(Un)Filtered Science: From the Lab to
The Table, and Everything in Between

As a child running through my parents' research labs, I didn't realize how rare it was to have a direct, unfiltered look into the work of scientists. In 1993, my family moved from the struggling landscape of post-Soviet Bulgaria to the high desert of Reno, Nevada, where my mom had secured a two-year postdoctoral position in the University of Nevada School of Medicine. I was four at the time and had no sense of where we were going or what to make of the transition, but since my parents arrived in debt, spoke little English, and had no place to send us, my sister and I spent quite a few hours entertaining ourselves in the halls of the research buildings while our parents finished their experiments. I remember playing endless games of hangman on the chalkboards, counting the change in my parents' desk drawers, working my way through the expert level on Minesweeper, and drawing on Microsoft's Paint program. That was the nineties, and my world was small.

Thirty years later, when the gap in communication between scientists and their various publics has become more apparent, I have a new appreciation for the close gaze I had into the world of science, and relationships with the people behind the work. My mom earned her PhD in physiology and pharmacology and my dad in pharmacology, and they instilled in my sister and me an appreciation for scientific work, for the scientific process, for the grueling experiments happening on a micro scale in the search for solutions to health challenges on a societal level—in my mom's case, on cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. In my youth, I don't remember ever questioning whether science was real, whether it was credible, or what scientists did because I could see the machines humming away and knew the countless hours my parents were spending in their labs, all while my sister and I sat in the courtyard outside counting our skittles and separating them into distinct color groups.

In some osmotic capacity, the visits to the lab and the conversations about grant proposals, publications, and successful or failed experiments around the dinner table nurtured an interest in and appreciation for science that stuck with my sister and me throughout the next decade and a half of schooling, and into our university experiences. My sister entered college as a biology major, and I hoped to pursue a career in astrophysics. We both had early jobs in research labs, in my case looking for ways to treat muscular dystrophy. Science was in our blood, at least to an extent; seven of our immediate relatives—grandparents, aunts, uncles—had PhDs, a number of them in the sciences. But at some point we were both drawn into the worlds of the humanities. And yet, after a big detour through a PhD in history, with an emphasis on narrative studies and a peripheral interest in public history, I found a home in a university writing program teaching a science communication course designed for students to think about how to bridge the gap between scientists and their publics. Of course, the context now is far different than the one in which I had my first direct encounters with scientific work. Many people today view science with skepticism, distrust, lacking knowledge of what the scientific process of inquiry, trial, and error entails, a phenomenon encapsulated in the deficit model of science communication (Dickson, 2004). The need to reconsider how science is represented—and filtered—from the lab into the public sphere presents obvious challenges.

Teaching science communication has given me the opportunity to bridge the world of my parents' research labs with my training in history to address larger questions related to the public consumption of knowledge. In an era characterized by the proliferation of quick reads and fast facts, online celebrity appeal, a general disbelief in the existence of truth, and public distrust in the ivory tower of academia, the need to bring transparency to the scientific process and to break down the walls of knowledge and research is clear.

But a more central theme that has emerged from my teaching has been the degree to which, historically and today, science communication is often impeded (and sometimes bolstered!) by intermediaries—whether the media, politicians, or online celebrities—who interpret and often shift public reception toward new facts and findings. The cases in which we find scientists speaking directly to the public are in fact seemingly quite rare. One might of course think of Bill Nye as bridging the gap between the metaphorical scientist's lab and the public arena; of Neil deGrasse Tyson's role as a public ambassador for space research; of Dr. Anthony Fauci and his television broadcastings on the most up-to-date CDC policy on COVID-19 protocols during the height of the pandemic; or of Andrew Huberman's Huberman Lab podcast, which seeks to distill neuroscience research into digestible chunks for a nonspecialist audience. Each of these figures has played an important role in demystifying the scientific process.

Yet in a number of other contexts, the process of sharing findings with the public is far less direct, far less linear. This is true of the general transmission of scientific knowledge from the lab through peer-reviewed articles to press releases and into the media; or through policy briefs into congressional debates that are picked up by journalists. In such cases, there are often several stages at which science communication is filtered through, and sometimes contaminated by, assumptions and worldviews that distort the original findings, often to make them more appealing and attractive for widespread consumption. At its best, this filtering process can help translate hyperspecialized research into relatable outcomes and mobilize large swaths of the public to support critical policy measures, or to change their personal habits and ways of living. At its worst, it can result in sensationalized, reductive representations of scientific processes that obscure the value and nuances of the work being done. In both cases, this signals the need to consider how many voices feed into the delivery of scientific findings.

I play with the complex idea of the benefits and challenges of scientific filtering through intermediaries in my science communication course, particularly in a unit themed "science writing and policy." This segment of the course offers space to celebrate the many ways in which past scientific advances have led to critical policy measures that protect the public, whether related to food consumption or environmental protections. It also lets us get at another point: the importance, historically, of public trust in science and its outcomes.

To explore this, I draw on two examples centered on food safety laws from the turn of the 20th century to the present, taking the students back to the dining room table. The first draws on the 1902 Poison Squad experiments of Dr. Harvey Wiley, Chief Chemist of the Agriculture Department in Washington, D.C. In a series of experiments funded by Congress, Dr. Wiley recruited 12 male volunteers to test the dangers of food additives like borax, formaldehyde, copper sulfate, saltpeter, and sulfuric acid, used to preserve the quality and color of food (Blum, 2018). The second historical example revolves around the public policy debates over margarine and butter and the benefits of saturated, unsaturated fats, and trans fats, which stretched from the 1960s into the early 2000s (Offit, 2017).

