Photo by Daniel Andor

Natural Selections: What is the Center for Science and Media and what is ScienCentral?

Dr. Eliene Aungenbraun (EA): The Center for Science and Media (CSM) is a non-profit organization devoted to improving communications between scientists and the public. It basically acts as an incubator or fiscal sponsor for science communication projects. For example, we are the fiscal sponsor for a stem cell documentary done by a former Dateline producer. We have another project which is to help young scientists make career decisions. It is a product on PhDs.org to help students figure out which graduate schools will be better for them based on other graduate students’ and postdocs’ ratings of the institutions.

ScienCentral is nominally a for-profit company, but its main focus is really educational. Our primary project is the ABC News project where we make 90-second long science pieces for ABC to distribute to all of its 200 local affiliates across the US. ScienCentral is also involved in producing many science museum projects and documentaries. Personally, I am very interested in science career information. We have done a whole bunch of videos on science careers, and many educational videos.

NS: You are a reformed scientist. Can you tell us something about your background?

EA: I went to medical school originally with the idea of either being a surgeon or a medical illustrator. I demonstrated no tremendous skill at diagnosing and tremendous skill with vomiting, so it wasn’t a good thing for me to be a physician. I decided to be a medical illustrator, which I did for many, many years. Then, I decided it wasn’t intellectually challenging enough just to illustrate complicated things, so I went to graduate school at Columbia and got my Ph.D. in Biology where I worked for a man whom I admired very, very much. Later, during the first year of my postdoc at Johns Hopkins, he committed suicide in the lab. Here’s a guy who studied the brain all his life, and he was depressed, and it was his brain that killed him. I decided I wanted to go into something that was bigger than a single experiment, bigger than a single lab, and that’s when I decided to go into science policy or science communication.

I spent a year in a science museum, and then I became an AAAS science policy fellow in Washington, DC for two years. I got on a project and did some really nice social science research. Next, I tried to figure out what to do since I was really interested in policy and consulting. I went on an interview with McKinsey & Company. It was at that moment that I realized the thing I was really good at was science communications. I had an opportunity to start this company, ScienCentral with a business partner who is a famous journalist. We started it, and we are very fortunate. We raised money and did some good social science research and put it to use. We did market research to determine whether local newscasts would take our science news. We interviewed 150 news directors about what it would take to get our stuff onto local news. We started the company in 1996, and it took us until 1998 to be on the air. In 1999, we started working with ABC News. So it took from 1996 to 1999 to bring the project to where we wanted it to be. Long story.

NS: Scientists usually spend many hours working in the lab and somehow are out of touch with reality. What do you think is the key for creating a new career from zero if you have spent so many years as a lab worker?

EA: The real honest answer is that the longer you spend time in science—if it’s not what you want to do—the worse off you will be when you want to get into something else. On the other hand, almost everything you’re learning how to do now, even if you stay in science, is not actually what you’re going to do on a day-to-day basis. You talk to the person running your lab, and he/she spends most of the time in fund raising, human resources, budget, analysis of the things that could go wrong, and hence is left with very little time in the lab. They aren’t really trained for that. No matter what you want to do, if you can somehow get yourself business courses or accounting courses, you’ll be glad of it.

I guess the other thing is that if you’re interested in writing, if you’re interested in television, there aren’t a lot of jobs in science communications. Most people can find some skill that they can leverage into a career in science communications. There are PIO [Public Information Officer] jobs all over the place, you can work for non-profit organizations that often need help with communications. Drug companies and other companies need help in two or three different areas in which communication is important. For example, venture capital investment firms often send scientists to investigate if [a proposal is] scientifically going to work, and then you have to write up your results in a way that can be understood by people that don’t know the science very well. The second thing that drug companies need is press release writers. They use science writers in Web or advertisement campaigns.

NS: You got more than three million Americans watching weekly science stories. How do you manage to capture people’s attention?

EA: Sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll. You really want to appeal to people’s lives. Even scientists, when you ask who watches the local news, a lot of people watch the weather and sports. It is the salient things of day to day life that matter, and it will translate across mass media

NS: Mass media live by their rules. How can scientists benefit from knowing these rules?

EA: It is a really good question. Rules are going to change every year. This is one of the things that the scientific community does the worst. We don’t follow popular culture as much as we should. You will find more opera buffs at Rockefeller University than in the general population. You will find people that are really engaged in certain parts of arts and culture, but not engaged in the broader, more popular, mainstream culture. I am sure more people here read Science than People magazine. But in the general population, it is otherwise. Carl Sagan who popularized science, was derided by a lot of scientists. We need to accept the science of communication where people don’t learn things from a single source, and they don’t learn things the first time they encounter it. Scientists have to be aware of, and embrace popular culture.

NS: How do you get the beginning of a story? Tell us something about your advisors.

EA: We basically get our science news from several sources. One is peer reviewed journals—usually a week or so before publication—sent to all science journalists who have agreed to be on the embargo press release list. The second way we get information is through PIOs, like Joe Bonner here [at Rockefeller], and in many cases from individual scientists. They would call us and say “we’ve got a great story,” maybe once or twice a year. We want those stories. We’ve done a number of Rockefeller stories.

We also have science advisors. These are people that we hope to have at our beck and call and we hope not to abuse them. We ask them about stories that are current, either from published peer review journals or sometimes from a published peer reviewed meeting. In a rare case, we might ask a scientist who has done a large body of peer reviewed research. We might feature an angle to what they’re doing that is not necessarily peer reviewed.

NS: Science news takes longer than other news. What’s the goal of broadcasting science news?

EA: Our goal is to reach everybody, whatever their education level. Most Americans watch local news. Most Americans don’t get Ph.D.s, they don’t understand and they don’t care about science. For example, most people who are not born in the United States don’t care about baseball or American football. They think about it, only during the season of the year when everybody is talking about it, during the World Series or the Superbowl. For most people, that’s the way it is with science. When a major health or science story comes out, they may think about it. For us, the goal is to put it in front of people and get them to think about science at least a little bit every single day, with the theory that if you saw as many scientists on television as you saw basketball, football, or baseball players, scientists would not seem strange or scary, or it might even be that you want your kid to become a scientist.

Interview and transcription by Manuel Castellano-Muñoz and Revathy Uthaiah Chottekalapanda.