Science and Showbiz

...Margaret Mead said that fathers spend too much time taking care of babies for the good of civilization...

...In the "highly competitive struggle for recognition" among peers there are easily identifiable markers of success: citations of the scientist's work, awards, job offers, appointments to professional committees, and other honors...

...Paul Erlich, for example, took the position that overpopulation was the main environmental problem...

...In part this may be a reflection of the author's research materials (Time, Vogue, and Mademoiselle magazines...

...Goodell notes that Mead reacts to criticism with enormous productivity, whereas Linus Pauling has apparently surrounded himself with admiring students and staff...

...The views of both no matter how unrelated to their areas of expertise benefit from society's general trust in the validity of their enterprise...

...She appears content with recording the public personalities of a group of supposedly thoughtful individuals who can say little more than that they are suspicious and surprised by their celebrity...

...The Visible Scientists only makes for mildly interesting bedside reading...

...There is some overlap, as Goodell sees it, between the social position of the majority of scientists and the clergy...

...Yet the visible scientists somehow remain immune to such criticisms either by ignoring them or overwhelming them with a deluge of replies...

...Goodell suggests that the visible scientists may help rid the layman of his misconceptions: "Flamboyant, passionate, hyperbolic, political, they defy audiences to think of them as coolly objective, unbiased, technical...

...According to Goodell, the problem for the scientist aspiring to visibility is to be found in the profession's comparatively clearly articulated "norms of behavior...

...He is portrayed as an excessively suspicious man who manipulates the press to further his findings on the in-heritability of IQ among blacks findings that would otherwise not merit serious review...

...Skinner, and Paul Erlich...

...William Shockley is this book's sole villain...

...By contrast, Goodell lauds her other visible scientists, who get press attention without asking and pursue less conservative causes...

...The model scientist shall channel all his enthusiasm into his research, shall not stray from his field, shall never expose dissension and controversy, shall always publish in technical journals before popular ones, and shall be politically moderate...

...But, inexcusably, it is also the case because she does not really execute any argument very thoroughly...

...Colleagues become skeptical if not openly hostile, believing publicity can only distort or sensationalize...

...The chemist's researchers, for instance, are staunch defenders of his Vitamin C theories...

...This mixture may be, and very often is, spiced with renegade tendencies: Barry Commoner claims he has been involved in every Left-wing political activity in the academic world, and Linus Pauling has been so entrenched in pacifist politics that Cal Tech would have fired him were it not for his tenure...

...It is too superficial and breezy...

...Finally, and above all, you must be unpretentiously charismatic, like Carl Sagan...

...There are, Goodell tells us, four ingredients essential to this dish...

...Explaining the complex processes by which men use the media so that both they and their knowledge reach a mass audience is no doubt a difficult task And one, unhappily, that Rae Goodell does not seem up to...

...He further sees his function as bringing people into personal contact with science and, reports the author, is "a master of the art of the minilecture, a quick and painless injection of education that can be administered between quips on the Johnny Carson show...

...in this respect, while it is helpful but not vital to have received a Nobel Prize, like Linus Pauling, academic tenure is the rock-bottom minimum...

...Mead relates that at professional gatherings, some anthropologists snidely tell her that their wives read her articles in women's magazines...

...For Goodell, they therefore become "heros and antiheros of a technological and electronic age" who are willing to disregard professional boundaries to battle against cultural tradition or governmental policy...

...The result is not merely a series of portraits but also a sort of cookbook, containing a recipe for making a well-adapted, media-conscious scientist...

...Third, you must have a creditable reputation...

...Reviewed by David Lipset Relations between contemporary American scientists and the press particularly televisionforms the central subject of Rae Goodell's study, The Visible Scientists...

...Goodell observes that Sagan, always dressed in a turtleneck when popularizing astronomy, believes it his duty to promulgate scientific thinking in the face of "the absence of critical thinking...

...Second, you must be talkative, clear and quotable...

...What motivates the visible scientist is a sense of mission combined with an ambivalent, albeit narcissistic, love of the limelight...

...Concluding in homage, the author asserts that we too must cherish these men and women because they best represent what we ought to know about the human part of the scientific endeavor...

...The author, an assistant professor of Science Writing at MIT, spent five years sifting through popular media materials and interviewing such conspicuous scientists as Linus Pauling, Barry Commoner, Margaret Mead, Carl Sagan, William Shockley, B.F...

...First, you must have a proselytizer's taste for controversy...

...Given these norms, venturing forth into the public eye is a dangerous business for a scientist...

...The only difference is that where the opinions of clergymen are sanctified by God, those of scientists derive their invincibility from the widespread belief in their objectivity...