How Science Books Drive Public Discussion
Bruce Lewenstein, Cornell University, March 8, 2002

1. Introduction

Why should we care about books? We live in a "new media" world where we're all using the web, and creating public discussion and dialogue, and putting in the infrastructure for electronic chat rooms, and so on. In that kind of world, what's the purpose of looking at "old fashioned" books?

There are several reasons. The first is that books have clearly been influential in public debate. It's so easy to point to some examples of books that have been influential in science or public issues over the last few generations. We can easily come up with examples like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring or the phenomenon of Stephen Hawking's book, A Brief History of Time. So one reason to study books is to understand: What's going on here? What role have books played in public debate?

Another issue is a more general one about history. I'm trained as a historian. Those of us who are historians don't just do it because it's fun, because we like reading other people's mail-though we do. But we also do it because we think that there is something that you gain by looking at new things with an understanding of old things.

Figure 1. Why studing scienc history matters. Does cold fusion repeat itself?

So, for example: those of you have been following the news know that there's a new claim of tabletop fusion coming out today in Science magazine. As a historian, I created an archive on cold fusion at Cornell 13 years ago, where we looked at not just how the media covered cold fusion, but also general questions about cold fusion, like How did it develop? What were the social issues that led to that development? Figure 1 shows an issue of Time magazine from those days - slightly altered, to show that an almost identical issue could appear this week featuring the new research.

What appears to be a new furor may be very similar to an old furor. I think there is something to be gained by looking back at history.

A third reason for thinking about books is that we traditionally think about books as being carriers of culture. The World Wide Web and other new media are part of culture, but they don't carry culture (although maybe soon they will). Books are where we traditionally turn for culture, and so they're a valuable point of study for understanding ourselves and our culture.

2. Conceptual Models

Finally, I think it's worth studying books because they force us to think about all forms of media. There is something to be gained by thinking about science communication generally. We shouldn't just ask: What are good ways to reach people? We need to ask more theoretical questions. What are the models of science communication? How do we imagine that information flows? We need to ask those questions because rethinking that conceptual model can affect what we consider to be "best practices" (which is what this meeting is all about). We tend to think about science communication as a formal process (Fig. 2). Science happens in the lab. It goes through some meetings and preprints and it is finally published in a formal paper and then it is "science." Only after gets to "science" does it get out to mass media and textbooks and policy documents.

Figure 2. The traditional model of science communication.

From studying the cold fusion case and other instances where the daily processes of science become more easily visible, we have learned that the science communication process is a lot messier (Fig. 3). Stuff happens in the lab and in field work and it doesn't necessarily go through formal publication, but instead goes to email or straight to a museum or (as Hannah Holmes suggested in her presentation at this meeting) straight from a journalist out in the field to a documentary or web site. Science information flows all over the place.

The value of this kind of conceptual approach is to remind us that, as we think about public communication of science, we have to think about it in a more complex way, not as a simple linear process. We have to think about the multiple ways that information is flowing.

Figure 3. The sphere of sience communication. Adapted from Lewistein, B. (1995). From Fax to Facts: Communication in the Cold Fusion Saga. Social Studies of Science, 25 (3), 403-436.

A second conceptual issue is to think about the models of what we are trying to accomplish with public communication:

• Deficit model
• Contextual model
• Lay expertise/lay knowledge model
• Public participation model

The labels I'm using here are slightly different than those used by Susannah Priest and Rick Borchelt in their presentations at this meeting, but the ideas are similar. The traditional deficit model is the idea that if we simply provide information, things will get better. As we've heard over and over at this meeting, such as in Joe Schwarcz's presentation, there is a tremendous need to provide information. There's nothing wrong with the deficit model: we do need to provide information. But that only captures part of the need. The contextual model addresses the issue that there is not a single audience, but in fact there are multiple audiences. We need to think about those audiences in context: For what reason do they need information? In what situation do they need information? This model highlights that we need to provide information in different ways to different groups at different times, to address the contexts in which they use information. Somewhat more controversial is the model of lay knowledge or lay expertise - the idea that sometimes public communication is about communicating ideas from what we would traditionally call "nonexperts" into the research enterprise. For example, AIDS activists and cancer activists have shaped the research agenda by bringing to the table their knowledge and their expertise about what issues are salient. They don't change nature itself, but they change what we know about nature and what we think about nature and where we put our efforts in terms of understanding nature. That's is a different kind of communication setting than a setting of simply providing information to fill a deficit.

