A Rite of Science Puts On a Public Face

Scholarly group tries to enliven its 160-year-old annual meeting

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By RICHARD MONASTERSKY

This week newspapers in Beijing, radios in Brisbane, and television sets in Berlin will all carry stories springing from Room 112, a windowless cell buried within Boston's Hynes Convention Center. More than 600 reporters and producers from media outlets around the world will be buzzing around that news-briefing room and nearby meeting halls, lured by legions of scientists giving talks about AIDS, climate change, poverty, stem cells, and many other thorny issues that confront modern society.

This rite has been repeated, in one form or another, for the past 160 years, ever since the first meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, known to most as the AAAS. That initial gathering, in Philadelphia in 1848, convened the top natural historians of antebellum America, and the annual event soon became the premier intellectual meeting of the country. Henry David Thoreau joined the association, as did Millard Fillmore, a former president.

In recent decades, though, the AAAS has struggled to keep its annual meeting from fading into history. As more-specialized societies have taken over the regular business of science, the AAAS meeting has had trouble attracting researchers and providing cutting-edge presentations. It actually loses money for its parent organization, and some have questioned its usefulness.

So the AAAS has tried to carve out a unique niche for its annual meeting — as a place where scientists can best reach out not just to colleagues, but also to the mass media and the world at large.

Sheila Jasanoff, a professor of science-and-technology studies at Harvard University, who has served on the association's board, frequently speaks at the meeting and says her talks there reach a wide audience and have helped her career. "If I present my stuff at AAAS, it travels, it lasts, it speaks across communities," she says. "Pretty much every time I've talked at AAAS, the thing has either become a publication or it's resonated with people in ways I couldn't have predicted."

A Chore for Some

Her perspective on the meeting does not resonate with everybody. Journalists often complain that there's no news at the meeting — no blockbuster results that are presented for the first time and will claim front-page real estate. If a researcher talks about interesting findings, they have almost always been reported previously, at some more specialized meeting or in the pages of a scientific journal, say reporters.

Scientists themselves carp at times that the AAAS meeting does not draw the fresh results or the numbers of researchers that the specialized meetings attract. Indeed, registration numbers for the AAAS convention have remained flat, even as the gatherings of other societies are ballooning. For scientists squeezed by increasing demands on their time and an expanding number of meetings to attend, the AAAS congress can be a low priority. Even if researchers do decide to go, some view it like a trip to the dentist.

Lloyd Keigwin, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, is speaking at the meeting this year because a colleague asked him. "As usual, I regret agreeing to do this because it is a lot of work," he wrote in an e-mail message. "However, in my view the AAAS meeting is more about public outreach, which scientists are supposed to do."

Like Mr. Keigwin, who is driving in just for the day of his talk, D. Wayne Goodman, a professor of chemistry at Texas A&M University at College Station, will fly in only for Sunday, when he is scheduled to speak. "Honestly, I did this as a favor to the symposium organizer," he says.

Then there is the question of purpose. The association loses money on the meeting every year, officials acknowledge, although they are unwilling to specify how much.

The Society for Neuroscience, in contrast, made $8-million on its 2006 meeting. "Over the years, there have been discussions about whether the annual meeting is the best use of AAAS resources, whether the annual meeting was an anachronism now," says Carol Rogers, who ran the association's office of public affairs from 1976 to 1989 and presided over the meeting's media activities. (The AAAS derives most of its revenue from its journal, Science, but the organization, like many publishers, faces an uncertain financial future. As it profits from selling online access to institutions, it has lost more than 30,000 individual subscribers over the past dozen years, although the numbers have started to rebound and the association's revenues are climbing.)

Nascar and Robots

In raw numbers, the AAAS meeting pales compared with those of other scientific societies. As the event moves around the country each year, its sessions draw 3,000 to 4,000 paying registrants and nonpaying presenters, most of whom are scientists. On top of that, nearly 1,000 people register at no charge with the press room. More than half of those are members of the media; most of the others are public-information officers from universities, nonprofit organizations, and federal agencies. Journalism professors and students make up the rest of the free registrants.

Compare that with the American Chemical Society, which holds two meetings a year. Each attracts 12,000 to 15,000 registered attendees. The American Geophysical Union's most recent annual meeting, in December, drew 14,600 registrants, out of a total membership of nearly 52,000. And the Society for Neuroscience, with only 38,000 members, pulled in 32,180 people to its meeting in November.

But direct comparisons of scientific attendance do not tell the entire story, because the AAAS has started to move in a new direction. In the past five years, the organization has added free events designed to attract thousands of members of the public.

During the weekend of the five-day meeting, the AAAS holds Family Science Days, a series of activities intended particularly for kids. Close to 5,000 people attended those events in Seattle in 2004. This year families can listen to Diandra Leslie-Pelecky, a professor of physics at the University of Texas at Dallas, talk about her new book, The Physics of NASCAR, to be released this week. David Calkins, a lecturer at San Francisco State University and founder of the ROBOlympics competition, will introduce children to battling robots. Corporations, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations will sponsor dozens of booths and activities.

