Scientific American as a journalistic institution is 177 years old. Yet don’t equate its age with stuffiness — the publication remains a trusted source because of its cutting-edge in-depth reporting on the ever-evolving world of science.
Jeremy Abbate is the Vice President and Publisher of the SciAm universe, which now includes not only the flagship magazine but also its biotechnology brand extension, “Worldview,” plus two podcasts and many other collaborative ventures in global health, planetary sustainability, energy, security, and neuroscience.
Cure sat down with Abbate to dissect the rapid evolution of science communication during the last decade and New York City’s latest star turn as a hub for science innovation.
Cure: What do science journalists, science communicators and healthcare leaders need to do to engender more trust in science?
Abbate: People turn to different content sources — including their friends and social media — to get their news these days. You could say it's a fractured audience. And I do think the gauntlet has been thrown down, particularly since COVID, in gaining the public's trust for science, for rational and evidence-based thinking. We’re at an interesting crossroads now — people are a little tired of the doom and gloom. We've been with it for so long.
Cure: There's fatigue, isn't there?
Abbate: Everywhere you look, there are the exigencies of a changing world, a world that some would say is threatened by the specter of AI, climate crises, the next pandemic. One of the challenges of communicating science is to say, look, there are solutions. We all have to be part of them. If humans could call on their collective wherewithal and be part of the conversation, and not feel that they've been spoken to by some elite — I think that's one of the problems we saw during COVID.
Cure: We need to get down from our ivory tower as scientists, as science journalists. But you use the word “specter,” which is an interesting term. Most of the time in science, when we first come across some new technology or innovation like AI, it often seems like a specter — Frankensteinian, almost. Why is that?
Abbate: We tend to fear what's new. While there's certainly hype in all the great things it can do, very quickly you see stories about the negative. Any AI headline has been either very hype-y about the wonders of it or it's very negative about how we're all going to lose our jobs and that the world's going to be overtaken by robots. I mean, media companies can sometimes be to blame because they're after clicks, so they have to be a bit provocative. But one of the tasks for anyone communicating science is to balance the hype with where is it really going to lead us? We need to make sure we have a public that is trained to say, we don't want a hype-y story. We want to explore the nuances of this — the good, the bad, what it's going to mean in one year, in two years and three years. It is definitely a challenge.
Cure: At 177 years old, Scientific American still going strong. So, there is still an appetite for good science communication. Abbate: Yes. In any given year, there are going to be anti-science factions trying to rail against what is objective, evidence-based reasoning and reporting. What the public has to understand is that science changes. It’s the nature of it and the reporting has to mirror that. During COVID, you found people saying, ‘You lied to us last week, you said this, and now the science has changed.’ The public needed to be reminded that this was an evolving story, it was an evolving virus.
The meta message of science journalism is that it's changing. I'm optimistic that we will continue to serve a place in society, because the public needs to understand science, whether it's just to understand the world and where health is going. You think about business and capitalism fueling the scalability of innovation. Those individuals need to understand where science is going. There's always going to be multiple constituents who need a clear view of our innovation future.
Cure: Absolutely. Because the moment we stop innovating, that's when we stop growing as a human society. But back to COVID for a minute. During COVID, it seemed like we were all celebrating — finally we felt that people understood the role of science, the role of government, industry, academia, everybody working together to bring forward vaccines in an accelerated timeframe. And we all thought, finally, science is having its moment. But very quickly the tide turned. Why do you think that happened?
Abbate: I think the public got used to innovation solving problems almost overnight. And there are many cases throughout the last multiple decades where science advances changed the nature of things. You look at diabetes 100 years ago, when it was a death sentence. And almost overnight with insulin, it became a manageable chronic disease. We are, in some ways, a victim of our own innovation successes. I think sometimes we think, this is going to solve the problem, and the fact that it doesn’t happen immediately fuels a suspicion that the scientific community isn’t giving the public the whole story.
Cure: At Cure, we believe we need to continue to build that trust. We need to create that two-way engagement because it's also about listening to people. It's about being able to have that dialogue and bring people in through the journey, not just for the end outcome. That's why we convene people of all walks of life who care about healthcare. And New York City as a life sciences ecosystem is at an inflection point — it's about to start thriving like Kendall Square, like Silicon Valley. What do you think the promise is for New York City to be the center of the world, in terms of being a life sciences ecosystem?
Abbate: There's no place like New York. It is part and parcel of the creative spirit that has solved so many of humanity's problems. It's where creativity is, certainly the cultural and financial capital of the world. Scientific American has been in New York since 1845, and I love being part of anything that showcases New York as a backdrop. So, I applaud Cure for being a convener of multiple stakeholders for multidisciplinary conversations in an ecosystem that will drive us forward.
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