EDITOR'S NOTE
Dear readers,
It is my pleasure to announce that a new member has joined our editorial team: Luisa Massarani, a researcher who has long devoted herself to studying science communication and who currently serves as head of the Casa de Oswaldo Cruz/Fiocruz's Museum of Life, where she was responsible for establishing the Center for Studies on Science Communication (http://bit.ly/63zyWY). The Center, whose goal is to foster reflection on issues within the vital field of science communication, is the antipode of staying cloistered inside an Ivory Castle, of restricting ourselves to an esoteric jargon spoken only with peers, or of sealing ourselves tightly within the competitive world of "publish or perish" - a world often times quite foreign to the needs, reasoning, or language of social groups dwelling outside of academia.
História, Ciências, Saúde - Manguinhos once had a department on museums, but it was eliminated, despite the good number of articles we published on the topic, including a special issue that completely sold out in print: Museums and the Sciences (vol.12, supplement, 2005, available online at SciELO). Dialogues Between Science and Art (vol.13, supplement, Oct. 2006) was another successful endeavor. Now, with the help of Massarani, we intend to make studies on science communication a permanent fixture here at the journal. These articles will be of value not only to the readers and contributors who are already in the habit of visiting our pages but also to those enticed into the fold by our new effort. We will not be creating a specific department on science communication, as we did with the topic of museums before. Instead, our new editor will work at gathering good contributions to our current departments in the form of historical studies - including those in the present tense - about science and technology communication in whatever form it takes: museums, newspapers, the internet, television, exhibits, cartoons, movies, comics, outdoor events, plastic arts, and so on.
Science communication has advanced in Brazil, as exemplified by the outstanding journal Boletim da Fapesp (http://bit.ly/93aU20). It has seen growth as an academic field as well. According to the data bank maintained by Brazil's federal research funding agency Capes, in 1985 only one doctoral dissertation was defended on the topic, while some forty theses and dissertations are now written every year. In 2009, the Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro's Casa da Ciência, the Center for Sciences and Higher Distance Education of the State of Rio de Janeiro, and the Museum of Astronomy and Related Sciences, with the support of the Latin American and Caribbean Network for Popularizing Science and Technology (Red-Pop), the Brazilian Association of Science Centers and Museums, and the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology's Department for the Popularization and Dissemination of Science and Technology, introduced a specialization course in Science Communication, following in the steps of earlier educational initiatives, like the University of São Paulo's José Reis Center and the program in Bioscience Education, Dissemination, and Management at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro's Medical Biochemistry Institute.
To show how seriously we're taking this matter, the current issue offers a three-article dossier on the topic. In "Science on the front page," Flavia Natércia da Silva Medeiros, Marina Ramalho, and Luisa Massarani herself analyze front-page leads on science and technology published in 2006 in an elite nationwide newspaper, Folha de S.Paulo, and in two regional papers, Pernambuco's Jornal do Commercio and Rio Grande do Sul's Zero Hora. "The framing of transgenics in São Paulo newspapers," by Danilo Rothberg and Danilo Brancalhão Berbel, looks at how Folha de S.Paulo and O Estado de S.Paulo framed and addressed topics on the safety of transgenic food products and assesses how this information may potentially contribute to political participation, focusing specifically on a public consultation conducted by Brazil's National Health Surveillance Agency (Anvisa) in 2007. Iara Maria de Almeida Souza and Amanda Muniz Logeto Caitité have contributed "The amazing story of the fraudulent cloned embryos and what it tells us about science, technology, and the media." Based on news reports from Brazilian papers, they analyze the fraud committed by South Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang. The media generally attend to the discoveries of science and the new possibilities it promises, but in this case science is shown the other way around, as its end results become challenged in consequence both of the tension between the different elements comprising the field and of the illicit actions at issue.
In another department, you will read an article that is closely related to the topic of the dossier Science and the Media: the review of a book edited by Regina Maria Marteleto and Eduardo Navarro Stotz, entitled Informação, saúde e redes sociais: diálogos de conhecimentos nas comunidades da Maré (Information, health, and social networks: knowledge in dialogue within the communities of Maré). In tune with our contemporary evaluation of the processes of science communication, its pages present a fine analysis of the social and collective dimensions of the construction of knowledge.
We sincerely hope our new initiative will attract similarly valuable contributions to História, Ciências, Saúde - Manguinhos.
On a final note, I personally hope all our readers and contributors will enjoy great times with friends and colleagues during the exciting World Cup play-offs. May the best team win!
Jaime L. Benchimol
Editor
Publication Dates
-
Publication in this collection
23 July 2010 -
Date of issue
June 2010
