To Make Science Engaging, We Need a Sesame Street for Adults
A new kind of television series could establish the baseline narratives for novel science like gene editing, quantum computing, or artificial intelligence.
This article is part of the magazine, "The Future of Science In America: The Election Issue," co-published by LeapsMag, the Aspen Institute Science & Society Program, and GOOD.
In the mid-1960s, a documentary producer in New York City wondered if the addictive jingles, clever visuals, slogans, and repetition of television ads—the ones that were captivating young children of the time—could be harnessed for good. Over the course of three months, she interviewed educators, psychologists, and artists, and the result was a bonanza of ideas.
Perhaps a new TV show could teach children letters and numbers in short animated sequences? Perhaps adults and children could read together with puppets providing comic relief and prompting interaction from the audience? And because it would be broadcast through a device already in almost every home, perhaps this show could reach across socioeconomic divides and close an early education gap?
Soon after Joan Ganz Cooney shared her landmark report, "The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education," in 1966, she was prototyping show ideas, attracting funding from The Carnegie Corporation, The Ford Foundation, and The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and co-founding the Children's Television Workshop with psychologist Lloyd Morrisett. And then, on November 10, 1969, informal learning was transformed forever with the premiere of Sesame Street on public television.
For its first season, Sesame Street won three Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award. Its star, Big Bird, landed on the cover of Time Magazine, which called the show "TV's gift to children." Fifty years later, it's hard to imagine an approach to informal preschool learning that isn't Sesame Street.
And that approach can be boiled down to one word: Entertainment.
Despite decades of evidence from Sesame Street—one of the most studied television shows of all time—and more research from social science, psychology, and media communications, we haven't yet taken Ganz Cooney's concepts to heart in educating adults. Adults have news programs and documentaries and educational YouTube channels, but no Sesame Street. So why don't we? Here's how we can design a new kind of television to make science engaging and accessible for a public that is all too often intimidated by it.
We have to start from the realization that America is a nation of high-school graduates. By the end of high school, students have decided to abandon science because they think it's too difficult, and as a nation, we've made it acceptable for any one of us to say "I'm not good at science" and offload thinking to the ones who might be. So, is it surprising that a large number of Americans are likely to believe in conspiracy theories like the 25% that believe the release of COVID-19 was planned, the one in ten who believe the Moon landing was a hoax, or the 30–40% that think the condensation trails of planes are actually nefarious chemtrails? If we're meeting people where they are, the aim can't be to get the audience from an A to an A+, but from an F to a D, and without judgment of where they are starting from.
There's also a natural compulsion for a well-meaning educator to fill a literacy gap with a barrage of information, but this is what I call "factsplaining," and we know it doesn't work. And worse, it can backfire. In one study from 2014, parents were provided with factual information about vaccine safety, and it was the group that was already the most averse to vaccines that uniquely became even more averse.
Why? Our social identities and cognitive biases are stubborn gatekeepers when it comes to processing new information. We filter ideas through pre-existing beliefs—our values, our religions, our political ideologies. Incongruent ideas are rejected. Congruent ideas, no matter how absurd, are allowed through. We hear what we want to hear, and then our brains justify the input by creating narratives that preserve our identities. Even when we have all the facts, we can use them to support any worldview.
But social science has revealed many mechanisms for hijacking these processes through narrative storytelling, and this can form the foundation of a new kind of educational television.
Could new television series establish the baseline narratives for novel science like gene editing, quantum computing, or artificial intelligence?
As media creators, we can reject factsplaining and instead construct entertaining narratives that disrupt cognitive processes. Two-decade-old research tells us when people are immersed in entertaining fiction narratives, they loosen their defenses, opening a path for new information, editing attitudes, and inspiring new behavior. Where news about hot-button issues like climate change or vaccination might trigger resistance or a backfire effect, fiction can be crafted to be absorbing and, as a result, persuasive.
