All about Eve
Eve Marder ’69, the Victor and Gwendolyn Beinfield Professor of Neuroscience and member of the Volen National Center for Complex Systems, was recently elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the nation’s most honored scientific advisory organization.
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Scientific Study
Catalyst: We live in an age of science, yet in some respects, science has become marginalized—for example, by foes of evolution, stem-cell research, and animal research. What’s the root cause?
Marder: There’s a real doublethink among the public. On the one hand, the public thinks that scientists should solve all problems and cure all ills. Yet there is tremendous demonization and distrust of science in the absence of sufficient education. It’s now acceptable to graduate from college without any knowledge of the basics of science. You would not find a well-educated lawyer who has never read Shakespeare, or a doctor who has never read a novel. Yet many supposedly well-educated people think it is acceptable almost to brag about their ignorance of science at the same time they depend on their BlackBerrys for instant communication.
Do you think science has become more politicized in recent administrations, or has it always been so?
Science policy has been extremely politicized in the Bush era; I am not enough of a science historian to know how this compares with past administrations. I do know that the scientific community does not believe that the present administration is open to the best possible advice on many issues highly relevant to public policy.
Do scientists need to be more engaged with the public? Are there other things scientists can do to broaden public understanding and engagement with science?
Scientists today are much more willing to speak to the press than they used to be. As we do our research, thanks to taxpayer money, most scientists now feel that they owe it to the public to translate those resources into new knowledge.
What are the top science issues with which every educated person should be familiar?
There are a number of critical issues that face every one of us today and will continue to do so in the years to come. Our medical care, for example, is becoming much more technology-driven and dependent on the development of new devices and new pharmaceuticals. The complex issues surrounding how drugs are developed, tested, and used require us to understand statistics as people make decisions about their own medical care. It is important to understand the trade-offs between short-term economic gain and long-term issues like global warming. For example, cheap air flights might facilitate short-term economic development but have long-term deleterious effects on the environment. Another important example is management of the fisheries in both coastal and deep waters. Fishing for animals with long life spans can produce complex unanticipated consequences for ocean ecology. At the same time, numerous issues related to the use of genetically modified crops, stem cells, and evolution enter the public discourse without many of the people deciding these issues understanding the basic scientific principles underlying them. We are entering a new era of human genetics in which we will soon be able to obtain a great deal of information about the genetic underpinnings of numerous traits. How will we use this information? And as our understanding of brain function grows, some quarters are arguing that we’ll need a new field of “neuroethics” to frame the issues that will emerge because of this new knowledge.
You’ve managed to meld prestigious leadership roles—as president-elect of the Society for Neuroscience and now as an NAS member—with a research program that is highly individual rather than focused on problems pursued by legions of scientists. You’ve been enormously successful in both. What’s your advice to young scientists?
Always follow your dreams. It is easier to live with your own mistakes than to berate yourself for failing to heed your intuition.