The final model is what Susannah Priest called the public opinion model, what Rick Borchelt called the dialogue model, what I call the public participation model. They are all essentially the same thing. As a society, we claim we're interested in this issue of public communication because science is important in an democracy. The key thing about a democracy is public participation in all facets of discussion of public issues. The public participation model of science communication highlights the need to create venues and opportunities for public discussion.

These conceptual models provide a background. When we start talking about books, we are thinking about books in the context of the overall web of communication. We are talking about them in the context of multiple models of public communication of science. So then we can ask questions about what multiple roles might the books be playing?

3. Are Science Books Important?

To understand the role(s) of books, I am looking at the history of science books since World War II. I'm looking both at books within science, such as textbooks and conference proceedings, and more public books, such as bestsellers, Pulitzer Prize winners, and other contributors to public and intellectual debate. In this talk, I'm just looking at the public books.

There are a couple of different ways of identifying books that play a role in public culture. There are the ones that some kind of official presence: they have won an award, a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, etc. Or they have been certified as being popular by virtue of being on one of several best seller lists. Or they fall into a category I call "remembered books," the ones where someone I'm talking with remembers the book and then says "But you're going to include that book aren't you?" These are the books that have become touchstones for us.

Let me start with the Pulitzer Prize winners (Fig. 4).

Figure 4: Science-oriented Pulitzer Prize Books after World War II

In the first 30 years after World War II, there were almost no science books. One book, James Phinney Baxter's Scientists Against Time, published right after the war, was a story about the atomic bomb. William Goetzmann's book, Exploration and Empire, was about exploration of the American west. But beginning with Carl Sagan's Dragons of Eden in 1978, then every year or every other year the Pulitzers begin honoring a science book. They are not all history of science, either. They show up in both the general non-fiction and the history category of the Pulitzers. Clearly something happens in the late 1970s to make science books more central to American culture. Science becomes a part of the general public discussion. Interestingly, that same time period is also about the time of the "science boom." There were some new popular science magazines that started in the late 1970s and early 1980s. There were new science television shows - Nova's first broadcast was in 1973. The science museum industry was booming. All this data suggests that the relationship of science with American culture went through a change in the late 1970s, in which science became a necessary part of any cultural discussion.

The pattern continues in more recent years, with books like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel and John McPhee's Annals of a Former World. Those of us who are science attentive have been reading McPhee for years, but only recently has he received this national award recognition.

Looking at bestsellers, I see a similar pattern. Figure 5 shows data from the weekly New York Times bestseller list.

Figure 5. Number of "science" titles added to New York Times bestseller list.

Although the data shows lots of variation, there is a clear change in the late 1970s. Before then, only rarely did more than 10 new science-oriented books a year become added to the list. But after 1978, only rarely do fewer than 10 science-oriented books get added to the list. More science books being sold. That's another markers to suggest that science is a necessary part of ongoing cultural conversations. The Pulitzer Prize data and the bestseller data suggest that the idea that there are "two cultures" (of science and arts) that don't speak to each other may no longer hold (if it ever did).

