Steve Blose of Protein Databases, Inc. brings up the question of how much public outreach scientists need to engage in to make sure the public understands the science. Sometimes the need for better communication is clear only with hindsight. “A failure of the molecular biology community [in the 80s and 90s] was [that they didn’t recognize the need] to go and actually talk to people, help them understand, and they allowed things to sort of snowball through the media at that time which was different than it was today, it was primarily press and television.”
