Historical moments in public understanding of science: 1977, The Visible Scientists identifies a new scientist for the mass media age

摘要

Published 40 years ago, The Visible Scientists (1977) remains a landmark work in the public understanding of science. It was written by Rae Simpson under her former name Rae Goodell, who was at the time of its publication an assistant professor of science writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She first set out her ideas in her 1975 doctoral dissertation in communication studies at Stanford University. Two years later, major commercial publisher Little, Brown released a revised version of her thesis as a trade book aimed at a wider audience. From these origins, the book has gone on to be so influential that its title has become an established term in the lexicon of science communication scholarship. The Encyclopedia of Science and Technology Communication had an entry on 'visible scientist' (Bucchi, 2010: 932). The term 'visible scientists' for Bucchi and Trench (2016: 160) was one of 10 keywords for understanding research in the field because it described a phenomenon that had ongoing interest for scholars: the nature and impact of scientists who are well known outside their specialist fields and are prominent in public life. An excerpt of The Visible Scientists was included in a major four-volume anthology of 79 foundational works in the field, with editors of the collection noting that the book has earned over time the status of germinal text (Bucchi and Trench, 2015). My own work is heavily indebted to Goodell, and I will argue in this retrospective that The Visible Scientists was a notable work for three reasons. It classified a new type of public scientist, introduced a novel concept that explained how this new type of public scientist emerged and had impact, and identified how the mass media influenced the workings of the scientific enterprise. I will also argue that the book has influenced several lines of contemporary scholarship, not least because its core idea of visibility remains a fruitful concept for explaining how selected scientists become recognised in popular culture and how they influence political and public debate.