Science Doesn’t Happen in a Vacuum

By Sheeva Azma

Understanding that “science doesn’t happen in a vacuum” means knowing the many ways by which science is influenced by its social, historical, and cultural context.

Tweet

As a science writer now working adjacent to academic biomedical science, one lesson I’ve learned that I never heard about in my science classes is the following: science is shaped by the scientists who perform it, who are themselves shaped by society.

“Science doesn’t happen in a vacuum (well, some experiments may require a vacuum). All scientists are living and working within society, and that social context matters. What is legal to study? How much funding is available to study it? How will resulting new science and technology be used? These are all essential questions. Ultimately, social context cannot be divorced from the scientific process…all scientists are living and working within society, and that social context matters,” writes Ben Isaacoff of the American Chemical Society.

Studying science holistically, “with compassion and empathy”

“Science doesn’t happen in a vacuum,” David Wessner wrote in Science Magazine in 2019: “Yes, I’m a scientist, but I’m also a person living in a complex world. So are my students.”

In the article, Wessner talks about his efforts to present science within a social context: “…but I didn’t always. Why should I? After all, I was trained to be a scientist.”

As a graduate student studying HIV/AIDS during the AIDS epidemic of the late 1980s, Wessner wanted to become a professor and “help students understand and appreciate [the amazing science of HIV]. Examining the lived experience of HIV/AIDS wasn’t part of the plan.”

Then, one day, things changed. In the mid-1990s, Wessner, a postdoctoral researcher working in Washington, DC, visited the AIDS memorial quilt at the National Mall. He says that “The quilt’s visceral impact was transformative. I realized that science can’t be studied or taught from the confines of an ivory tower. Science needs to be studied holistically and taught with compassion and empathy.”

The AIDS memorial quilt was made of thousands of cloth panels sewn together in memory of the many people who had died of the disease. Wessner relates: “Walking past panel after panel, my research suddenly gained a new context. Because of the virus that piqued my scientific fancy, these individuals had lost their lives, many of them estranged from their families and ostracized from their communities.”

When Wessner says that science doesn’t occur in a vacuum, he means that science occurs in the context of life…and he argues that science can be enriched by this context.

Finding the human aspect of science through SciComm

I can relate to Wessner’s journey to more humanized science research. Though I left graduate school in 2013 (almost exactly 10 years ago as of writing this!), I have continued my research. I am currently writing a manuscript summarizing my research on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which I never had the chance to publish in grad school.

What has helped me the most in my independent research is personal stories: talking to people with PTSD, understanding their life’s challenges, and trying to figure out how much of all of that is captured in the scientific literature. The answer, I have found, is that a lot of it is not. Scientific questions that remain outstanding represent huge life challenges for people with PTSD. One example of this is that the poorly-understood link between substance use disorder and PTSD means that PTSD patients often struggle with substance use disorder (SUD) as a coping mechanism to alleviate their PTSD symptoms. As I am currently writing in my paper, there is no real neuroscientific understanding of why the two (SUD and PTSD) are so closely linked, and no cures for either the PTSD or SUD aspects.

Volunteering at a local veterans’ hospital, I have met many people with PTSD. Talking to people diagnosed with PTSD has refocused my interest in the disorder from one of purely scientific curiosity to one that is focused on solving problems for patients — which, of course, also corresponds to filling gaps in the literature.

Being a science communicator has helped in my effort to relate to people diagnosed with PTSD. Although people with PTSD are familiar with their own health conditions, they may not know about the latest research, and they may not know the neural basis of why they have the symptoms that they do. Talking to PTSD patients as a PTSD researcher, I have learned that if you can explain your research in a way that can make sense to a non-scientist, you might be surprised by the dialogue that you can establish with people. It has definitely added a human dimension to my science work that grounds empirical research in terms of real-world challenges.

The human aspect of biomedical research is the most important part, but we ignore it when we act like science happens in a vacuum. Sure, sometimes the human aspect makes research seem less exact and more messy, but let’s face it, life is messy and complex. As much as scientists would want to do so, it’s not possible to turn everything into a variable and examine it in complete isolation – and life doesn’t work that way, anyway.

What does this all mean for the way we currently do science? Since I founded Fancy Comma in 2020, I have always said that science communication should be part of undergraduate and graduate science programs. In terms of opportunities to talk to patients, as a graduate student at Georgetown, I regularly worked with patients, but only in a clinical setting. I did not sit down and have a casual conversation with them about their life’s challenges. I simply did not have the time or the opportunity. Should we be making time for these types of interactions in graduate science education? If we want to reinforce that science doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and want to embrace the true complexity of life, maybe we should be.

The word “vacuum” means “an empty space”

“Wait…what is a vacuum?” you might inquire by this point. The simple answer is that there is nothing in a vacuum.

The UK’s National Physical Laboratory defines a vacuum as “a volume empty of matter, sometimes called ‘free-space’.” According to Wikipedia, the word “vacuum” itself comes from the Latin for “empty space” or “void.”

Beyond the science definition of “vacuum,” Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries defines the phrase “in a vacuum” idiomatically, or as a turn of phrase, meaning “existing separately from other people, events, etc. when there should be a connection.”