The first case demonstrates both how the work scientists do for the public good can enter into conflict with other political forces, and how, with public trust in science, major policy measures can result. Dr. Wiley carefully documented the various negative side effects resulting from toxic food additives—headaches, stomachaches, vomiting, depression, and so forth—and the message he and his scientific team offered as a result of the Poison Squad experiments was clear: food additives posed clear risks to the health of the American populace. But when Wiley pushed for the federal regulation of food additives, lobbyists from the packaging and canning industries (as well as the Secretary of Agriculture himself) blocked the release of his findings to the public. Selections of his work were gradually leaked through newspapers, to no immediate effect, but when mothers and housewives across the country read his reports and realized the risks food additives posed to their infants and children, they launched a massive public mobilization campaign that was able to create lasting change. As a result, Congress passed the Meat Inspection and Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906, and Dr. Wiley's experiments eventually led to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA (Blum, 2018).

I use Dr. Wiley's work with the Poison Squad as a powerful example of how scientific work can reach the public through news media and lead to momentous improvements in public health. It also, significantly, offers an instance in which public buy-in, in this case with the pivotal role of mothers and housewives, who were often precluded from direct participation in politics, was critical to ensuring policy change. It offers a sense of optimism that with public trust in science, based in the belief that scientists are in fact conducting their research for the good of the populace, the results can be beneficial across generations.

In contrast, the second case I offer signals how a deficit in knowledge of, and appreciation for, the long and meticulous scientific process can open space for intermediaries to transform public views in potentially devastating ways. When debates over the risks posed by margarine and butter began in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in a context of rising rates of heart disease, they were prolonged because scientists needed to study the facts. It would take time, they stated, to follow the process of trial and error required before reaching a consensus on whether margarine was truly a heart-healthy alternative to butter. Knowledge of cholesterol, triglycerides, body fat composition, and the difference between types of fats (saturated, unsaturated, trans) was still in its infancy. But as scientists conducted their studies, refraining from offering a quick judgment, various political and nonpolitical actors stepped in with their own clear message: Margarine was undoubtedly the heart-healthy alternative to butter, given the need for the public to transition to a low-fat diet to reduce heart disease (Offit, 2017).

This message was taken up by, and spread, across the political sphere into media outlets and quickly shaped popular consumption practices. Prominent celebrity voices also played their part. Eleanor Roosevelt, for instance, appeared on a TV commercial for Good Luck margarine in 1959, immediately boosting its sales. One of the most influential voices in this period, however, was Senator George McGovern, who had recently been captivated by a low-fat diet and exercise regimen and who created a Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs in 1968 to publish a special report on nutrition. Although he teamed with a "group of political activists with no specific training or expertise in the field of nutrition" (Offit, 2017, p. 44), his committee report, published in 1977, stated that Americans should limit their use of butter to restrict their dietary fat, and managed to codify it in official government policy. Scientists quickly raised concern that such restrictions to dietary fat could have negative effects, but they could not yet give clear indicators as to why. Over the next decades, margarine quickly solidified its place at the dinner table.

Researchers, meanwhile, were scrambling both to understand how different types of fats acted on the body, and to determine whether there was in fact a clear link between dietary fat and heart disease. But the scientific process is lengthy, and the public often eager for a clear solution. McGovern's report offered that, and seemed to be supported by studies in the 1980s confirming that saturated fats (found in butter) contributed to heart disease, leading to an even greater consumption of margarine. Few realized that margarine contained high amounts of trans fats, the most dangerous, generally industrially synthesized, type of fat. It took over a decade more of scientific work before, in the early and mid-1990s, Harvard researchers concluded that trans fats were the real culprits behind the now-exponential rise in rates of heart disease.

The margarine-butter example offers a prolonged case study of how public celebrities and the media can exert a significant influence over popular consumption habits, particularly when the scientific jury is still out on a topic, deeply embroiled in meticulous research before converging on a clear recommendation. In this case, while studies spanning 20 years on over 300,000 people for a cost of $100 million (Offit, 2017) showed no link between the dietary fat found in butter and heart disease, margarine dominated until the Institute of Medicine announced boldly in 2002, after a series of conclusive studies, that no amount of trans fats was safe. Several years later, in January 2006, the FDA began to require packaged food manufacturers to list the quantity of trans fats on nutrition labels, and, "by the end of the year, 84 percent of Americans had heard of trans fats and at least could correctly identify their health risks" (Offit, 2017, pp. 57–58), leading to a sharp reduction in their consumption over the next decade.

From a modern vantage point, the historical policy successes that resulted both from Dr. Wiley's work on toxic food additives and the work of scientists on the dangers of trans fats seem nearly miraculous. But these cases are perhaps a valuable reminder that such victories often rest on a strong relationship between scientists and a receptive public. In this, the role of those in the middle, the go-betweens and intermediaries, are as important as ever.

These examples also signal the value in considering what the work of a responsible intermediary might be. Perhaps an important part of our role as science communication instructors in the classroom is precisely that: to model the responsible filtering and translation of scientific findings ourselves, so that we might prepare our students to embody their own function as intermediaries—between their labs and peers, their families, the social media sphere, and more. We can continue to repeat, after all, that scientists should speak more directly to the public, but this places the burden of responsibility on a single small segment of the populace.

Instead, the field of science communication today suggests that the conversation about what science is, what it offers, can and should expand much more broadly. As science communication educators, we can play a small but significant role by equipping students with the ability to ask rigorous questions, use precise and purposeful language, all while sharing scientific knowledge in a way that makes it relatable. In this way, we can help return science to people-centered stories with people-centered outcomes. While the challenge in restoring public trust in the scientific process is clear, bringing science back to the dinner table might be one step in the right direction.