Peter Hotez

It turns out 75 percent of Americans, three-quarters of Americans cannot name a living scientist.

And when they try to, they usually first name Einstein or Jonas Salk, not realizing they've moved on or whatever.

or then they'll get to Bill Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson.

And I love them.

I think they're great and they provide an important service, but they're not doing what we do in the sense of, you know, working on reviewer two's comments of a major revision of a paper or revising a grant or the heartache of getting a grant not discussed at the NIH and what goes on in the scientific meeting.

And it turns out the vast majority of

Americans cannot even name an institution where biomedical research is conducted.

On the list where they could, the one thing our two institutions share, the Scripps Institute and Baylor College of Medicine, is no one named our two organizations.

We're invisible almost by design because a lot of these institutions, the academic health centers especially,

don't like their docs and scientists speaking out because they want to control the brand, control the message.

And so the consequences are invisible.

And by being invisible, it allows the bad actors to weaponize this.

And by being invisible and not seeing us as real people that have to either pick up our kids at school in the afternoon or

or pay our bills and all the other things that all normal people do, it allows them to portray us as shadowy figures in white coats plotting nefarious things.

And it allows them to weaponize us.

And so that's got to be fixed.

And, of course, not all scientists want to be out there in the...

public domain and there are a lot of we all know them right they're great scientists and they just don't want to be bothered right they want to write their papers and do their experiments and that's fine but you know i think there is a group of young scientists especially their commitment to public service is high and and we need to encourage that we don't we

um we we basically say do it at your own risk or what the academic health center's office of communications too often do is they'll say well you know you're an academic you know technically you're free to speak out of whatever you want dot dot dot but don't screw this up and don't get the institution in trouble and yeah yeah well you know so you do that with the sort of damocles over your head and of course if you're out there in the public domain enough

like we are, you know, eventually all of us screw it up at some time.