Pint of Science festival is running this year from 13-15th May across Edinburgh.
Festival programme below
A jar of preserved sheep’s ovaries and an interpretive dance demonstrating how sperm swim wouldn’t normally accompany a cold, crisp pint of Tennent’s. But I encountered both of these one Tuesday night in an Edinburgh pub last May, alongside a rather unsettling analogy comparing the structure of testicles to spaghetti bolognese.
I was one of over 15,000 audience members at pubs across 41 cities in the UK alone, attending Pint of Science, a festival bringing scientists out of the lab to give fun, informal talks worldwide. The aim is to demystify science in a non-pretentious environment where researchers can have face-to-face conversations with members of the public.
The idea grew from a patient-engagement initiative where Pint of Science co-founders Dr Praveen Paul and Dr Michael Motskin were researching neurodegeneration and decided to invite patients affected by related conditions to visit their labs. Following the success of this, Praveen tells me it helped them realise, “Okay, people are actually interested in coming to see us in our ‘native environment’ of a lab -why don’t we take this out to them?” From this, Pint of Science was born. 11 years on, it now takes place in over 500 cities across 25 countries, run predominantly by volunteer scientists.
While engaging non-scientists and humanising the role of the researcher is a key goal of Pint of Science, its value to scientists is just as integral. Praveen does not shy away from this fact: “We didn’t know what people in our own department were doing, or the rest of the university… we couldn’t really admit that we don’t actually understand what anyone else is talking about.” The informal environment of Pint provides a unique opportunity for researchers, as well as the public, to ask questions that might feel too silly in other contexts. As Praveen points out, in most professional settings scientists feel they can’t always admit, “look, I don’t actually know what a gene is.” Attending talks in unfamiliar fields has even sparked new interdisciplinary collaborations.
Praveen is well aware that the festival couldn’t run without its volunteer scientist speakers and event organisers, and emphasises that another main goal is to provide an opportunity to try something new. “We really want to give ownership to everyone that’s organising the events to say ‘look, what I really fancy is… experimenting with this,” she explains, and stresses that the informal pub or cafe environment is the perfect place to feel comfortable doing so . At Pint of Science, the stakes are low and often anything that doesn’t quite work will just end in laughter from the speaker and audience together – much less soul-destroying than a failed laboratory experiment. This philosophy has clearly paid off for Praveen: since setting up Pint of Science with minimal prior experience of public engagement, she is now the full-time director of a massively successful global science festival.
There are clearly strong incentives for scientists to participate in events like these –. Often science communication is, rightly, focused on impacting non-scientist audiences – of course, making science more transparent and accessible is crucial. But it’s also okay to acknowledge that sometimes there is as much in it for scientists as for the public – even if it’s simply the chance to nerd out over the reasons you became captivated by science in the first place.
Written by Katie Pickup (she/her), who is a PhD student in Genetics and Molecular Medicine and one of the hosts of EUSci’s Not Another Science Podcast.
Originally edited By Sara Teles, Beth McGregor, Gabrielle Jawer, Rashi Krishna and Mika Kontiainen for Issue 32: Scientist Next Door.
Adapted for EUSci Online by Anna Motylova.