But the narratives can't be stuffed with information. They must be simplified. If this feels like the opposite of what an educator should be doing, it is possible to reduce the complexity of information, without oversimplification, through "exemplification," a framing device to tell the stories of individuals in specific circumstances that can speak to the greater issue without needing to explain it all. It's a technique you've seen used in biopics. The Discovery Channel true-crime miniseries Manhunt: Unabomber does many things well from a science storytelling perspective, including exemplifying the virtues of the scientific method through a character who argues for a new field of science, forensic linguistics, to catch one of the most notorious domestic terrorists in U.S. history.
We must also appeal to the audience's curiosity. We know curiosity is such a strong driver of human behavior that it can even counteract the biases put up by one's political ideology around subjects like climate change. If we treat science information like a product—and we should—advertising research tells us we can maximize curiosity though a Goldilocks effect. If the information is too complex, your show might as well be a PowerPoint presentation. If it's too simple, it's Sesame Street. There's a sweet spot for creating intrigue about new information when there's a moderate cognitive gap.
The science of "identification" tells us that the more the main character is endearing to a viewer, the more likely the viewer will adopt the character's worldview and journey of change. This insight further provides incentives to craft characters reflective of our audiences. If we accept our biases for what they are, we can understand why the messenger becomes more important than the message, because, without an appropriate messenger, the message becomes faint and ineffective. And research confirms that the stereotype-busting doctor-skeptic Dana Scully of The X-Files, a popular science-fiction series, was an inspiration for a generation of women who pursued science careers.
With these directions, we can start making a new kind of television. But is television itself still the right delivery medium? Americans do spend six hours per day—a quarter of their lives—watching video. And even with the rise of social media and apps, science-themed television shows remain popular, with four out of five adults reporting that they watch shows about science at least sometimes. CBS's The Big Bang Theory was the most-watched show on television in the 2017–2018 season, and Cartoon Network's Rick & Morty is the most popular comedy series among millennials. And medical and forensic dramas continue to be broadcast staples. So yes, it's as true today as it was in the 1980s when George Gerbner, the "cultivation theory" researcher who studied the long-term impacts of television images, wrote, "a single episode on primetime television can reach more people than all science and technology promotional efforts put together."
We know from cultivation theory that media images can shape our views of scientists. Quick, picture a scientist! Was it an old, white man with wild hair in a lab coat? If most Americans don't encounter research science firsthand, it's media that dictates how we perceive science and scientists. Characters like Sheldon Cooper and Rick Sanchez become the model. But we can correct that by representing professionals more accurately on-screen and writing characters more like Dana Scully.
Could new television series establish the baseline narratives for novel science like gene editing, quantum computing, or artificial intelligence? Or could new series counter the misinfodemics surrounding COVID-19 and vaccines through more compelling, corrective narratives? Social science has given us a blueprint suggesting they could. Binge-watching a show like the surreal NBC sitcom The Good Place doesn't replace a Ph.D. in philosophy, but its use of humor plants the seed of continued interest in a new subject. The goal of persuasive entertainment isn't to replace formal education, but it can inspire, shift attitudes, increase confidence in the knowledge of complex issues, and otherwise prime viewers for continued learning.
[Editor's Note: To read other articles in this special magazine issue, visit the beautifully designed e-reader version.]
A historical perspective offers insights about how far we have come since the 1918 Spanish flu, and how far we have yet to go.
With a deadly pandemic sweeping the planet, many are questioning the comfort and security we have taken for granted in the modern world.
A century ago, when an influenza pandemic struck, we barely knew what viruses were.
More than a century after the germ theory, we are still at the mercy of a microbe we can neither treat, nor control, nor immunize against. Even more discouraging is that technology has in some ways exacerbated the problem: cars and air travel allow a new disease to quickly encompass the globe.
Some say we have grown complacent, that we falsely assume the triumphs of the past ensure a happy and prosperous future, that we are oblivious to the possibility of unpredictable "black swan" events that could cause our destruction. Some have begun to lose confidence in progress itself, and despair of the future.
