We have built a science that is objective, cold, individualistic, precise, and verifiable, so precise that it uses a lexicon full of little-known techniques and expressions. In this science, we scholars have become a kind of pre-conciliar priests of a new sect in which the robe imitates the dawn. We speak a new Latin language unknown to the general public unfamiliar with scientific language, we use incomprehensible terms and we perform experiments that are inexplicable to the majority. This science usually turns its back on people, who live in a separate world, far from society and its needs and problems.
They are preoccupied with providing solutions that often improve people’s lives and the environment, but without being able to be understood by those who will benefit from them.
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Science, like us, is the fruit of our time, such that knowledge develops, grows and matures in a collective and supportive manner. In this coldness, objectivity and individualism that science suggests, we lose the richness of our emotions. Can you imagine Darwin’s astonishment when he visited the Galapagos Islands?
In fact, he saw the same thing as the rest of the Beagle crew, but he was the only one who looked at the birds differently. To his surprise, his different way of looking at the world was the seed that germinated for over twenty years until it took the revolutionary form of The Origin of Species. Or, what emotions might have overwhelmed Sarah Gilbert when the Wimbledon crowd applauded her for five minutes for developing a Covid-19 vaccine?
We scientists are still girls who are amazed to look at the world around us with new eyes every day. Our infinite capacity for wonder gives us joy, and thus the resilience needed to continue discovering, inventing, and building.
This is why face-to-face communication is so nourishing: people are a mirror of ourselves, of our amazement, of our smile when we learn something new. When we see girls smiling in front of a bicarbonate volcano, exploring the world of the invisible with a microscope, building compost bins and tending gardens, we are nourished by the hope of a future in which science does not turn its back on society, but is integrated into it. We will stop being the villains in superhero movies. Because in reality, we just want a better future, a better world where we all fit in.
*UV Institute for Basic Sciences
