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Gifted scientists are rarely also gifted communicators. During my career in journalism, I was fortunate to meet two of the very best.
The first was Carl Sagan, the brilliant Cornell University astronomy professor who turned the world into his classroom. Through the television series Cosmos and frequent appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, Sagan educated millions, if not billions, of people about the wonders of the universe.
The second was Anthony Fauci, the government infectious-disease expert who became a ubiquitous voice of authority in the terrifying early months of COVID-19 and who was instrumental in fast-tracking the vaccine that ended the pandemic. Like Sagan, and unlike most bureaucrats, Fauci had an exceptional ability to translate complex topics into everyday English.
For their efforts as communicators, Sagan, who died in 1996 at the age of 62, and Fauci, now 85, achieved celebrity but also experienced the flip-side of fame.
Envious of Sagan’s stardom, fellow scientists rejected him for membership in the National Academy of Sciences, minimizing his impressive research and dismissing him as a mere popularizer. In this elitist view, which became known as the “Sagan Effect,” public outreach and TV appearances meant a scientist couldn’t possibly be doing serious, rigorous work.
Fauci, for his part, now finds himself insanely targeted as a scapegoat for the COVID pandemic, a traumatic event that society has never adequately processed. Never mind that Fauci has saved millions of lives with his work on infectious diseases. Never mind that he treated Ebola and AIDS patients at the National Institutes of Health, displaying more bravery than his critics ever will. Never mind that he could have made millions of dollars in the private sector but chose to remain in public service.
The demonization of science communicators isn’t just a problem for them. It hurts all of us. What young person – watching Fauci being pilloried by Senate Republicans this month, threatened with prison time and cited for contempt of Congress – would be inspired to become a government scientist? What articulate scientist would want to make the effort to go on television and educate the public about their area of expertise? Better to keep your mouth shut and your head down.
When I worked at USA Today, we frequently invited newsmakers to meet with the editorial board. Over time, we developed a rule of thumb: the smaller the entourage, the more impressive the guest.
After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin came to our office accompanied by more than a dozen aides and hangers-on. Nagin was later sentenced to 10 years in federal prison after being convicted of conspiracy, bribery, wire fraud and money laundering.
By contrast, when Fauci visited the board to discuss whatever infectious disease was in the news, it was typically just him and his briefcase. He would patiently answer all our questions. He told us what he knew. He told us what he didn’t know. Like all good scientists, if new evidence emerged, he changed his mind.
On Presidents Day in 2020, a weary-looking Fauci met with us to discuss the novel coronavirus that was emerging in Asia. He’d been up all night working on the best way to safely evacuate COVID-infected passengers from a cruise ship in Japan. He could have easily canceled. Instead, he spent more than an hour informing our readers about the scary new disease.
The risk of contracting COVID in the United States at that moment was very low, he said, but that could change if it turned into a pandemic. The virus probably didn’t leak from a biolab in Wuhan, China, but that possibility couldn’t be ruled out and warranted further investigation.
Did Fauci err at times? Of course. He’s human. He initially understated the importance of wearing masks and underestimated the downsides of closing schools. His personal journals – vindictively culled from government servers by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and released by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. – are cringey in places. They show Fauci to have been star-struck by his dealings with Hollywood celebrities and marveling at his international renown.
But the obsessive effort by Paul and some of his Republican colleagues to try to turn a national hero into some kind of villain, to stage a Maoist show trial to catch Fauci in a perjury trap, is a travesty. No wonder Fauci followed his lawyer’s advice to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights.
Carl Sagan’s last book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, was a passionate defense of rationality against a rising tide of pseudo-science.
“We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements … profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster,” he wrote three decades ago. “We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”
The smear campaign against Tony Fauci proves the prescience of Sagan’s warning.
Bill Sternberg is an award-winning journalist and former editorial page editor of USA TODAY. He grew up in upstate New York and subscribes to The Front Page.
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