Educating Auntie Vera

Congressional Republicans are waging war against the Environmental Protection Agency. The Food and Drug Administration is also under fire. Climate change and vaccines are the subjects of fierce debates that emphasize politics, not science.

At the same time, the mistakes of the past — from Thalidomide to asbestos — have left the public skeptical of new pronouncements.

In this politically charged environment, people want the straight dope about new scientific advances, from genetically-modified foods to nanotechnology.

But how do you reach them?

A group of more than 100 academics, policymakers, educators and activists spent two days in Ann Arbor, Mich., exploring that question at a symposium sponsored by the University of Michigan’s Risk Science Center. It was an eclectic group for a far-ranging discussion, which was at once freewheeling and focused.

The topic of the meeting last week was officially supposed to be a broad look at understanding risk and sustainability amid the fast-paced world of emerging technologies. The participants returned again and again to the question of education and engagement.

Do people want information and the ability to make their own decisions, or do they simply want to be told a product is ​“safe?” Can they understand the idea of ​“safe enough”? Or do they need absolutes? Whom will they trust, and why?

Hilary Sutcliffe (pictured), the director of MATTER, a British organization that she labels an ​“action tank” specializing in public outreach, said she watches the current debate with the sense of ​“twitchy angst,” knowing that existing education efforts aren’t interesting people like her mother, sister and ​“Auntie Vera.”

If there’s one thing the past has taught us, she said it’s that ​“we will get it wrong.”

And yet, for all the talk about new paradigms for new technologies, she said, nobody’s tearing up any rule books right now. ​“These systems are so embedded,” she said. ​“How are we really able to change on a sixpence?”

The European government, for example, is promising the public it will characterize the risks associated with nanomaterials, Sutcliffe said. But people see the more than 1,000 nano-products now on the market and have to be scratching their heads.

Sutcliffe said she’d seen a post on Twitter that resonated with her: something to the effect of ​“I don’t want to be empowered, I want others to take responsibility.” The ​“poor public” has enough to worry about without being forced to make scientific evaluations, she said.

“Let them watch TV, and let’s see how we can take responsibility for own actions,” Sutcliffe said.

That in itself is a complicated endeavor. The American system is mostly set up to prevent dangerous products from coming onto the market, through a lengthy pre-approval process such as the FDA’s system for prescription drugs or the Environmental Protection Agency’s method of registering pesticides. But those methods take time – seemingly more so every day. And technology is moving ever faster.

“Riskless innovation is not possible,” said Mark Banaszak Holl, a chemistry and engineering professor at Michigan who’s also involved in the university’s research administration. ​“That means we’re also in a new era of risk.”

Peter Preuss, chief innovation officer in the office of the assistant administrator for research and development at the EPA, said agencies like his aren’t equipped to handle the new paradigms (Preuss, like all the participants from government and industry, made a point of saying his opinions were his own, and not the EPA’s.)

“I don’t think we can deal with these types of problems with the system of governance that we have today,” Preuss said. ​“The pace of innovation is now six months … I don’t think there’s a governance structure that can deal with that.”

The political structure — even without the current gridlocked Congress – isn’t ready either, said David Goldston, the director of government affairs for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“Politicians want a number that gets them to a place where they don’t have to make a choice,” said Goldston, a former majority staff director for the House Science Committee.

Wisconsin law professor R. Alta Charo (pictured), who recently finished at stint at the FDA, said what she worries about more than anything else isn’t a new technology, but rather the public’s attitude.

There is an anti-intellectual, anti-science feeling, she said. Convergence from both the far right and far left has produced a deep skepticism. With innovation now involving technologies that are difficult to understand, the public has to delegate some authority to experts, she said. But they don’t want to.

There’s often a disconnect from both sides, Sutcliffe said.

“We mean ​‘that public’ and we don’t mean ​‘that public,’” Sutcliffe said.

David Bidwell, a research fellow at Michigan, said it’s easy to assume that public engagement is easy to do, and is just a matter of presenting the facts, not persuasion.

Many scientists have ​“that belief if you engage the public they’re eventually going to think like you if they have the right information,” he said. ​“That’s just not true.”

People don’t experience risk, pointed out Brian Zikmund-Fisher, an assistant professor at Michigan. The experience outcomes, he said — a side effect for a prescription drug, or some kind of accident. Just talking about ​“risk” may not be the most effective thing, he said.

“Our job as communicators is to put the information that people have into context,” he said.

But that context is often different for scientists than for the lay public. The former may think about ​“acceptable risk,” which might allow for 10 deaths from a drug that helps millions, while the latter might regard a single serious illness is a good reason to pull a drug from the market.

People don’t view risky products or behaviors as part of a continuum, said Julie Downs, director of the Center for Risk Perception and Communication at Carnegie Mellon University. They don’t make a distinction between the 1‑in-100,000 and the 1‑in‑1 million risk — instead, they’re looking for a simple ​“safe” vs. ​“risky.”

Then there’s the question of trusting sources, whether in person or electronically. While efforts to link autism to childhood vaccines have been uniformly debunked — with the main publication that appeared to confirm parents’ fears now completely discredited — the Internet teems with frightening information, and celebrities such as Jenny McCarthy seem to carry more weight than scientists. But the vaccine fact sheets handed to parents are much more succinct and clear than the multi-page inserts, printed in tiny letters, that accompany prescription drugs.

Sutcliffe said people want to be involved, and have their opinions taken seriously, but probably don’t want to have to dig too deeply into the details of every drug or newfangled food product.

“Go to them where they are and talk to them in their language, rather than having them talk to us in our language and come to us,” Sutcliffe said.