A true vacuum is not a real concept outside of high school physics problems

In high school, when I was learning how to do physics problems, I was told to assume they were happening in a vacuum. This was because in a vacuum, there are no air particles, so the physics problems become simpler. In a vacuum, gravity is the only force that acts on objects. Air resistance goes away in a vacuum because there is no air. We assumed that the objects were existing in a vacuum for simplicity’s sake, so we could learn the basis of physics.

As scientists, sometimes we think our science occurs in a vacuum. In reality, we are performing science through the lenses of our own selves and of society.

Science happens in the context of society

While useful to teach physics, life (and science) does not actually occur in a vacuum. You can think of science as happening amidst the backdrop of society. Think of society as a busy coffeeshop, and scientists as coffeeshop patrons, trying to do their work amidst the hustle and bustle of people chatting, coffees being made, and all of the exciting things that happen at your local coffeeshop. Sure, all of the hustle and bustle makes it harder to concentrate, but also adds to the ambiance. Unless you want to work in a quiet library, you have no choice but to try to make it all work.

My love of coffee and coffeeshops aside: in less scientific terms, the phrase “science doesn’t happen in a vacuum” means that science occurs in the context of society. That includes our collective values, goals, expectations, beliefs, biases, and historical context. When one says that something that happens “in a vacuum,” that means that it happens in isolation. As UK NPL writes, though, “In practice, only partial vacuums are possible. A true vacuum is not even physically possible.”

When solving physics problems, for simplicity’s sake, we can assume that an event is happening in a vacuum, in isolation from other events…but in the real world, that’s not possible. “Treating my classroom as separate from the outside world is idealistic at best and foolhardy at worst,” opined Wessner in the 2019 Science article.

Remember when I blogged about the historical context of the founding of Science Service amidst the heyday of racist (and false) theories relating to selective breeding and eugenics that paralleled the rise of white supremacy in the United States back then? Actually, that was not the only controversy in the 1920s, when Science Service (now Science News) was founded. Society in the United States was undergoing huge changes in the post-World War I era. Science had largely been the realm of the wealthy or middle-class citizen, and around the turn of the 20th century, scientists stopped being as popular. “What would capture the public’s attention in the 1920s were stories presenting scientists behaving as elitists, and science as one of the aspects of modernity,” writes Carisa Sousa. Understanding the historical and personal context of science can help us tease apart bias from facts.

Learning lessons from sociology to improve scientific impact

Is it weird that, when I was thinking of a way to describe the relationship between science and society, chemistry metaphors popped into my head? Maybe not, because as SciCommers know, metaphors (and storytelling) are a great way to help establish scientific understanding.

The conversation between science and society is a two-way reaction in my mind. Science flows through to society, and society influences science, too. When people say that “science doesn’t happen in a vacuum,” they mean that science occurs in the context of the larger society: our collective values, beliefs, experiences, biases, goals, and so on. Here’s a blog from MindTheGraph about ways culture influences science research. The University of California at Berkeley also has a dedicated mini-course on the subject of society influencing science.

Sociologists study human society: its development, structure, and functioning. To sociologists, the idea that science is shaped by the people who perform it, and the people for whom its intended to help, is nothing new. Yet the phrase “science doesn’t happen in a vacuum” isn’t something I learned in grad school or even as an undergrad at MIT. It’s something I realized after years of being outside of science, seeking to apply my skills and knowledge to solve real-world problems.

Working with Kelly Tabbutt, then a PhD student in sociology and now a sociology professor, I realized that a huge piece of science is the social aspect — yet we rarely talk about it in science training programs. As Kelly wrote for Fancy Comma about the relevance of sociology in a post-pandemic world, “In order to rebuild and improve upon our societies, we need more than policies and funding — we need the cooperation and legitimation of the general public.”

Illustrating the link between science and society

Before I wrote any part of this post, I opened a graphics editor and came up with a diagram representing the dialogue between science and society. The exercise helped me organize my thoughts for this post.

In trying to illustrate the relationship between science and society, I borrowed the the double arrow from chemistry. In chemistry textbooks, it’s used to represent chemical equilibrium reactions.

Want to see what I came up with? Check out my artwork (right-click here to save a copy)!

If you’ve taken chemistry, you know that the double arrow isn’t always a perfect two-way street. Sometimes, one side of the reaction is overrepresented, and the other side of the reaction occurs much less often. One could argue that science flows out to society way more than society flows to science.

Science clearly improves lives by shedding light on new truths that can be applied to advance health, technology, shape new policies, and generally help the world innovate. Society influences science by influencing expectations, values, beliefs, and goals of scientists; creating stereotypes about “who looks like a scientist”; and providing a historical context, norms, and culture that shape research questions. Everyday people can also do science; when they do, that’s called citizen science. Public input from everyday people (and, in the biomedical world, patients) also sometimes drives science research and its questions.

Science is performed by people, for society

There are definitely huge divides when it comes to science literacy and related skills such as critical thinking between scientists and the non-scientist public. Many science communicators (including us!) work to bridge that gap.

Scientists recognize that science is a process, while the media often portrays science as a means to an end. In reality, hypotheses are continually tested and refined, proven and disproven, and the facts evolve as more discoveries happen.

How can we improve the dialogue between science and society? The first step is realizing that science doesn’t happen in a vacuum.