Special promotional content provided by Wisconsin Science Festival.
We know science is important, but is it … fun? Organizers of the annual Wisconsin Science Festival have spent the past sixteen years celebrating not just the wonders of science, but the excitement and silliness too. Each October, a ten-day slate of events throughout the state invites people to stroll through booths at Science on the Square that demonstrate scientific principles in hands-on accessible ways, or take in a pub quiz or the Why Sci Variety Show. If you’re a sports nut, a ticket to Science and Soccer offers hands-on demos before the Forward Madison soccer match. And for those who prefer an in-depth discussion of anything from the gut microbiome to the origins of life can swing by a panel discussion like SoundWaves.
The festival offers more than 800 engaging and illuminating events in 57 counties (and expanding every year), but the Wisconsin Science Festival is about more than entertainment. Festival director Sam Mulrooney wants to use science and art to foster connection at the local level: “We’re creating events as a way to build relationships in the community.” The ideal event sparks connection with others, inspires learning about the science of the audience’s own community, sharing that knowledge more broadly. Some of the most important communities the festival hopes to reach each year are the folks who think science isn’t for them.
There are increasingly urgent reasons to remind audiences that science really is everywhere and affects them in direct and indirect ways. The past few years have seen an uptick in debate about how research is funded, what research can be trusted, whom recent funding cuts affect and how. One of the festival’s in-depth panel discussions, Crossroads of Ideas, will tackle this topic directly.
The uncertainty and funding cuts reach further than many people realize, disrupting not only the world of higher education, but the workforce employed in scientific research and the potential scientists wondering if they should pursue this career at all. The ripple effects may be felt well beyond our current time and place, from the labs in academia all the way to the festival goer who hears about meaningful avenues of research now out of reach for the foreseeable future.
“Unexpected funding terminations or reductions have several long-term effects on the scientific enterprise,” says Jo Handelsman, director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. “Resources are wasted on incomplete studies that are not interpretable or publishable. Student and staff positions are terminated, disrupting people’s lives, demoralizing researchers, and sometimes resulting in good scientists leaving science. Clinical trials that are terminated abruptly deprive participants, who may be suffering from serious illnesses, of promised and needed medical care, causing researchers to breach their ethical contract with participants. These diverse effects discredit science and dispirit the scientific community.” In other words, researchers in lab coats aren’t the only ones affected when their grants are rescinded. So are the workers in their labs, the postdocs who moved to a new city to begin a position that disappears, the graduate students about to start a significant project only to find they no longer have funds to do so, and patients relying on the treatments they could only receive in a clinical trial.
One useful thing about the current discussion of research funding is that it reveals gaps in public awareness about the day-to-day work of science. The science festival illuminates the way the work is done, the reasons it’s exciting, and what it means to festivalgoers, which is meaningful in a world where researchers struggle to communicate the nature of specialized, technical work to a community who benefits from their work in ways they may not realize. That’s important, because gaps in public understanding are often filled with misinformation. For example, the historically swift development of a covid-19 vaccine showed both how an effective vaccine could save lives and restore a sense of personal and economic normalcy, and it also demonstrated how a backlash of misinformation and suspicion can take a firm hold at the very same time.
Luckily there are helpful lessons to learn. One reason people mistrust scientific research is rapidly changing guidelines or beliefs. But as Handelsman has pointed out in interviews, a core tenet of science is change: the known is always being refined as new discoveries happen. Some fields change so rapidly that a textbook can be out of date before the class is over. Perhaps if the public knows more about how scientific theories change and the expectation that they will change, there might be less mistrust.
It’s also crucial to educate communities about issues they may dismiss as a problem for another day. Mention a topic like the world’s rapidly depleting topsoil and people might not see the urgency. Explain that this issue is already showing up in lost agricultural production, and an abstract scientific idea becomes a very concrete one: many will recognize “less food” as today’s problem.
Scratch the surface and you find that science is all around us, in other words. If citizens are more aware of the scientific underpinnings of everyday life, they may see more reasons to support scientific research, not only to benefit the research world, but to benefit themselves.
That’s why programs like the Wisconsin Science Festival are more important than ever as a way to meet the public in their own libraries, museums, pubs, and outdoor spaces. The festival’s mission to spark curiosity and illuminate the scientific stories being told all around us is more significant than ever, says Science Festival director Samantha Mulrooney. “We’re inviting everyone to continue to think critically and ask questions about the world around them. And we think there’s a way to make it exciting and engaging for everyone.”
Michelle Wildgen is the author of four novels, most recently Wine People; the co-founder of the Madison Writer’s Studio; and a writer in residence at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery.
