PCST 2004

SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY

Barcelona will host the first headquarters of the International Academy “Science and Society”

The Forum Barcelona 2004 Dialogue “Scientific knowledge and cultural diversity” (8th Conference of the International Network on Public Communication of Science and Technology, PCST-8) gathered more than 650 participants from more than 50 different countries from the 5 continents. 341 abstracts from 36 countries were presented.

As announced in the closing event, Barcelona will host the first headquarters of the International Academy “Science & Society” (provisional name). This new organization will be responsible for the creation of the documentary basis of the PCST network and will have as a main task the drawing up of reports on particular matters in the field of communication and social understanding of science. Vladimir de Semir, who will be the Chair of the Network between 2004-2006, announced also that “the Academy will additionally look for the necessary resources at an international level to guarantee the entrance to the network and to its activities of those countries that currently have more difficulties. The network must grow up, but it must also represent all the different cultures of the world. Thus science communication must respect the different cultural contexts and include the knowledge of all continents”.

So the Academy ‘Science and Society’ will carry out in its headquarters in Barcelona international and local activities. A subcommittee set up by Vladimir de Semir (chair of the PCST network), Brian Trench, Hans Peter Peters and Pierre Fayard, will decide on the plan of international activities of the Academy. The activity of the Academy will focus on three main fields: Spain, Catalonia and Barcelona. That is why the three main local participants of the Academy will be, Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología (Spanish Government), the Catalan Science Foundation (FCR) of the Generalitat de Catalunya and the Commissioner for Scientific Culture (Barcelona City Council).

The executive committee of the PCST network decided also to give support to the content of the Olympia Letter of Culture, document signed in September 2001 in the beginning of the Cultural Olympiad of Athens by sixty personalities from all over the world as an initiative of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and where, among others, the formal commitment to “make public or private media to assume, aware of their moral responsibility, their role of carriers of peace and dialogue, and guarantee the plurality of the information, as well as their independence regarding all pressures from the political, ideological and economical power” is fulfilled.

It was also agreed that the document should be named up to now Olimpia-Barcelona Letter and all present delegates in the Forum Barcelona 2004 committed to give support and coverage to their contents all over the world.

According to the planned programme, the dialogue was developed into three main sets of activities:

1) 2 June, workshop “New Models on Health & Life Museums”, coorganized by the Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau and the Science Communication Observatory of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (OCC-UPF).

2) From 3 to 6 June: 8th International Conference of the Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST-8) network that was born in 1989 in Poitiers and which is held every two years. Their local organizers were the OCC-UPF and the Commissioner for Scientific Culture-ICUB of the Barcelona City council. Under the general theme “Scientific knowledge and cultural diversity” there were three plenary sessions on “Native knowledge and modern science”, “Science communication: historical perspectives and new trends” and “Science communication and social participation” and 30 parallel sessions related to those topics. All the contents can be consulted on the PCST-8 website: www.pcst2004.org.

3) Finally, 7 and 8 June: Seminar ‘Science Jorunalism in a Diverse World’ organized by the Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología (FECYT) and the Science Communication Observatory (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) in collaboration with the Catalan Association of Science Communication (ACCC) and the Spanish Association of Scientific Journalism (AEPC).

SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY

Among the diverse contributions during those days, these are some of the most outstanding ones:

- Federico Mayor Zaragoza (Chairman of the Fundación Cultura de Paz. Director-General of UNESCO, 1987-1999) remembered that ‘the important thing is not to communicate, but to communicate with one another’ (Lo importante no es comunicar, sino comunicarse) and he also emphasized the need for a real integration of all countries in the debate about science and its applications.

- Mariano Gago (Professor of Physics at Instituto Superior Tecnico in Lisboa. Prof. Gago was the Minister for Science and Technology of Portugal from 1995 to 2002) stressed the need that scientific policies of the different administrations must include activities on public communication of science, with enough resources and long-lasting enough. On the other hand he added that the goal of such policies must go beyond the simple understanding of science: ‘It is not only a question of reaching a greater public understanding of science, but to reach a greater public understanding of the world’. He also emphasized the importance of science communication to keep an adequate level of scientific vocations in the world and the importance of the integration of women in the creation of scientific knowledge.