But the new coronavirus should not defeat our spirit—if anything, it should spur us to redouble our efforts, both in the science and technology of medicine, and more broadly in the advance of industry. Because the best way to protect ourselves against future disasters is more progress, faster.
Science and technology have overall made us much better able to deal with disease. In the developed world, we have already tamed most categories of infectious disease. Most bacterial infections, such as tuberculosis or bacterial pneumonia, are cured with antibiotics. Waterborne diseases such as cholera are eliminated through sanitation; insect-borne ones such as malaria through pest control. Those that are not contagious until symptoms appear, such as SARS, can be handled through case isolation and contact tracing. For the rest, such as smallpox, polio, and measles, we develop vaccines, given enough time. COVID-19 could start a pandemic only because it fits a narrow category: a new, viral disease that is highly contagious via pre-symptomatic droplet/aerosol transmission, and that has a high mortality rate compared to seasonal influenza.
A century ago, when an influenza pandemic struck, we barely knew what viruses were; no one had ever seen one. Today we know what COVID-19 is down to its exact genome; in fact, we have sequenced thousands of COVID-19 genomes, and can track its history and its spread through their mutations. We can create vaccines faster today, too: where we once developed them in live animals, we now use cell cultures; where we once had to weaken or inactivate the virus itself, we can now produce vaccines based on the virus's proteins. And even though we don't yet have a treatment, the last century-plus of pharmaceutical research has given us a vast catalog of candidate drugs, already proven safe. Even now, over 50 candidate vaccines and almost 100 candidate treatments are in the research pipeline.
It's not just our knowledge that has advanced, but our methods. When smallpox raged in the 1700s, even the idea of calculating a case-fatality rate was an innovation. When the polio vaccine was trialled in the 1950s, the use of placebo-controlled trials was still controversial. The crucial measure of contagiousness, "R0", was not developed in epidemiology until the 1980s. And today, all of these methods are made orders of magnitude faster and more powerful by statistical and data visualization software.
If you're seeking to avoid COVID-19, the hand sanitizer gel you carry in a pocket or purse did not exist until the 1960s. If you start to show symptoms, the pulse oximeter that tests your blood oxygenation was not developed until the 1970s. If your case worsens, the mechanical ventilator that keeps you alive was invented in the 1950s—in fact, no form of artificial respiration was widely available until the "iron lung" used to treat polio patients in the 1930s. Even the modern emergency medical system did not exist until recently: if during the 1918 flu pandemic you became seriously ill, there was no 911 hotline to call, and any ambulance that showed up would likely have been a modified van or hearse, with no equipment or trained staff.
As many of us "shelter in place", we are far more able to communicate and collaborate, to maintain some semblance of normal life, than we ever would have been. To compare again to 1918: long-distance telephone service barely existed at that time, and only about a third of homes in the US even had electricity; now we can videoconference over Zoom and Skype. And the enormous selection and availability provided by online retail and food delivery have kept us stocked and fed, even when we don't want to venture out to the store.
Let the virus push us to redouble our efforts to make scientific, technological, and industrial progress on all fronts.
"Black swan" calamities can strike without warning at any time. Indeed, humanity has always been subject to them—drought and frost, fire and flood, war and plague. But we are better equipped now to deal with them than ever before. And the more progress we make, the better prepared we'll be for the next one. The accumulation of knowledge, technology, industrial infrastructure, and surplus wealth is the best buffer against any shock—whether a viral pandemic, a nuclear war, or an asteroid impact. In fact, the more worried we are about future crises, the more energetically we should accelerate science, technology and industry.
In this sense, we have grown complacent. We take the modern world for granted, so much so that some question whether further progress is even still needed. The new virus proves how much we do need it, and how far we still have to go. Imagine how different things would be if we had broad-spectrum antiviral drugs, or a way to enhance the immune system to react faster to infection, or a way to detect infection even before symptoms appear. These technologies may seem to belong to a Star Trek future—but so, at one time, did cell phones.
