A little more than a year ago, I participated in a meeting, organized by the National Academy of Sciences, on the subject of enhancing public understanding of science by encouraging greater collaboration between scientists and the media. Most of the scientists present were members of the academy, which serves both as an elected honor society and as an official adviser on science policy to the U.S. government. Across the room I spotted a slim man who seemed somehow familiar. His deliberate movements suggested an inner passion concealed beneath a subdued exterior. When I came close enough to read his name tag, I saw that he was the famous astronomer Carl Sagan, whom I had corresponded with but never met.
We introduced ourselves and began a conversation that strikes me now as poignant. Sagan mentioned having heard that I’d developed a potentially lethal cancer, and he asked how I was doing. I replied that I had undergone surgery and was now fully cured, as far as I knew. He volunteered that he, too, had had a brush with cancer. He had been diagnosed with myelodysplasia, a condition that can develop into leukemia, but he had received treatment and, he said, been cured. Unfortunately, not long after our meeting he developed complications from a bone-marrow transplant and died a few days before Christmas. I wonder, in retrospect, whether he owed his subdued appearance the day we met to a sense of what was to come.
Later that day, during a group discussion about the importance of communicating science to the public, I commented on a disturbing paradox: scientists who do communicate effectively with the public often find their colleagues responding with scorn, and even punishing them in ways that affect their careers. My remarks stimulated Sagan to address the meeting eloquently for 15 minutes. He described how he, too, had taken flak from other scientists, but--he paused, as if to choose his words carefully--the disadvantages to him had for the most part not been serious. As he uttered these words, I sensed my fellow academy members holding their breath, waiting to hear whether Sagan would mention a stinging insult he had suffered at the hands of academy members themselves. In fact, he passed tactfully over the scandal that had unfolded a few years earlier, when he had become one of the few people in the academy’s long history to have been provisionally elected to membership but then individually rejected in a special vote.
Sagan’s rejection would normally have remained unknown outside the academy, because members are supposed to keep election matters secret. Some unidentified members, however, were so outraged that they leaked the affair to the press. (I have no idea who they were, having missed that meeting.) Briefly, as described in the press, Sagan had been among many scientists nominated, his candidacy survived initial screening stages, and his name was on a long list of candidates placed on the ballot mailed to academy members. Ballot responses placed him among the 60 candidates receiving the most votes. These top candidates are usually accepted as elected, without further discussion, at the annual meeting.