- Patrick Luganda (Science journalist in Uganda and Chairman of the Network of Climate Journalists in the Greater Horn of Africa) explained the different role of journalists in the different countries. ‘Many times the information we publish about a medical subject in our newspaper, the most read in Uganda, can mark the difference between life and death. For example in the case of health problems involving pregnant women and children, who are still very frequent in my country’.

- John Noble Wilford (Creator of the Science Times of The New York Times. Former Science Times editor and winner of two Pulitzer prizes), while revising his career for more than 40 years as a scientific journalist in one of the publications with more international influence, confessed: ‘I am a science journalist thanks to the Russians. I started to be interested in covering topics completely unknown for me as a result of the Russian satellite Sputnik launch in 1957, and the great social impact it provoked in the American society’. From then Wilford has covered in The New York Times the main events on science of the second half of the 20th Century (among others, the landing of the human being on the Moon and practically all the space race) and he is still writing in the New York Times. Wilford insisted on the need that science journalism keeps an adequate critical level.

For further information: mariajose.gonzalez@upf.edu, 935422446

OLYMPIA-BARCELONA LETTER

The participants in the opening of the Cultural Olympiad of Athens and the participants in the dialogue Scientific knowledge and cultural diversity of the Universal Forum of Cultures of Barcelona solemnly reject any idea of the fatality of conflicts between civilisations. We consider culture and cultural creation bearers of values that overcome all differences. We firmly believe that cultural plurality and polyphony, guarantors of the acknowledgement and respect of the right of people, participate in the development of each person and allow open dialogue, excluding all sectarian and totalitarian ideologies. We are convinced that the parity of cultures constitutes the condition sine qua non of peaceful coexistence and world development and we desire that Culture, representing one of the creative forces of human action, would be considered more broadly both as an essential process for the future construction of humanity and the advent of a culture of peace.

To this effect, we declare that it is essential:

- To provide the culture of the 21st century with the necessary means in all areas of intellectual and artistic activity, and also to provide the supplementary means for scientific research with no commercial or economic goals and to favour the development of a scientific and technical culture which integrates critical and ethical interrogation;

- To take into consideration the history and traditions of each people and to take care of the conservation or restoration of monuments and the safeguarding of non-material heritage, a component of different cultures which, all together, constitute the common heritage of the all humankind;

- To embrace the fight for peace and against plagues, such as violence, fanaticism, exclusion (in the form of sexism and apartheid) and terrorism, but also to ensure the conditions essential for the development of cultural life, fighting against underdevelopment, malnutrition, the lack of medical care, economic precariousness, pollution and attacks on the environment and, finally, to sustain the scientific effort and the fine-tuning of principles of precaution in order to ensure the conditions of life, respecting biological integrity and the specificity of each human being, considered as a bearer of all that is humanity;

- To further promote, especially among the school-going public, the equality of opportunities for the equality of access to all knowledge, for the fight against illiteracy and ignorance, for the preparation of integrated actions, particularly aimed at the most disadvantaged peoples linking cultural or pedagogic programmes to economic development and for the widest possible diffusion of the new communications technologies;

- To encourage the media, private or public, to assume, with full awareness, their moral responsibility, their role as vectors for peace and dialogue and to guarantee the plurality of information and its independence from all pressures exerted by political, ideological or economic powers;

- To foresee for the future, at national and international level, the ways and means for dialogue and intercultural exchange, founded on respect for oneself and for others, both in terms of acknowledgement of individual and collective identities and legacies of the past and in terms of mutual aid and solidarity between generations and peoples.

All the people that support this declaration wish to start a debate and to widely spread all the proposals included in the Olympia & Barcelona Letter in all our local fields. We ask both national and international competent organizations to support and update their contribution in order to promote an universal coverage of a true cultural humanism.

Athens-Olympia, 21-23 September 2001
Barcelona-Universal Forum of Cultures, 4-6 June 2004