on your mind that we didn't get to talk about or that you want to make sure that is also plugged in here that is sitting with you still?

01:03:24 Dirks

No, I think we've covered it and really appreciate the opportunity of being on the show and talking with you,  Adam, and to go athro. That's an easy slogan for me to make. I guess the last thing I'd say about anthropology, and you know this well from your studies, there have been lots of debates within anthropology, whether it's a science or is it a social science or some would say even a form of humanism. And my point is, it's all of it. And anthropology actually is this extraordinarily capacious discipline. which does encompass the full range of disciplines in a way. So it gives you a kind of perspective that helps explain, well, among other things, why I'm interested in the things that I am and they've, and why you're interested in the things that you are. Good plug for a good plug for anthropology, but, but it's been great talking to you. Awesome. Thanks so much.

01:04:12 Adam

Thanks once again to Dr. Nick for joining me on the podcast today. We delve deep into the world of science, exploring its connection with society, technology, and the human experience. We learn that science is not a solitary endeavor, but a dynamic interplay between disciplines, as well as between science and the public. The importance of public engagement and trust-building took center stage as we discussed the role of social media, filter bubbles, and the need to communicate the non-linear nature of scientific discovery. So I encourage you to take a moment to reflect on how these topics resonate with you. How does science shape our lives and society? How can we foster trust and understanding between scientists and the wider public? And in a world where information is at our fingertips, how do we navigate the fine line between scientific authority and the need for open and diverse knowledge systems? I invite you to share your thoughts and experiences with us in the comments below or by getting in touch over email or on social media. Now, before we go, I want to express my sincere gratitude to each and every one of you for your continued support here of This Anthro Life. Your curiosity and engagement keep us going. And if you enjoyed this episode and you're new, I invite you to subscribe. And if you're a longtime fan, please leave us a review or share this episode with someone you think will love it too. Your feedback really means the world to us and helps us improve our content. And of course, don't forget to join up on the AnthroCurious sub stack blog for additional resources and insights. It is a fantastic way to expand your knowledge and stay connected withThis Anthro Life community. Remember, we are always open to your feedback and suggestions for future episodes, so reach out to us on our website or through our social media, and we really genuinely value your input and want to create content that resonates with you. Once again, thank you so much for joining me today, and until next time, keep exploring, keep questioning, and keep embracing the rich tapestry that is human life. I'm your host  Adam Gamwell, and this is The Anthro Life. Stay curious, friends.