#7

My set of drawings uniformly consists of old, wrinkly white men with glasses and lab coats holding beakers of bubbling chemicals. Not all of them are well groomed or well shaven. Some are hunched and bald. However, these drawings do not resemble the scientists I know. The science departments at Ursinus are very diverse, having members of both genders and various races and ethnicities, all with unique style and demeanor.

The drawings certainly reflect a certain stereotype about scientists being small old men. This is bad for science because this type of person is not very interesting or appealing. Not many people particularly want to be that type of person, so they may choose not to go into scientific fields. Further, because that type of person seems uninteresting, people may not want to hear what scientists have to say. 

It is particularly bad for science writing because the audience who is supposed to read science articles does not meet the scientists or the writers face to face, so the appearance and motivations of the scientist are left to the imagination. This renders the scientists susceptible to being stereotyped as boring old men who work with beakers in a lab all day long. This would deter them from reading the articles, thus missing out on some potentially vital information. Who wants to donate their time to reading a long article based on ‘science’ done by boring old people?

A lot of people do not view that stereotypical image of a scientist as a real person with a heart or feelings and emotions. That lack of humanity is what drives people to distrust scientists; putting one’s faith in drones seems slightly scary.  It is easier to place faith in more personable figures, such as actors and other public figures who appear in interviews on talk shows and in magazines. Because they are more relatable, they seem more trustworthy to the general public, despite that their judgments about science are much less trustworthy because they have no support for the assertions that they make.

This is due to the fact that scientists operate behind the scenes—most scientists do not appear on talk shows and in regular magazines to talk about their research findings. Other, less reliable people have the exposure that scientists are lacking. And science writers can’t recover that for them because the science writers are not the experts either. The field of science needs to be elucidated; it is not simply lab work with test tubes and white coats. It is such a large and important aspect of life and provides the only evidence we can get to explain lots of phenomena.