May 20th, 2009
Scientific methods on a barstool
By KELLY HOUSEN | spark
The Science Cafe in Newark, where everyone is (or at least seems) smarter over a bottle of wine.
Q: When did you hold your first Science Cafe here at Home Grown?
A: We started in April, the first one was April 22.
Q: What inspired you to start the Science Cafe?
A: This is the kind of thing that\'s done in a lot of college towns. I read an article in Wired magazine about a year or so ago, and it described Science Cafes at a variety of colleges and universities.
Q: So do people just come, eat the complimentary appetizers you provide and talk about science?
A: Every university probably has a different conception of what they should be, but for the most part they\'re all informal talks by scientists or engineers, mostly scientists, and the idea is to involve the community as much as possible. We also make sure that the talks are not formal, like an academic presentation. There are no Power Point props used.
Q: And what about this appeals to the regular person?
A: Science is typically pretty important in their lives. They have a vague idea that that\'s true, they know that all kinds of new drugs are being developed, new food crops, but they don\'t have firsthand knowledge because they are sometimes intimidated by academic science.
Q: How do you decide what speakers to invite?
A: For the most part, all of the people I\'ve invited I knew beforehand. I knew a little bit about their research and thought it would be interesting to the general public. The first speaker was talking about research he does in the Antarctic. He\'s a great photographer, and they drill down under the ice and he\'s down there in his SCUBA gear, taking photos. Another is doing really important work about air quality in Delaware. It\'s sort of an obvious public health question -- what is the quality of the air we\'re breathing. The last two were plant and soil professors. This one is about how genetically modified plants are put in your garden. People don\'t usually think about that, but there\'s a lot of genetic modification in things that we grow, and increasingly things that we eat. But more than anything, it was a hunch that I had that these people would be accessible to the public, and also they were willing to do it.
Q: Do you have a background in science?
A: I have a PhD in philosophy, I teach in the philosophy department and I also work at the Delaware Biotechnology Institute, which is part of the university. I run a program there called science ethics and public policy. A lot of my work is really about science and ethics, how science is conducted but also the products of science, changes that scientists are trying to convince us to undertake. I\'m interested in a lot of questions that really are about how communities benefit from the science that they are in fact paying for. We\'re funded by a big grant that we won, the EPSCoR grant, and this is one of the programs that\'s funded by it. If you pay federal taxes, a portion of it is going into the grant and all National Science Foundation grants. I think it\'s generally a good thing when the public knows what their tax dollars are going for.
TOM POWERS, NICOLE DONOFRIO AND AMY DOUGLAS
Science Cafe: Tom started the Science Cafe as a way to educate the general public about some of the research that\'s going on at the university.
What to expect: Nicole Donofrio and Amy Douglas were at last week\'s Science Cafe to discuss how genetically modified plants make it into your garden. Nicole is a plant pathologist, and though her focus is on a fungal disease that attacks rice, she\'s working with NovaFlora to combat a fungal disease that attacks roses. Amy works as a breeder at NovaFlora, and her work involves creating new plants. To do that she and her co-workers take tiny plantlet cells and irradiate them to alter their DNA, in a process called mutagenesis. Then they grow them, and see if mutation in the DNA resulted in a different color flower, different texture of the plant or more petals, for example. Those plants then wind up in your garden.
Stay informed: The schedule for Science Cafes over the summer will be posted at http://sepp.dbi.udel.edu, along with the info about the programs that fund it.