To understand this new cultural debate, we need to know more about what specific types of books were appearing on the bestseller lists. There are a least two kinds. First are the books in which "science" appears as a main character. These are the books that are about physics, or astronomy, or biology or so forth. The second set of books are those that I call "public science." These books are about, for example, sex, but they draw on the science of sex. These are the inspirational books that draw on psychological research. Many of the diet, health, fitness, and medicine books draw on scientific research or at least the appearance of scientific research. I don't want to claim that all of these books use science well. As the examples cited in the talk by Joe Schwarcz at this meeting demonstrated, many books that claim to be scientific are not. Nonetheless, it is important for us to see that these "public science" books get some of their credibility precisely because they lay claim to the authority of science. Some people argue that science is not valued in our society. I disagree. These books become bestsellers by claiming to draw on science, which they do because science is respected in the community of ideas. The book data indicates that science actually plays a very important and respected role in general culture.

Figure 6 shows titles from the annual Publishers Weekly bestseller list.

Figure 6: Science-oriented bestsellers after World War II

This list again shows the importance of "public science" topics, such as sex. Consider the two books on human sexuality by Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues, published in the late 1940s and early 1950s. These are not books that anyone would predict would become best sellers, once you get past the title, because they are actually dull, dry academic treatises. But the titles alone seem to have sold a fair number of copies. We also see Sherry Hite's Hite Report and the Masters and Johnson book on Human Sexual Response there. Another "public science" topic is exploration. Many books on the list, such as Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki and Rachel Carson's earlier book, The Sea Around Us, fall into that category. (Carson was a bestselling author ten years before Silent Spring came out.)

Then there are the "grand" books, such as Jacob Brownowski's Ascent of Man or Carl Sagan's Cosmos. These are perhaps the first of the books that we would think of as "science as science" books (not counting Kinsey and Masters and Johnson), books about scientific ideas. It's interesting to note that these "science as science" books, too, appear only in the 1970s. The breakthrough clearly comes in 1980 with Sagan's Cosmos. The TV show of course was tremendously powerful and well known and is partly what drove the sales. But the book itself was also a bestseller -- a bestseller so great that shortly after it was published, Sagan was given a $2 million contract for what would become the novel Contact. At the time, that was the largest advance ever given for a fiction book that was not even in manuscript form. Cosmos marked the moment that something different was clearly going on.

In the "science as science" category, the next big moment was Hawking's A Brief History of Time. Hawking's book is the one that everybody bought but nobody read. He says in the introduction that he left out all the mathematical equations so that he wouldn't lose readers, but the book is still a pretty tough read. It sold 700,000 copies in hardcover in its first year, 400,000 copies in its second year. That's just in hardcover. It sets a new sort of expectation about what books can accomplish. There are changes in what counts as a bestseller during this period, so it appears that the ranking of science books goes down. But Hawking's book opens up the book publishing world - and thus the broader cultural world - to science. After it appears, science books get entire aisles in the book store, agents go seeking authors like Hannah Holmes to write books about engaging in science.

All of this evidence suggest that books have played a role in general American culture. Some of the evidence shows that books are even more important in recent years than they were in an earlier time, even with all the changes in media.

4. How are Science Books Important?

Books exercise their cultural importance by contributing to public discussion in four areas.

First, books are important to the intellectual development of science itself. Even though some of the bestselling or prize-winning books are targeted to the public, they are also targeted to the scientific community or they play a role within the scientific community. That should not surprise us, given the conceptual understanding that the "sphere of science communication" gives us, which stresses the feedback among different forms of communication and the loops that connect different types of communication.

The second role that books play is to recruit people into science. This function is not unlike the goal of many of the websites or community-based projects that have been featured at this meeting. That makes sense, because if books are part of general cultural discussion, then the functions of books should be similar to the functions of other activities within the culture.

The third role is one that cannot easily be expressed in English. The French call it culture scientifique, the idea of everyday culture as infused with science. If we say "a scientific culture" in English, it doesn't carry the same meaning that it seems to carry in the French-speaking countries. The idea is that books show the integration of science and culture in our everyday life.

The final role is one of public debate, in which books are the location or the forum in which public issues can be discussed.

