Scientists and the media: victims or villains?

Do scientists get the media they deserve? Are scientists ambitious? Crazy? Irresponsible? Arrogant? Invaluable? How do we make up our minds? How should we make up our minds?

You probably recognise part of what the answer to this question might be. Don’t you know this character? Lab coat, messed-up hair, wild, glazed eyes and cackling with turbocharged, world-dominating glee…. That’s right - it’s the iconic image of the mad scientist! He’s like a well-known, yet slightly unwelcome old relative who keeps coming back to visit, over and over.

Ask anybody of any age to draw you a picture of a scientist and you’ll see a tendency for this sort of image to emerge. In fact, go to Google images and search for ‘scientist’. One of the first images that is served up is a nutcase in a labcoat. Go ahead and try it now!

The spiky haired, raving genius is part of a story which goes back at least to ancient Athens. Our modern ‘mad scientist’ is the inheritor of an undesired behaviour which the Greeks called ‘hubris’.

Originally, hubris revolved around the concept of disrespect to others, or an individual showing excessive pride – but later, the highest form of hubris came to be seen as being disrespectful towards the ‘gods’ or ‘powers of nature’. The story best indicative of this is that of Daedalus and Icarus.

Daedalus, an inventor and craftsman was imprisoned with his son Icarus on an island labyrinth by king Minos. They planned an escape by fashioning wings of feathers bound together with wax.  Daedalus warned his son not to fly too close to the sea or the wings would get wet, and not too close to the sun, to prevent them from melting. As we recall, Icarus flew too close to the sun, the wax melted and he fell into the ocean to drown.

This story, and many like it have been deeply embedded in cultures for thousands of years, and are meant to illustrate a belief in the inability of human beings to overcome the natural world – or a warning not to rise above what is considered to be ‘the place’ of human beings.

Literature, society, symbols – collectively have produced this image of the scientist. We have trained ourselves to recognise and react to this stereotype, or icon, much in the same way we react to a stop sign, or a combination of musical notes which we interpret as being ‘sad’ or ‘happy’. It is a learned response, but hardly reasonable.

What do scientists think about the media attention they receive?