In class it was mentioned that art is for the consumption of everybody, whereas science isn’t nearly as accessible.  Now although this is true, I feel that there are some similarities between science and art that are not always addressed.  Over the summer I read the book “This is Your Brain on Music” by Daniel Levitin and he raised some interesting points on this issue.  The author actually worked as a music producer prior to becoming a neuroscientist and as such had experience working in both fields.  I am paraphrasing, but as I understand it he basically states that a musician will spend a significant amount of time writing and recording material for an album and upon public release of this material, it enters the hands of critics and the general public, who will assess its merits and produce an opinion on it.  Basically, is it good or bad?  The same may be said of science, from my understanding a group of scientists may work on a paper for years potentially, when it is finished the draft is sent to a journal and reviewers will “critique it”, accept it and provide feedback or they will decline it and the scientists will have to submit it elsewhere.  I am not saying that they are the same thing, an album getting a positive review from an online music magazine like Pitchfork isn’t nearly the same as getting a paper published in Nature.  But the basic idea is that the results of what is sometimes a number of years worth of work gets published and is then subsequently judged and scrutinized by the community, be it the arts community or the scientific community.

The big difference between the two, as we discussed in class is that art can be readily consumed by everyone and everyone has an opinion on it.  With science this is much different.  First of all not all journals are open access, if I was not at UBC I would have to pay a hefty fee to read some journals and furthermore, without my education in molecular biology and biochemistry I would not be able to understand these papers at all ( and I still have trouble understanding sometimes).  Whereas, you don’t need any background at all to enjoy a song on the radio.  But that is not to say that the public can’t enjoy it if they are interested in it.  I would argue that science is for everyone and that it is important for everyone to have some kind understanding of it, especially in health sciences when misinformation is so easily spread.  One only has to look so far as the whole vaccines cause autism thing that keeps getting tossed around to know that information of a scientific nature can be misleading or at least used in a misleading way.  The problem is that science is hard and as such producing information on it that can be readily consumed by the general public without simplifying it too much so that it loses its meaning is also hard.  Additionally, news stories have to generate interest or no one will read them.  This poses a problem for science journalism as well.  How do you make a scientific discovery exciting without distorting it.  A scientist may say “A may be correlated to B” but in a newspaper report that doesn’t really make for a good headline, for them it might be more interesting to say “A causes B” but that would be misleading.  To conclude I don’t think that there is any reason why science can’t be accessible, in fact I think that it should be.  It is just that it is hard to make it interesting and accessible without potentially distorting it.