A. Intellectual development of science itself

For an example of how a prize-winning book contributes to science itself, consider E.O. Wilson's Sociobiology. This book was partly intended for the science attentive public, elite intellectual community. But it was also an argument within science itself. It was Wilson's full, complete statement of the sociobiology program. It was intended for use within the scientific community as a statement of that program. In a very real sense, it pulled that field together, making explicit some of the connections and ideas that had previously existed only in separate papers or only in specialist communities. Wilson's book made the new field concrete..

A similar function was played by one of the textbooks I've looked at, James Watson's Molecular Biology of the Gene, published in 1965. That book pulled together the field of molecular biology, which had not existed before. Whole courses were created to teach that textbook. In the same way, courses were suddenly created called "Sociobiology," based on Wilson's book, pulling together the field in a way that had not been true before. Yet, especially because of Wilson's the last chapter on humans, the book also became part of a general public discussion about the nature of who we are.

Another example is Joseph Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason. The book is a key text within artificial intelligence. At the same time, it is also part of the general discussion about the role of computers in society, the workings of the human mind, and all those related topics.

James Gleick's Chaos is interesting because it also seems to serve this intellectual role within science, even though it was written as popular science book. It was just another journalist going out and writing a book that would explain some area of science. And yet the book served the function of pulling that field together, the field of complexity and chaos, in a way that it had not previously been pulled together. If you look at some of the more recent books that are histories of the fields of chaos or complexity, they will cite Gleick's book as being one of the things that pulled all those people together, that made them suddenly realize that they were all talking to each other. The public discussion shaped the intellectual discussion as well - through the medium of books.

B. Recruitment

Recruitment books pull people into science. These are books that people cite as "Hey, the reason I'm a scientist is because I read that book." Paul De Kruif's Microbe Hunters is the epitome of these books (although it was published a generation before the period I'm considering, it continued its powerful pull for many years). It is astonishing how freqeuntly that books appears in the memories (and sometimes memoirs) of senior scientists who became biologists in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s - they read Microbe Hunters and that's what turned them on.

James Watson's Double Helix is a very different kind of book, but served much of the same purpose in the 1960s, 1970s, and maybe even the 1980s. If you look at the people who are today at the forefront of biotechnology or genomics, many of them read that book as graduate students and said "Yeah, That is the kind of scientist I want to be! I get to make a Nobel Prize-winning discovery, and then I get to go play tennis, and then I get to go get the girls." That sounded like a cool kind of career.

More recently, particularly in astronomy or physics, you get people for whom Cosmos (either the TV show or the book) served the same function. These are often people who were so turned on by the TV show that they went out and got the book. Cosmos has had the same kind of recruiting power as the De Kruif and Watson books: "Why are you an astrophysicist or an astronomer?" "Because I saw Carl Sagan's Cosmos" or "I read Cosmos."

C. Culture scientifique

The third role of books is this culture scientique idea. This is the idea that you are expected to have read some particular books if you want to call yourself "cultured." The books by Isaac Asimov and Stephen Jay Gould, or Bronowski's book, are "required reading" in cultured circles (although the list does change over time - Asimov is probably less read now than he was during his lifetime). You can't consider yourself a cultured person if you haven't read the essays of Lewis Thomas about medicine, or more recently Dava Sobel's Longitude. Not all of these books have tremendous amounts of "science" in them - Thomas's essays are as much about philosophical approaches to illness as they are explanation of disease, and Sobel's book is more adventure story than science explanation. But you are "expected" (in some circles) to have read those books. Among the "science attentive" public, you are expected to have seen the excerpts of these sorts of books in the New Yorker.

Asimov is an interesting case in this category. Asimov is actually best known for is his science fiction books. Of his 400-plus books, Amazon.com lists about 285 of them. His Foundation series is first, and it ranks about 9,700 - in the top 10,000 items on Amazon.com. Some of his nonfiction books rank in the top 50,000, but they tend to be his books about the Bible or about bawdy limericks (he had range!). The first of his nonfiction science-oriented books is Atoms: A Journey Across the Subatomic Cosmos. That book ranks about 50,000 on the list. It's the 26th of his books on the list, so it's about 10 percent of the way down.

