Communicating Science

I was very much pleased to read about ACS’s support of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellows Program (C&EN, June 29, page 33). This superb program, with its long and distinguished history, has particular meaning for me.

Back in the 1990s, when I was executive director of the Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation, the foundation supported, as I recall, up to 10 Mass Media Fellows annually, specifically to encourage chemistry (writ large) and chemical engineering (ditto) graduate students and postdoctoral researchers to take part in the program. Prior to that, discouragingly few of the Mass Media Fellows came from our disciplines, and for reasons that never became clear, ACS was at that time not interested in providing support.

It was a privilege to get to know many of these impressive women and men. I was delighted at their interest and struck by their passion and persistence (kudos to those research advisers who recognized or were persuaded of the value of this experience). What was intriguing about the program’s outcomes was that about half the participants did go into careers in science communication in one form or another. The remaining, except for those who may have changed careers completely, went back to their prior career paths. But they all recognized that they returned equipped with the skills to tell the stories of their science—whether chemistry or another—to a nonspecialist public. This was, and I hope remains, a valuable and much appreciated program outcome.

Hearty congratulations to ACS for its support of the program.

Robert L. Lichter
Great Barrington, Mass.