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5 OCTOBER 2012 VOL 338 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org 40

LETTERSedited by Jennifer Sills

LETTERS I BOOKS I POLICY FORUM I EDUCATION FORUM I PERSPECTIVES

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NextGen Speaks

RECENTLY, AT THE LONDON 2012 OLYMPIC Games, a famous Austrian swimmer found

a creative explanation for his moderate

success: He argued that intelli-

gent athletes have a disad-

vantage in competitions

because they tend to think

too much. In an attempt to

prove his claim, he pointed

to an intelligent alpine skier

who only won four World Cup

races and an—in his opinion—

rather unintelligent one who won more than

50. This might be an extreme example, but

we encounter causal oversimplifi cation and

faulty generalizations so often in our daily

lives that we barely notice them anymore.

What makes matters worse is that politicians

throughout the world—be it intentional or

not—use logical fallacies as tools to justify

unmoral actions and gain votes, inciting rac-

ism, sexism, and fear as collateral dam-

age along the way. Their success is based

on the lack of a basic understanding of

logical fallacies and critical thinking.

Much more than from a specific scien-

tifi c concept, our society would benefi t from

knowledge of (and training in) scientifi c rea-

soning. The Austrian swimmer—although

apparently hindered by his intelligence—

managed to win 34 medals at major events

throughout his very successful career.RUDOLF GRISS

Laboratory of Protein Engineering, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, CH-1015, Switzerland. E-mail: rudolf.griss@epfl .ch

I WISH EVERY NON-SCIENTIST UNDERSTOOD

[that]…. [c]arbon markets are our best cli-

mate policy alternative because (through the

availability of carbon offsets) they create

options for lowest-cost climate change miti-

gation…. The fact that carbon offsetting can

be good seems to have been lost in an ideo-

logical debate about devel-

opment justice, achieving

emissions reductions in

established industries, and

the blind pursuit of gover-

nance rigor…. Scientifi c per-

spectives have been largely over-

looked. We need offsets that contribute to

genuine sustainable outcomes, but we also

need to make progress on climate change

mitigation, and offsets enable a more eco-

nomically palatable transition.PAUL DARGUSCH

School of Geography Planning and Environmental Manage-ment, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Aus-tralia. E-mail: [email protected]

I AM AN ENVIRONMENTAL TOXICOLOGIST, and I wish that people understood the con-

cepts of hazard and risk and the differences

between the two. Chemicals are

hazardous—even things we

might think of as benign or

“natural”—but they only

cause a problem when they

reach a concentration that is

associated with a hazard. Risk

[is a measure of both] hazard and

exposure. I am frustrated by news and social

media outlets that incite fear of “hazardous

chemicals” in the general public without

ever considering the level to which exposure

is occurring.KATHERINE COADY

The Dow Chemical Company, Midland, MI 48674, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

…NUMEROUS RECENT EXAMPLES OF RAPID phenotypic evolution in wild populations,

occurring over the span of just a few gen-

erations, have taught modern biologists that

evolutionary change is something we can

often observe directly. Yet the average non-

scientist (perhaps even the average non-

biologist) thinks that evolution can only

Results: Big IdeasIn July, we asked young scientists to describe the one big idea in their fi eld that they wish every non-scientist understood.

We heard from nearly 200 readers. A sample of the best responses can be found below. To allow for as many voices as possible, in some cases we have printed excerpts of longer submissions. To read the complete versions, as well as many more, go to http://scim.ag/NextGen4Results.

Submit Now: Experiments in GoverningAdd your voice to Science! Our new NextGen VOICES survey is now open:

You’ve just been elected to your nation’s highest offi ce! In your inaugural address, announce the biggest challenge facing your country today and how you will use science to address it.

To submit, go to http://scim.ag/NextGen5

Deadline for submissions is 16 November. A selection of the best responses will be published in the 4 January 2013 issue of Science. Submissions should be 250 words or less. Anonymous submissions will not be considered. Please submit only once.

NextGenVOICES

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www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 338 5 OCTOBER 2012 41

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Microbiota and cancer

Neurobiology Prize Essay

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crawl through the millennia at a

pace that is slower than anything

humans can easily imagine. This

mindset allows many to safely

ignore evolution, or, worse,

reject it entirely.... [T]he misun-

derstanding that evolution occurs

primarily on a geologic time scale

has impeded societal endeavors

such as human medicine, harvest

of natural resources, and con-

servation efforts. But times are

changing. Physicians are updat-

ing antibiotic dosage suggestions to curb

the evolution of drug-resistant patho-

gens. Fisheries management agencies

are applying life history

theory to effectively

manage wild stock.

