12th International Conference on Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST), Florence,Italy,18-20 April 2012. Published as book chapter in:Bucchi, M.,&Trench,B.(Eds.)(2012).Quality,Honesty and Beauty in Science and Technology Communication: PCST 2012 Book of Papers (Proceedings of the 12th International Conference"Public Communication of Science and Technology", Florence, Italy, 18-20 April 2012).Vicenza: Observa Science in Society,pp.295-298.

Pcst-12 Proceedings 70. Science and Celebrity Studies: Towards a Framework for Analysing Scientists in Public Declan Fahy, School of Communication, American University, Washington, DC Introduction In 2006, Oxford University Press published a collection of essays on the life and work of writer and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. The book called him “the world famous author . . . [who] has come to play a prominent role as a leading public intellectual.”1 This discourse of fame has been used by commentators and journalists to describe other scientists active in the public arena. The Daily Telegraph called Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking “the world’s most famous living scientist.”2 The New York Times called American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson “a space-savvy celebrity.”3 Nature called Oxford professor Susan Green- field “a celebrity neuroscientist.”4 But what does it mean for a scientist to be a celebrity? How does a scientist become a ce- lebrity? And how can a scientist be analysed as a celebrity? This conceptual paper addresses these questions by proposing a theoretical framework for analysing scientists in public, a framework grounded in field of celebrity studies. It outlines the core characteristics of celeb- 295 rity in general and then applies these characteristics to science in particular. It then demon- strates how these characteristics are present in the media portrayals of the lives of selected high-profile scientists.

Science and Celebrity Studies Celebrity is a useful concept for analysing public figures because it has come to be “a key site of media attention and personal aspiration, as well as one of the key places where cultural meanings are negotiated and organised.”5 Historian Janet Browne examined Charles Darwin as an 19th-century scientific celebrity, arguing that celebrity was an interesting area in which to “think about the manufacture of scientific identities.”6

1 Graften, A. and Ridley, M. (eds.). 2006. Richard Dawkins: How a scientist changed the way we think. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2 Bowater, D. 2012. Stephen Hawking: Women are a complete mystery. The Daily Telegraph. 4 January. Available from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/stephen-hawking/8993228/Stephen-Hawking- Women-are-a-complete-mystery.html [Accessed 4 January 2012]. 3 Martel, N. 2004. Mysteries of life, time and space (and green slime).The New York Times. 28 Septem- ber. Arts/Culture, p. 5. 4 Nature. 2004. Popularizer Greenfield is blackballed by peers. Nature. 429, p. 9. 5 Turner, G. 2004. Understanding Celebrity. London: Sage. p. 6 6 Browne, J. 2003. Charles Darwin as a celebrity. Science in Context. 16(1/2), p. 176. Pcst International Conference (Florence – Italy, 2012)

The Visible Scientists (1977) by Rae Goodell identified a new type of scientist that emerged on the U.S. public stage in the 1960s and 1970s. She argued that these scientists, including astronomer Carl Sagan and anthropologist Margaret Mead, used mass media to influence public opinion and science policy, at a time when new communication technologies were reshaping social and personal life, and the mass media was becoming a venue for the public contestation of scientific issues.7 For Goodell, these scientists shared five media-focused characteristics: they had ahot top- ic, were controversial, were articulate, had a colorful image, and had a credible reputation. Goodell used the terms visibility and celebrity as synonymous, but, since her book was writ- ten, the analysis of celebrity has been an emerging academic field, with a range of writings from different perspectives on the subject – thereby decoupling the ideas of visibility and celebrity. Graeme Turner’s Understanding Celebrity gives a three-part definition of celebrity. He defined it as: A genre of representation . . . ; it is a commodity traded by the promotions, publicity and media industries that produce these representations and their effects; and it is a cultural formation that has a social function.8 Breaking this definition down into its constituent parts, as follows, reveals more about the central features of celebrity. 1. First, celebrity as a genre of representation means that there is an intense person- alisation in an individual’s media portrayal. The individual is portrayed as unique, distinctive, and coverage attempts to describe their authentic nature. Thereisa 296 merging of their public and private selves in their representations. This intertextual representation occurs across various media.9 2. Second, celebrities are commodities. They become commodities to sell their own books, broadcasts, and cultural products. Also, they can promote another commod- ity, such as a book or television show or magazine, their name serving as what An- drew Wernick called a promotional booster for these products.10 3. Third, a celebrity’s social function involves the way celebrities represent something more than themselves, supplying what scholar Jessica Evans called “a human dimen- sion to the public world, personifying or personalizing things that may otherwise be quite abstract.”11 Scholar Sue Holmes said celebrities with lasting popularity have a “deep, structural relationship with the ideological contexts of their times,” meaning that their image becomes a means of working over useful questions of their times.12

7 Goodall, R. 1975. The Visible Scientists. Boston: Little Brown and Company. 8 Turner, 2004, p. 9. 9 For detailed discussions of celebrity, see: Dyer, R. 1988. Stars. 2nd edition. London: BFI Publishing; Evans, J. 2005. Celebrity: what’s the media got to do with it IN: Evans, J. and Hesmondhalgh, D. (eds.) Understanding Media: Inside celebrity. Maidenhead: Open University Press; and Marshall, D. P. 1997. Celebrity and Power: Fame in contemporary culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 10 Wernick, A. 1991. Promotional Culture: Advertising, ideology and symbolic expression. New York: Sage. 11 Evans, 2005, p. 6. 12 Holmes, S. 2005. ‘Starring . . . Dyer?’: Re-visiting star studies and contemporary celebrity culture. Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture. 2(2), pp6-21. p.12. Pcst-12 Proceedings

