Communicating science to the general public: role of scientists and science writers

Today, we see an increasing division of labour between scientists who are content with producing knowledge and science writers who are content with communicating this knowledge to a broad audience. We tend to justify this separation as inevitable because science has become so complicated that scientists have neither the time nor the skill required to communicate science to the general public and science writers have neither the opportunity nor the skill required to produce knowledge. While this may be true to some extent, I worry that scientists are using the supposed complexity of science as an excuse to shirk responsibility and unnecessarily exaggerate the division of labour. © 2021, Current Science. All rights reserved.