Bryn Mawr Professor of Chemistry Michelle Francl has long been a voice for greater scientific literacy. In addition to being one of chemistry's most cited researchers, she has taken on pseudo-science in a number of media outlets including Slate and on NPR. A prolific writer, Francl's essays on science, culture and policy appear regularly in Nature Chemistry and in several collections as well as on her own blogs.
So it should come as no surprise that Francl is among the speakers at Philadelphia's March for Science this Saturday, April 22.
Francl shared some of her thoughts about why she's marching with NBC-10 Philadelphia.
NBC10: Tell me what you will be talking about at the March for Science.
Francl: I’m going to try to break down the standard notion of what a scientist looks like. There is a test anthropologists use called “Draw a Scientist” test, which does just what it says, hands people a blank sheet of paper and asks them to draw a scientist. The image that surfaces is incredibly consistent. People draw a man—and it’s almost always a man—in a lab coat with crazy hair, glasses at a lab bench with bubbling beakers and test-tubes.
But #actualLivingScientists (to use a popular hashtag) don’t look like that. They are short plump women with gray hair, like me. They are tall athletic young women from New Jersey…and brilliant women from Mexico. They wear headscarves and geeky t-shirts and leggings—and their lab coats. They are gay young men with beautiful bass voices, like my son.
People think that it doesn’t matter who does science, because science is supposed to be objective, and the people who do it like Vulcans, dispassionate, unemotional. They think that if it is there to be discovered, and we just have white men looking, someone will still find it. (Nuclear fission was discovered at least three times: twice by women and once by a man, some years later; he won the Nobel for it.)
I see science as a “long, loving look at the real”—scientists are incredibly passionate about what they study. Irish crystallographer Kathleen Lonsdale figured out the structure of a key molecular building block, benzene, on her kitchen table while on maternity leave. What you are passionate about determines everything, to quote the former head of the Jesuits, Father Pedro Arupe:
What you are in love with,
what seizes your imagination, will affect everything.
It will decide
what will get you out of bed in the morning,
what you do with your evenings,
how you spend your weekends,
what you read
whom you know,
what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.
And I would add, what science you do! If we limit who we let in the door to become scientists, we are limiting what science can be passionate about and thereby limiting our imagination. We are all the poorer for it. It does matters who does science, and the best science will emerge when many excellent people with different passions and backgrounds and ideas come together. There is no shortage of challenging and important problems we could all use solved—from antibiotic resistance to climate change.
And I will talk a little bit about my work with the Vatican Observatory, that for me science is a door into the sacred.
Read the rest of the interview on the NBC10 website.
Also speaking at the march will be Shaughnessy Naughton '99.
Students interested in attending the Philadelphia march can get more information through LILAC. There will also be a bus taking students to the March for Science in Washington, D.C. The bus leaves Pem Arch at 6 a.m. on Saturday with an expected return of around 9 p.m. There is a $5 transportation fee. Those interested in going should contact Emily Geoghegan '17 via email. There is expected to be room on the bus for those who decide to go at the last minute, just show up with $5 and, as long as there's space, your name will be added to the list.