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Vol. 38, No. 18 |
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2-19-2008 Marion’s Science Cafés serve up the perfect blend of good taste and good scholarship
McEnnis coordinates a series of monthly events at a popular new Marion eatery in which science is the special of the day. The gatherings, which have been running since November, are called Science Cafés. A knot of anywhere from 25 to 50 people pulls up some chairs, plates full of food and plenty of curiosity to hear a speaker hold forth on a scientific topic of general interest. “It’s not just another lecture series — there’s plenty of those going on around the university already,” McEnnis said. “What we try to do with these is get the speaker out into the community, in a very informal atmosphere where people can feel comfortable asking questions,” he added. The idea for the Science Café, while new to the small-ish community of Marion, is not original to McEnnis but actually stems from a European movement called Café Scientifique. The movement is defined on its Web site as “a place where, for the price of a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, anyone can come to explore the latest ideas in science and technology … a forum for debating science issues … committed to promoting public engagement with science and to making science accountable.” When the momentum carried the idea to American shores, it became the Science Café, and several locations have cropped up all over the country.
“I think the main reason I got into this was to try to raise awareness of science within our community, to get people thinking about science and the way scientific research is done,” McEnnis said. So far, there have been four cafés and the public response has been positive, McEnnis said. The first topic dealt with global warming and neatly coincided, purely by chance, with the announcement of the joint winners of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize (Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). The December café, presented by Marion psychology Professor Tracy Tylka, dealt with patterns of eating behavior in America. The January subject was infectious diseases, addressed by Kurt Stevenson from the OSU Medical Center.  The most successful café to date was also the most recent one, “Science and Religion,” which was held Feb. 5 and co-led by Robert Klips from the Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology and John Holliger, pastor of
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. More than 70 people squeezed into the community room of the Rise and Dine, and almost as many had to be turned away. Klips figured the turnout was due to both interest in the topic and the fact that both he and Holliger have longstanding connections to the community. “There’s a tremendous interest in evolution and some genuine misunderstandings about it,” Klips noted. “One individual expressed confusion that since evolution is a ‘theory,’ it must not be well supported by evidence. I was able to explain some of the basic principles of natural selection.” The success of this café points up the importance of having timely and compelling topics — and speakers to deliver them — a task that falls solely to McEnnis at this point. “I’m a committee of one,” he said. “Basically I send out a call to faculty here on campus to see who’s interested, or sometimes I bump into someone in the hall and tell them they should do a Science Café and I twist their arm until they say yes.” Future possibilities for discussion include science fiction, the scientific method, endangered species and an examination of the statistics at play in election results. In his quest for interesting and engaging topics, McEnnis said he is deliberately wide-ranging in his definition of “science” and tries to strike a balance between physical, biological and mathematical sciences. “The idea is to give as much variety in the topics as we possibly can,” he said. “We’re not going to shy away from subjects that can be technical, but we do want topics that can be presented at a level the general public can understand.”
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