Journalist's Lecture Explores the Untapped Value of Science's 'Outliers'
If you’re a scientist in search of a research subject, you may be likely to focus on what helps the most people or brings in the most money -- in other words, the top of the bell curve.
That’s where “the good stuff” is assumed to be -- “the stuff that's most applicable to most things most of the time,” said journalist Matthew LaPlante.
This is especially true in medical research, largely because so much funding comes from pharmaceutical companies, he said. “If I'm going to spend millions of dollars creating a pill, I'm going to want it to help as many people as possible, right?”
But in an upcoming lecture, “Superlative: Why the Biggest Ideas in Science Get the Shortest Shrift,” LaPlante will explain why true change comes from the often-ignored fringes of the bell curve -- the outliers.
“What we’re learning now, of course, is that the . . . diversity that give us superlative outliers – the biggest, fastest, strongest, smartest and whatever-est of anything — can help us pinpoint what our genes actually do and are capable of under various conditions of expression,” he said.
LaPlante, a faculty member in the Department of Journalism and Communication, will speak at 11:30 a.m. Wednesday, Jan. 18, as part of the Communicating Science Series, hosted by USU’s Climate Adaption Science group.
The interdisciplinary lecture series explores how to effectively communicate science to diverse audiences using diverse media. The free lecture will take place in room 154 of the Merrill-Cazier Library. Light refreshments will be served.
As a journalist and communicator, LaPlante is drawn to those outlying lines of the bell curve because, he says, “superlative things are just darn interesting.”
Take, for instance, research about Utah’s average, ordinary aspen tree. “I'm a good writer,” he said, “but I don't think I could get many people interested.”
But a look at arboreal outliers, like an Aspen clone in central Utah that is the world's largest known organism, draws much more attention.
“When I wrote about Pando,” he said, “people flipped. I still take emails, still get calls, and I can still command any party conversation just by starting to tell the story of Pando. “
For more information:
Matthew LaPlante, matthew.laplante@usu.edu, 435-797-1353
https://climateadaptation.usu.edu/communicating-science/
Writer and contact: Janelle Hyatt, Janelle.hyatt@usu.edu, 435-797-0289
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