Asimov is also interesting because he reflects the commitment to a scientific worldview that is often at the core of these culture scientifique books. To illustrate, let me use a personal example: In the late 1980s, I wrote an op-ed piece for The Scientist, a weekly newspaper for scientists, in which I was talking about what I called the "arrogance of pop science." I was addressing the question of who should popular science be directed towards. I was arguing that a lot of the popular science magazines that had been produced at that time, and that by then were in trouble (many of them had failed or been sold to new owners), had failed not because they aren't pretty, but because they were speaking from the scientific point of view. They were not starting where audiences were, which was a concern about their personal situations or their personal interests or their personal diseases. Too many of the magazines, I argued, were stuck in an elitist scientific point of view. Asimov got a little annoyed at that, and he wrote a letter to the editor. I'm proud that I generated a letter to the editor by Isaac Asimov. He said: I don't understand what this Lewenstein nut is saying. Because he is saying that if people are stupid, then I need to start where they are. That doesn't make sense. "By Newton," he thundered (not "by God," but "by Newton"), "I'd rather be arrogant than stupid."

D. Public Debate

The final role is the role of public debate or public opinion. Books do not just provide information, nor do they just excite people, but some of them are in fact making arguments. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring is the most obvious example. That book made an argument about chemicals in our society, and is widely cited as being the founding document of the environmental movement. The argument did not go uncontested. Carson's book was not attacked just by chemical companies, it was attacked by science writers. In 1963, a well known science writer named Lawrence Lessig won the American Chemical Society's Grady-Stack Award (for excellence in science journalism). As part of his award speech, he called Carson's book "highly emotional with a biased thesis." Much of his talk was an attack on Silent Spring. This example demonstrates the degree to which there was an argument which many people felt they needed to take up.

Similarly, Evelyn Fox Keller's The Feeling for the Organism, a biography of Barbara McClintock, was part of a discussion about the nature of science and whether feminine science was somehow different than masculine science. Did McClintock do science differently? Did she have some kind of female connection with her materials that males didn't have? Fox Kellery was making an argument, one that's part of an ongoing argument. Lots of people have criticized some of the technical details of Fox Keller's book, but for our purposes the important point is that she was engaging in public discussion of a contemporary issue. Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's book on The Bell Curve is similar: many people will argue with the science in it, they will argue about whether it properly reports research findings or interprets data correctly. But the point is that it became a topic of discussion. The Bell Curve was the kind of book where there were public debates, op-ed pieces, magazine pieces, newspapers articles that cited it, policy discussions and so forth. It's an example of how books can play a role in public discussion.

5. Conclusion

Books drive public discussion, most simply, because they are part of the media mix that permeates our culture. While we focus on the World Wide Web and other new media because of their freshness, we can't forget that there are lots of other pieces in the sphere of science communication; books are there. More deeply, books drive public discussion because of the multiple roles they play in providing information, engaging lay expertise, and contributing to public discussion.

Books bring new perspectives into science. As we think about the functions of public communication of science and technology, we need to remember examples like Chaos, the book in which the journalist James Gleick pulls together an intellectual field in a way that hadn't been done before. We need to think about the stimulating of discussion - not just making you feel good the way a Lewis Thomas book did, but making you argue with a book in the way the Herrnstein and Murray book did. That is a role that books can play. That role highlights the public participation or public opinion model.

Ultimately, books create the culture that we live in. They are elements both of the scientific culture and of our more general culture. By looking at them we can actually see the ways in which science and modern culture are not separate but are -- to use a jargon word from the sociology of science -- co-produced. Neither science nor society exists without the other one. Books provide an example of how that interaction exists in a real, material way. If we think about the multiple ways that books demonstrate the interaction of science and society, then we can also see the ways in which the other activities that participants in the "Best Practices for the Communication of Science and Technology to the Public" meeting are engaging are contributing not just to solving some particular problem, but in fact are serving to create a scientific culture, a culture scientifique.