“When science denialism comes from the federal government itself, it’s very hard to fight,” Dr Natalia Pasternak told The Brilliant.
It’s rare for a science communicator to find themselves in direct conflict with the people who wield power in a country. But that’s exactly the position Pasternak, founder and president of the Brazilian Instituto Questão de Ciência (Question of Science Institute), is in.
The denialism, in this case, is that of Jair Bolsonaro, the strongman president of Brazil, who has consistently downplayed the significance of COVID-19, even as the country records more than 146,000 deaths and 4.9 million cases.
“The president totally disregards scientific information and scientists,” Pasternak says. “And he conveys all the wrong ideas to the population, [saying] that COVID-19 is just a minor flu and going out shaking hands and taking selfies and hugging people. The result is that half the population is probably very confused.”
COVID-19 has pushed Brazilian scientists into the spotlight in a new but not entirely welcome way. “In Brazil, scientists keep to themselves,” Pasternak explains. “We don’t have the cultural habit of communicating with the public. It’s very new to us. I think that’s probably one of the reasons that the few science communicators here in Brazil became so necessary all at once. That’s probably the reason that I and my institute became a necessity here in Brazil.”
Pasternak established the institute in 2018 to boost Brazilian science’s engagement with the public and promote the use of scientific evidence in government policy.
A child of academic parents in the huge metropolis of São Paolo, in south-east Brazil, she devoured her father’s collection of books, which included works by famed biochemistry professor and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov and astronomer and great science communicator Carl Sagan.
Then, Pasternak says, she fell “in love” with genetics and molecular biology and embarked on a career in microbiology. “I always worked with basic research,” she says. “I loved it because it’s really about curiosity – it’s not like you research something because you’re going to make it into a product. You just want to know how things work.”
The path from basic research to establishing her institute – and then becoming the voice of scientific reason for millions of Brazilians – began for Pasternak after she fell pregnant.
“Maternity is what turned me into a science communicator,” she explains. “When my daughter was born, I decided that I wanted to spend a couple of years just being a mother and I didn’t return to the lab.
“Becoming a mother took me out of that university bubble where everyone thinks like you and everyone understands how science works. All of a sudden I was thrown into a whole other world where I had to talk to other mothers who knew nothing about science.”
“I got into a WhatsApp group with other mums and they started talking about astrology and alternative medicine and pseudoscience. I stayed very quiet at first because I really wanted them to like me.
“But all of a sudden one of the mothers posted a message that she wasn’t going to vaccinate her kids because it was dangerous. Then I realised I had to do something. I couldn’t keep quiet anymore. It was not harmless [to not vaccinate]. It was something very dangerous. So, I introduced myself, said I was a scientist,and explained all about vaccines.
“They started asking questions and I got very enthusiastic. But then I got a little overenthusiastic: after I answered all those questions about vaccines, I started to talk about homeopathy and acupuncture and astrology – and they blocked me.
“That made me realise it was not that easy to communicate science. It was a good lesson!”
Pasternak also realised that WhatsApp groups are not the most effective way to communicate science. With colleagues, she launched the blog Café na Bancada (“Coffee at the Lab Bench”), which gained broader recognition, covering evolution, science history and the dangers of pseudoscience. But all the while she was thinking bigger. “We wanted something more institutionalized, with more structure,” she recalls.
She looked around the world for good examples in science communication to follow and found Sense About Science and Good Thinking Society in the UK, and the US Center for Inquiry. The latter two, in particular, “really helped us to build the foundations of what became the Question of Science Institute,” Pasternak says. “What we wanted was to communicate science in a way that promotes rational thinking and scepticism.
We didn’t want to just communicate the beauty of science. There are plenty of good people doing that. We wanted to take a step further and communicate the science that deals with the decisions people make in their daily lives, such as vaccinating their children, or what kind of medicine they’re going to use, or what kind of product they’re going to buy at the supermarket.
“And we wanted to do something that’s very difficult in Brazil right now. We wanted to build a bridge with the government so that we could influence politicians to make policies that are science-based, not based on ideology as they are today.”
Today, the institute has a team of nine. Incredibly, the whole project is mostly funded by Pasternak who inherited some money from her industrialist grandmother. “People said, ‘Maybe we should try to attract more investors’,” Pasternak says. “But I don’t want to be asking around. This is my project – let’s do it!”
Small it may be, but the institute’s impact is measurable. Its first focus was on the lack of scientific evidence for homeopathy, which is supported by the Brazilian healthcare system. Pasternak brought British complementary medicine specialist Edzard Ernst to Brazil and lined up interviews for him with national media. “After that, Brazilian media started to talk about homeopathy in a way that they didn’t before,” Pasternak says. “They started to question it, and they started to call us and all the specialists to talk about it and to explain why it has not been scientifically proven and why we know it doesn’t work.
“It was really beautiful to see the effects of our work. We know it’s going to take some time before we turn it into public policy [in the way that homeopathy is no longer covered by the UK’s NHS], but still we see that at least we are moulding the national debate about it.
The next challenge is to tackle COVID-19 misinformation, which Pasternak agrees is a tough one. “Since the beginning, we have been talking about the importance of masks and testing, and that there are no miracle drugs,” she says. “It just doesn’t seem to get through to people. It’s frustrating.”
Bolsonaro has been a big proponent of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19, despite growing evidence that the drug has no effect on the virus. Pasternak found herself debating two hydroxychloroquine-defending doctors on national TV: “They were really mad at me for saying there was no scientific basis to it. They really thought they were doing the best for their patients. I had to explain a double-blind placebo study to them!”
The COVID-19 pandemic has had horrific consequences worldwide, and especially so in Brazil. But if there is one silver lining, Pasternak says, it’s that scientists such as herself are finally able to publicly communicate about the role of science. And, most importantly, they’ve been able to start conveying to the Brazilian people about the often-deadly consequences of ignoring evidence-based research.
Scientists are finally out of the closet, so to speak,” she says. “And role models are very important.”
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Article by Iain Scott
Photo credit: Photo supplied