Conservation groups are

realizing the importance of

conserving genetic varia-

tion in threatened species….

A public grasp of one of the big-

gest ideas in contemporary evolutionary

biology is within reach.STEPHEN P. DE LISLE

Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Univer-sity of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S 3B2, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]

[I WISH EVERY NON-SCIENTIST UNDERSTOOD] the immunology underlying vaccines. It

frustrates me to no end that available, effec-

tive inventions to combat disease

aren’t always used due to media

reporting and mass hysteria.

If the public and media net-

works fully understood the

science behind vaccines,

preventable deaths could be

avoided.

ADITI HALDER

University of Queensland, St. Lucia, QLD 4067, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]

I WISH THE PUBLIC UNDERSTOOD THE ENDO-symbiotic theory. In realizing that mitochon-

dria have a radically different genome than

what exists in our nuclear DNA,

one has to grapple with a star-

tling idea: Life as we know

it would not exist without

these small organelles, once

mere foreign bodies inside our

single-celled ancestors. For

all our arrogance, humans are not

independent from other life on this planet; the

story of the natural world is not only about the

struggle of individual species but about the

relationships between them. Understanding

our interconnectedness provides plenty of

food for thought—and thoughtful citizens

make thoughtful stewards.JILLIAN WALKER

Department of Biological Sciences, California State Polytech-nic University, Pomona, CA 91768, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

I WORK IN THE FIELD of medical genetics

and genetic counsel-

ing, an area where the

contact with the non-

scientific public is very

intense. It would be great if we could bet-

ter explain concepts related to risk of recur-

rence, recessive inheritance, and de novo

mutations…. Sometimes it is very diffi cult to

alleviate the sense of guilt that parents of mal-

formed children experience….

EDUARDO PREUSSER DE MATTOS

Department of Genetics, Genetics and Molecular Biology Graduate Program, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, 91501-970, Brazil. E-mail: [email protected]

…THE IDEA OF EVER-increasing complexity is

rooted in a strong adher-

ence to the old Aristotelean

world view of hierarchical

classifi cation of living things, which still

permeates our everyday thinking. But in

this case, it is time to let it go. The past two

decades provided plenty of evidence that

the endless variety of forms surrounding

us is the product of just a handful of sig-

naling pathways and gene regulatory mod-

ules, which are used iteratively over and

over during development. Just as the imag-

inative combination of a limited number

of Lego bricks can create a dazzling array

of forms, so can changes in the regulation

of key genes create new pigmentation pat-

terns, new appendages or new behaviors.

If people came to terms with this concept,

most likely they would accept more readily

our place in nature as just one branch on the

Tree of Life…. MÁTÉ VARGA

Department of Genetics, Eötvös Loránd University, Buda-pest, H-1117, Hungary. E-mail: [email protected]

[ I WISH NON-SCIENTISTS understood] the idea that one

of the biggest threats to pub-

lic health is the rise in the

drug-resistant pathogens.

Due to increased global

trade and travels, these patho-

gens can spread easily. Our global

research system is necessary and timely. We

never know when local problems and solu-

tions may become global, and every part of

the world has a contribution to make.PATRICK KOBINA ARTHUR

Department of Biochemistry, Cell and Molecular Biol-ogy, University of Ghana, Legon-Accra, Ghana. E-mail: [email protected]

…I WORK WITH DIFFERENT SPECIES OF fungi, many of which are pathogens.…I wish

more people, non-scientists as well as some

prominent scientists, understood that organ-

isms that cause disease are defi ned as patho-

gens only in relation to the organisms they

affect.…Pests causing infestations and epi-

demics are usually an integral part of the eco-

system. Often, we overlook the fact that dis-

eases occurring at a larger scale are caused

by an ecosystem imbalance.…

[M]any times, imbalances

are caused by anthropo-

genic factors and are indi-

cators of our own short-

sighted harmful activities

that lead to medical and

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environmental catastrophes….[I]f more peo-

ple adopted a less anthropocentric percep-

tion of their existence, they would be freer to

plan a sustainable future in the long term with

research efforts and funding perhaps shifting

toward…biodiversity and conservation.LJERKA LAH

Laboratory for Molecular Biology and Nanobiotechnol-ogy, National Institute of Chemistry, Ljubljana, SI-1000, Slovenia. E-mail: [email protected]

