Scientists, in the popular imagination, are oddballs. A chemist or geologist may be a genius, it is generally agreed, but the heightened mental acuity comes at great social and emotional cost, rendering the scientist a misfit, a weirdo, a robot in human clothing. This perception troubles me.
In a 50-year career spent writing about science, I have interviewed hundreds of scientists, from young postdocs to elderly laboratory directors, including several Nobel Prize winners. None of them fit within the confines of the stereotype. True, a few proved obnoxious, even insufferable, but not in a stereotypical way. So why do I continue to bump into this cliché wherever I go?
The following statement, for example, jumped out at me from a New York Times obituary for slain Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Nuno Loureiro: “Far from the stereotypical scientist holed up in his lab with little to say to the outside world, Dr. Loureiro was known for being warm, down to earth—even stylish.” Apparently such attributes are so out of place in the personality of a scientist as to merit special mention.
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Recently a group of high school physics teachers joined me via Zoom for a discussion of two of my books. The first question on their prepared list was, “How are the people who made big contributions to science similar to and different from ‘normal’ people?” Actor Jim Parsons, who played string theorist Sheldon Cooper in nearly 300 episodes of CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory between 2007 and 2019, won four Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe for his portrayal of the archetypal socially inept scientist. Children asked to create a picture of a scientist most often draw a white man wearing a lab coat and glasses, Marie Curie and George Washington Carver notwithstanding.
These skewed ideas about scientists are pernicious.
I’m concerned that these skewed ideas about scientists are not just laughable and inaccurate but pernicious. I fear they worsen societal attitudes toward the entire scientific enterprise. And they prevent young students from seeing science as a future that might include them.
The stereotype of a scientist thrives on the relative rarity of real scientists. According to the latest available statistics from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, approximately nine million individuals worldwide engage in scientific research. They are thus outnumbered 1,000 to one by other people. The odds of a person’s meeting a scientist, slim to begin with, contract further as a result of scientists’ tendency to congregate in settings with specialized equipment and limited access, such as labs at NASA and CERN, where they are further insulated from nonscientists.
As a science writer, I gain entry into many of those protected spaces. But if I’d been a sports reporter or a foreign correspondent, how could I have discovered what the practice of science looks like? I doubt I would have guessed the variety of activities that the phrase “doing research” may signify—or the amount of joy and fun derived from those activities.
Some scientists, aware of their image problem, have suggested that all recipients of federal grant money be required to explain their research to taxpayers, stipulating how the funds are spent and outlining the predicted usefulness of their projects. Not every scientist, I would argue, is capable of effective communication with the wider public. Demanding it of all of them seems unfair and unrealistic. Those who do have the skills, however, can use them to tremendous effect. Astronomers in a certain age cohort invariably tell me that their interest in the subject was aroused by Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage series, which debuted on public television in 1980. (Sagan himself enjoyed watching basketball.)
The steps of the so-called scientific method that many of us are taught in elementary or middle school suggest that scientists operate according to strict rules or recipes. As they themselves admit, however, they are guided primarily by their own curiosity. Their explorations feel creative to them the way painting or sculpting feels to an artist. That’s not to say they have no other creative outlets or hobbies; rather science is one of them. As editor of Scientific American’s Meter poetry column, I often receive poems from scientists who are moved to verse by some experience in their work. This trend is hardly new: Galileo wrote poetry. So did James Clerk Maxwell, who developed the theory of electromagnetism. In the 1920s and 1930s the Harvard College Observatory employed enough talented musicians to constitute an orchestra. The word I hear most often from scientists speaking candidly about their research—the word most at odds with the prevailing stereotype—is “passion.”
“Passion” came up memorably toward the end of a roundtable discussion held in Stockholm’s Royal Palace during the week the 2023 Nobel Prizes were awarded. Anne L’Huillier, one of that year’s three physics laureates, reached for a word to describe a scientist’s inner drive. “This is something that passionates you,” she said, inadvertently inventing a verb to evoke all the fascination, motivation, obstinacy and zeal that had carried her through 40 years of studies in attosecond science—work to which she was eager to return, she added, as soon as all the fuss over the prize had died down.
Further talk around the same roundtable revealed that L’Huillier and Katalin Karikó, one of two winners of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, were both long married and both mothers—even though family devotion, as is well known, plays no acknowledged role in the life of a stereotypical scientist.
Drew Weissman, Karikó’s collaborator and co-Nobelist for mRNA discoveries leading to COVID-19 vaccines, pointed out that the participation of his wife and daughter in the phase 3 trials of those vaccines became a powerful tool against vaccine hesitancy in their community. When Mrs. Weissman (aka psychologist Mary Ellen Weissman) attended church services and community meetings where neighbors aired fears born of conspiracy theories, she would ask, “Do you think my husband would have his daughter and his wife take a vaccine that would make them sterile?” No, of course not.
But now that the efficacy of all vaccines is questioned by government authorities, now that promising research on new mRNA vaccines has been halted—and considering the broad reach of the scientist stereotype—I have to wonder how many people might answer Mary Ellen Weissman’s rhetorical question in the affirmative. Exposing one’s spouse or offspring to mortal danger sounds like just the kind of thing a mad scientist would do.