The virus reminds us that nature is indifferent to us, leaving us to fend entirely for ourselves. As we go to war against it, let us not take the need for such a war as reason for despair. Instead, let it push us to redouble our efforts to make scientific, technological, and industrial progress on all fronts. No matter the odds, applied intelligence is our best weapon against disaster.
A participatory research project has evolved in the world's most powerful networked supercomputer to identify drug targets for COVID-19.
With millions of people left feeling helpless as COVID-19 sweeps across the U.S. and the rest of the planet, there is one way in which absolutely anyone can help fight the pandemic -- all you need is a computer and an Internet connection.
"The more donors that participate, the more science we're able to do."
The Folding@home project allows members of the public to contribute a portion of their computing power to a gigantic virtual network which has mushroomed over the past month to become the most powerful supercomputer on the planet.
As of April 6, more than one million people across the globe have donated some of their home computing resources to the project. Combined, this gives Folding@home processing powers that dwarf even NASA and IBM's most powerful devices. To join, all you have to do is go to this website and click 'Download Now' to load the Folding@home software on your computer. This runs in the background, and only adds your unused computing power to the project, so it will not drain resources from tasks you're trying to do.
"It's totally crazy," said Vincent Voelz, associate professor of chemistry at Temple University, Philadelphia, and one of the scientists leading the project. "A month ago, we had around 30,000 to 40,000 participants. And then last week, it rose up 400,000 and now we've hit a million. But the more donors that participate, the more science we're able to do."
Voelz and the other scientists behind Folding@home are using these vast resources to model the ever-changing shapes of the coronavirus's proteins, in the hopes of identifying vulnerabilities or 'pockets' in its structure that can be targeted with new drugs.
One of the reasons it's difficult to find treatments for viruses like COVID-19 and Ebola is because the proteins, the innate building blocks of the viral structure, have notoriously smooth surfaces, making it hard for drugs to bind to them.
But viral proteins don't stay still. They are constantly evolving and changing shape as the atoms within push and pull against each other. Having a supercomputer enables scientists to simulate all these different shapes, revealing potential weaknesses which were not immediately visible. And the more powerful the supercomputer, the faster these simulations can happen.
"Simulating these protein motions also enables us to answer basic questions such as what makes this new coronavirus strain different from previous strains," said Voelz. "Is there something about the dynamics of these proteins that makes it more virulent?"
Finding a genuinely novel drug for COVID-19 is particularly critical.
Once they have identified suitable pockets within the proteins of COVID-19, the Folding@home scientists can then take the many compounds being identified by chemists around the world as potential drugs, and try to predict which ones will stand the best chance of binding to those pockets and inhibiting the virus's ability to invade and take over human cells.
"We have so much bandwidth now with Folding@home that we really think we can make a dent with screening these, and prioritizing which compounds are then going to get experimentally tested," said Voeltz.
The team are particularly hopeful they can succeed, having already used the supercomputer to identify a new vulnerability in the Ebola virus, which could go on to yield a new treatment for the disease.
Finding a genuinely novel drug for COVID-19 is particularly critical. While researchers are also looking at repurposing existing medications, like the antimalarials Hydroxychloroquine and Chloroquine (which have just been approved by the FDA for emergency use in coronavirus patients), concerns remain about the safety of these treatments. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic recently warned that the use of these drugs could have the side effect of inducing heart problems and run the risk of sudden cardiac arrest.
But with the death toll increasing by the day, speed is of the essence. Voelz explains that the scientific community has been left playing catch-up, because a drug was never actually developed for the original SARS outbreak in the early 2000s. The enormous computational power of the Folding@home project has the potential to allow scientists to quickly answer some of the key questions needed to get a new treatment into the pipeline.
"We don't have a SARS drug for whatever reason," said Voelz. "So the missing ingredient really, is the basic science to reveal possible drug targets and then the pharma can take that information and do the engineering work and optimizing and clinically testing drugs. But we now have a lot of basic science going on in response to this pandemic."