I AM IN SCIENCE POLICY AND I WISH EVERY-one had a better understanding

that science itself is not politi-

cized or inherently supportive

of one party or another. Too

many people, I think, believe

that science serves only a par-

ticular viewpoint or political

argument. In reality, science is

the underlying foundation on which

to make policy decisions that may or may

not hinge on the science itself. With a better

understanding of that, I hope people would

not be as quick to criticize scientifi c reports

and the scientists who produce them based

solely on the conclusions. ANISH GOEL

Technology Policy and Geopolitical Affairs, The Boeing Company, Seattle, WA 98101, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

…A CLEAR UNDERSTANDING OF PHARMA-cogenomics would lead to

safer prescriptions, reduced

risk of adverse side effects,

minimized healthcare

cost, and improved clini-

cal outcomes. In addition,

a better understanding of

this concept will encourage

the public to participate in clinical trials in

order to bridge the knowledge gap among

clinicians, scientists, and the non-medical

community. This will pave the way for the

advancement of medicine and improvement

of standard practice.MICHAEL O. BACLIG

Research and Biotechnology Division, St. Luke’s Medical Center, Quezon City, 1102, Philippines. E-mail: [email protected]

[I WISH NON-SCIENTISTS UNDERSTOOD] THE concept of gene-environment interaction that

could predispose us to the progression of cer-

tain diseases. Diseases are often multifaceted

in nature, and studying

merely genetics or simple

in vitro models is not suf-

ficient in recapitulating

the environmental factors

that we are exposed to across

the years…. If everyone can take a small

step to mitigate possible deleterious gene-

environment interactions by altering their

lifestyles, we can potentially reduce our

healthcare costs even without discovering

novel treatments to delay or reverse the pro-

gression of the diseases plaguing the devel-

oped world.BRYCE TAN

Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National Univesity of Singa-pore, 119077, Singapore. E-mail: [email protected]

UNCERTAINTY. IT DOES NOT MEAN I DON’T know. It is quantifi able. It is under-

standable. Communication

between non-scientists

and scientists would

improve greatly if non-

scientists understood sci-

entifi c uncertainty. I work

between the fi elds of environ-

mental engineering and ecology

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in interdisciplinary research. My work links

to sensitive issues such as climate change

and environmental pollution. We are scien-

tists, not fortune-tellers or psychics read-

ing into the future. No, we cannot predict

every exact detail what will happen because

of human impacts on the Earth system. But,

using scientifi c observations combined with

sophisticated models, we can determine a

range of what could happen and what most

likely will happen….SARAH M. ANDERSON

Nitrogen Systems: Policy-Oriented Interdisciplinary Research and Education-IGERT and School of Biological Sci-ences, Washington State University, Pullman, WA 99164, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

[I WISH NON-SCIENTISTS WOULD HELP] stop overuse of antibiotics….[A]ntibiotic

use for any kind of abnormal physiological

condition is a common practice in develop-

ing countries like Nepal.

Even though we are not

sick, we use antibiot-

ics in our daily life,

for example, cosmet-

ics, shampoo, and meat

from antibiotics-treated

animals….Improper use and overuse of anti-

biotics are the major reasons for the increase

in multi-drug–resistant bacterial strains.

Bacteria may gain sovereignty again over

humankind unless everyone stops overuse

and misuse of antibiotics.

BISHNU P. MARASINI

Natural Product Research Laboratory, Nepal Academy of Science and Technology, Khumaltar, Lalitpur, Nepal. E-mail: [email protected]

…AS A NEUROSCIENTIST WORKING ON

learning and memory, I wish every non-

scientist could appreciate

the beauty of our sophisti-

cated neural circuits and

understand that dramatic

enhancement of human

intelligence is optimisti-

cally possible….CHUN-WAI MA

Department of Physiology, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China. E-mail: [email protected]

…AS A PH.D. STUDENT, ONE OF THE MOST challenging—and sometimes discourag-

ing—things for me to explain to a non-

scientist is why I chose to

be a scientist, and why my

research matters. The sat-

isfaction and joy I have

when accomplishing a hard-

earned research project, add-

ing valuable data to a long-

term study, or discovering a new question to

explore can be intangible to a non-scientist.

I don’t expect non-scientists to fully under-

stand why I chose my career path, but the

notion that science is a critical component

to understanding our world, now more than

ever, seems lost on many…. ELIZABETH PHILLIPS

School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, University of Wash-ington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Letters to the Editor

Letters (~300 words) discuss material published

in Science in the past 3 months or matters of

general interest. Letters are not acknowledged

upon receipt. Whether published in full or in part,

Letters are subject to editing for clarity and space.

Letters submitted, published, or posted elsewhere,

in print or online, will be disqualifi ed. To submit a

Letter, go to www.submit2science.org.

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