Characteristics of Celebrity Scientists Based on these ideas from celebrity studies, I argue that there are five salient characteristics of famous scientists. As I outline these characteristics, I will illustrate how these characteris- tics are present in the lives of selected scientists that have been described using discourses of fame. 1. The scientist’s represented images feature a blurring of their public and private lives The point at which someone becomes a celebrity is when media coverage moves from re- porting their public lives to describing their private lives.13 Stephen Hawking is a strong il- lustrative example of how this principle can be applied to a scientist. As well as his scientific work being reported, his former wife wrote a book about their life together, Music to Move the Stars (2000), that featured intimate details of their emotional and romantic lives. Also, there was media coverage of his divorce and second marriage. For example, Vanity Fair ex- plored the police investigation into a series of apparently suspicious injuries that Hawking suffered during his second marriage.14 2. The scientist is a tradable cultural commodity Communicating with broader audiences through trade publishing or commercial television involves the branding and marketing and promotion of the scientist as author or presenter – often involving cross-media promotion. For example, Richard Dawkins’s book The God De- lusion (2006) was released around the same time as the television documentary Root of All Evil? (2006) was aired on Britain’s Channel 4. 3. The scientist’s representations feature the tensions and contradictions inherent in fame 297 The Visible Scientists noted that high-profile scientists had an “overrated credibility with the public.”15 This is also a pattern in the representation of scientific celebrity: the tension between public profile and scientific status. As an example, the scientific output of Oxford professor Susan Greenfield has been criticized. In one case, an anonymous scientist was- re ported in The Observer newspaper as saying: “A lot of what she says does not pass muster academically. Britain is very strong on neuroscience and compared to the leaders in the field, she is simply not in the same league. She is never cited in research papers.”16 4. The scientist’s public image is constructed around discourses of truth, reason and rationality The fame of various professions is tied to different discourses. David Marshall in his book Celebrity and Power (1997) said the film star is constructed around discourses of individuality and freedom, the television star is constructed around discourses of familiarity and wide- spread acceptability, and the popular music celebrity is constructed around discourses of authenticity.17 I argue that celebrity scientists are constructed around discourses of truth,

13 Turner, 2004. 14 Bachrach, J. 2004. A beautiful mind, an ugly possibility. Vanity Fair [Online]. June. Available from: http://www.vanityfair.com/fame/features/2004/06/hawking200406 [Accessed 20 November 2008]. 15 Goodell, 1977, p. 202. 16 O’Hagan, S. 2003. Desperately psyching Susan: sexy or serious? The Observer. 7 September. Review, p. 5. 17 Marshall, D. P. 1997. Celebrity and Power: Fame in contemporary culture. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis. Pcst International Conference (Florence – Italy, 2012)

reason and rationality. And they are different from other types of celebrities in that their public image has epistemological and ideological dimensions. This can be seen, for example, in the way Hawking is described. A recurring pattern of representation presents his mind as existing outside his body, in another realm where knowledge is found.18 Time magazine said: “Even as he sits helpless in his wheelchair, his mind seems to soar ever more brilliantly across the vastness of space and time to unlock the secrets of the universe.”19 This representation underscores the claimed “epistemic exceptionalism” of science.20 5. The scientist has a structural relationship with the ideological tensions of their times Famous figures that have lasting popularity are emblematic of the socio-cultural tensions of their times. Neil deGrasse Tyson, an African-American astrophysicist who directs New York’s Hayden Planetarium, is an illustrative example of this idea. His autobiography frames his life and career partly in terms of how he came of age in post-1960s America. He described how he became an astrophysicist in spite of NASA, which, in its early years, was sending white as- tronauts into space while poverty grew in inner city black communities. He wrote about how he dealt with racial stereotypes involved with being a black man who did not occupy a public role as an athlete or entertainer, and about how he became a public expert in a topic that had nothing to do with race.21 These issues were tensions of his time reflected through his image.

Discussion This framework is proposed as a way of analysing prominent scientists in public as celebrities. These characteristics are likely to be present, to a greater or lesser degree, in celebrity scien- 298 tists. Some of these characteristics are likely to be more prominent at different times over the course of a scientist’s individual career. Future work might examine the lives and careers of particular high-profile scientists, in different countries, to examine how these characteristics play out in individual scientists’ lives. This work could illuminate how the fame of scientists, like the fame of other figures, sits at what historian of fame Leo Braudy called “the crossroads of the familiar and the unprecedented, where personal psychology, social context, and his- torical tradition meet.”22

18 See also: Mialet, H. 2003. Reading Hawking’s presence: an interview with a self-effacing man.Critical Inquiry. 29(4), p571-598. 19 Cited on the back cover of Hawking, S. 1988. A Brief History of Time: From the big bang to black holes. London: Bantam Books. 20 Christidou, V., Dimopoulos, K. & Koulaidis, V. 2004. Constructing social representations of science and technology: The role of metaphors in the press and the popular scientific magazines. Public Un- derstanding of Science. 13(3), p. 358. 21 For a full discussion, see Tyson, N.D. 2004. The Sky is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astro- physicist. Amherst: Prometheus Books. 22 Braudy, L. 1997. The Frenzy of Renown. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 16.