The inpsired finalists of the Google Science Fair may provide valuable lessons for practising scientists
What questions would the public choose to invest scientific time and resources in, if given the chance to shape research policy? This is an old and largely unanswered question. Indeed, it is one that many members of the scientific community go out of their way to avoid testing. It is also a question I had a chance to think about recently, as a judge at the Google Science Fair.
This Science Fair wasn't the parade of vinegar-based volcano models you might imagine. It was an astonishing display of inventive science. One of the projects had already been patented. Chatting with the finalists as part of the judging process, the first thing I asked was what had inspired them? Many seemed surprised by this question. I think they were expecting to talk about the scientific work they'd done to develop the idea, not its inception. But they all had a story.
Several were prompted by illness in the family, some had political and social concerns they wanted to address. Luke has a friend who loves building robots but struggles with programming, so he devised an application that helps robots understand commands written in plain English.
Lauren was sitting in her local doctor's office, and read a story about a lawsuit against fast food companies for not informing customers about carcinogens in grilled chicken. Later, at home, she watched her mother cook and devised a beautifully simple project based on marinades to address the problem.
Vighnesh was playing in his school covers band and was surprised to discover there wasn't a program for transcribing music, so he wrote one (which he hopes will have applications for seismology, speech recognition and cancer detection).
Harine was visiting her grandparents' village in India, where she met children struggling to do their homework because the energy supply was too unreliable for decent lighting, and felt compelled to do something to help.
Dora read an article in Scientific American about memory loss, which she coupled with her personal love of the movie The Notebook as inspiration for developing an aid for facial recognition.
Matthew loves sailing. Daniel adores trains. Christopher's mother works in an airport, helping people with visual impairments. He'd started to think about how he could help solve some of the problems she encountered. When he bugged her with his ideas, she gave him an ultimatum: either he did something about it, or he would have to tidy his room.
You can learn about the projects and watch a video about the people behind them on the Science Fair blog.
The editor of Nature, Peter Campbell, speaking at an event on research impact at Imperial College earlier this month, pointed out that scientists are routinely inspired by things outside their professional community. This is exactly what these teens were doing, albeit in a slightly different social sphere from that of the majority of the senior academics who define our research agenda.
I should note that one of the finalists, Michelle, drew inspiration largely from peer-reviewed papers. I don't think there is anything wrong with professional scientists doing this either. Science is often a long-term and specialised business. Sometimes projects have to come from other ones, and are by their nature reasonably esoteric. Michelle attends what sounds like an incredible school: one that encourages students to take an interest in cutting edge research, where 14-year-olds regularly stand around chatting about the latest edition of Nature. It was as heartening to hear her talk about research as it was to hear the others rave about their hobbies, friends, family and favourite movies.
To return to my initial question of what science the public would pursue, given the chance, the teens I met at Google are not "the public". They are finalists in an international competition, truly extraordinary people. I'm not sure we can describe any schoolchildren as "the public", though. They might not be professional scientists, but as they undergo the early stages of scientific training in school, they are asked to engage with science in a way most adults are not.
It is perhaps best to think of schoolchildren as holding a liminal position with respect to science and the rest of society. They are not quite inside the scientific community or squarely outside it either. They are both science and "the public", and they are neither of these things, yet. Their lives could go in a range of directions.
Arguably, their occupying this midway position is why the Google Science Fair projects were so inventive. So what can we do to further this sort of liminality in grownup science? How can we extend the social spheres of our professional scientists, especially those who define the research agenda, so they might draw inspiration more effectively from the diversity of publics that fund them?
How can we keep our scientists social, and thereby enrich and extend their work?
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2011/jul/15/everyday-inspiration-google-science-fair
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