Dr Chris Smith knows his science. But lots of people know their science — that doesn’t mean they can talk about it.
What distinguishes the 33-year-old virology lecturer and medical doctor from Cambridge University in the UK is his entertaining weekly BBC radio show The Naked Scientists. Airing every Sunday night, and available on podcast for South Africans, it’s an hour-long mixed masala, a hyperactive mix of international phone-in questions, talk show, peer-reviewed research (sometimes from the Annals of Improbable Research) and some seriously silly live experiments.
Researchers are interviewed about their work showing poo germs can be transmitted by farting in people who don’t wear underwear, while those who wear jeans have a built-in barrier. And the listeners are left in little doubt as to how exactly the highly undignified research was done.
When people phone in with questions — like if a driver saw a moonbow, the nightime equivalent of a rainbow — a resident expert can often answer them. If not, an appeal is made to the listeners. Inevitably, someone has the solution. Now Smith is interested in hearing more from scientists (and science radio journalists) in Africa.
He’s already been to Johannesburg for a conference on science journalism in which the resident expert was astronomy outreach campaigner Case Rijsdijk. A quiz somehow managed to include how the economic earning potential of lapdancers linked up with their menstrual cycle, and it was a great success.
Clearly escaping the lousy weather on that small island to the north, Chris has been to Australia twice — first for the World Conference of Science Journalism in Melbourne and more recently when it was announced on-air that he’d been temporarily exiled for unspecified “crimes against the dress code”.
And he’s coming back to our continent, to SciFest Africa 2009 in the last week of March. Each time he visits, fresh accents go on air.
It’s an ideal time for researchers to make their voices heard. Especially if their research is particularly yucky, icky or cool.
For more information, go to www.Scifest.org.za and www.thenakedscientists.com.