In a separate event, the AAAS will hold what it calls a "town hall" meeting, designed for school teachers, health professionals, parents, and students, on the topic of obesity. Last year's town hall, on climate change, attracted 1,200 people.

"I love this part of it," says Alan I. Leshner, chief executive officer of the AAAS since 2001. "If the largest general scientific society is going to [visit] a community, we have an obligation to make science more accessible to that community, and to do it in a way that's engaging and participatory."

Despite the costs associated with the events, says Mr. Leshner, "they really are an opportunity for public engagement with science, which is a core mission for AAAS."

Rachel L. Falk, a science teacher at Mercy High School, in San Francisco, attended last year's meeting on climate change, where she heard some top scientists discuss the problem and potential solutions. "It got me fired up and inspired," she says. "It made me more knowledgeable before I taught that subject to my students."

The emphasis on interacting directly with the public parallels activities sponsored by the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the model upon which the AAAS was based back in 1848. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the British group made the transition from an annual meeting of scientists to a festival aimed at the public. In 2006, when the festival visited Norwich, England, almost 175,000 people participated.

Mr. Leshner says the AAAS board has had nothing but praise for the association's annual meeting in recent years. "They love the direction we're going to — more and more serving the community as well as the scientific community," he says.

Courting Reporters

For the AAAS, serving the community also means catering to the news media. That relationship goes back to the first meeting, in Philadelphia, says Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, a professor of the history of science at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and one of the authors of The Establishment of Science in America: 150 Years of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Rutgers, 1999).

In the past, reporters attending the meeting could get news stories by going to technical sessions, in which scientists discussed their recent work. But those sessions started to decline in number in 1948, when the AAAS began transforming the meeting into an interdisciplinary event that examined the intersection of science and society. By 1972 the technical sessions had vanished altogether, making it harder to draw scientists to the meeting.

"That was a mistake because the AAAS has been whining ever since about declining attendance at the annual meeting," says Michele Aldrich, who was archivist at the association from 1979 to 1996.

The complaint about the lack of news at the meetings goes back decades, says Bruce V. Lewenstein, a professor of science communications at Cornell University, who also contributed to The Establishment of Science in America: "There hasn't been news at the meeting for 40 years."

But reporters keep on coming by the hundreds (including three from The Chronicle this year). David Perlman, science editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, will be one of the senior journalists there. He has attended the meetings since the mid-1960s, a time when he could count on getting front-page articles out of the event. The prime reason for going now, he says, is to absorb background knowledge about important issues that might become news stories later, and to meet scientists whom he might have written about or whom he plans to contact in the future.

"It's also a neat place to meet your colleagues, who you don't often see a lot of," he says.

That opportunity is one of the prime attractions for many reporters. They network, look for jobs, recruit employees, talk about their trade — and party. Each year the local community of science journalists throws a bash for the 1,000 or so reporters and public-information officers attending the meeting.

The AAAS also entertains reporters by staging a large party to honor the winners of its award for science journalism, which is sponsored now by Johnson & Johnson. Hundreds of reporters (including this one) have gone to the meeting over the past 63 years to pick up their plaques and prize money.

The AAAS leaders believe that nurturing science journalists is part of the organization's prime goal of advancing science. And that's a tougher job these days, so scientists need allies in the media.

"There's been a decline in public interest, public trust, and public support for science — and scientists want it back," says Sharon Dunwoody, a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who has studied the behavior of reporters at AAAS meetings.

But with increasing competition for their attention, and tighter travel budgets, many journalists have trouble justifying a trip to the meeting. National Public Radio, for example, has not routinely sent any reporters to cover the meeting for more than a decade, says Richard Harris, a science correspondent at the network.

Still, Ms. Dunwoody expects the press room in a popular destination like Boston to be overflowing, a prediction that matches the high number of media-registration requests received by the AAAS.

Forecasts of shrinking news-media attendance are "a common refrain," says Ginger Pinholster, director of the office of public programs at the association, "but the same people show up every year, so you've got to wonder whether there must be some value in the meeting."

Although some top American reporters have stopped coming, the number of international attendees has climbed. This year reporters from 56 countries have registered in advance. The meeting is also attracting people from new types of media, such as science bloggers and Web producers, jobs that did not exist 15 years ago.

This weekend, as Ms. Dunwoody wades through the throngs of American journalism students, producers from the BBC, and German correspondents, she might run into a few of the reporters who have seen the meeting change over the decades.

Mr. Perlman, 89, of the San Francisco Chronicle, will be flying in to cover the meeting. He expected his request to attend this year to be turned down by the newspaper, given budget pressures these days. But he got the go-ahead.

"I figure I'll go to the last one when I'm 90," he says. "Then I'll stop."