Building Bridges Between Science and Society

One of the most popular writers and lecturers on scientific topics, Stephen Jay Gould aims to make science more accessible to the public.

Published March 1, 2000

By Fred Moreno, Anne de León, and Jennifer Tang
Academy Contributors

When he was five years old, Stephen Jay Gould took the short trip from Queens to the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan with his father. That visit sparked an interest in paleontology that blossomed throughout his boyhood and teenage years in New York City’s public schools.

Today, some 50-plus years later, Gould has become one of the most popular writers and lecturers on scientific topics. His 20 books and hundreds of essays, reviews, and articles have contributed immeasurably to building bridges between science and society. Since 1994, his essays, “On Common Ground,” have appeared regularly in The New York Academy of Sciences’ (the Academy’s) magazine, The Sciences, helping fulfill one of the Academy’s prime missions: advancing the understanding of science and technology. His essays in The Sciences reflect Gould’s view of scientific writing as a critical, rather than purely instructional or educational, genre.

“I believe my kind of writing is part of a humanistic tradition, sort of what Galileo did when he wrote his books as Italian dialogues and not as Latin treatises,” he says. “Even the conceptually most complex material can be written for general audiences without dumbing it down.”

Inspiring Critical Debate

But Gould is much more than just a popular author of accessible essays and books. A productive scholar (currently on the faculty at Harvard), his ideas on the theory of evolution and the interpretation of fossil evidence have inspired critical debates among biological and geological scientists. His insights into the importance of statistical reasoning and the meaning of variation are also significant and have more personal connotations: they were derived as a long-term survivor of abdominal mesothelioma, a rare form of cancer that was usually fatal at the time of his diagnosis in 1982.

“My statistical training taught me that the ‘median mortality of eight months’ for mesothelioma was not necessarily a prediction about me,” he says. “I decided that I was going to be in the half that lives longer.”

Gould has said that one of his goals is to make people “less scared” of science. His essays in The Sciences are playing a role in doing just that.