Science as
Narrative: The story of the discovery of penicillin
Lucy Avraamidou,
Jonathan Osborne, King’s College London
Department of Education,
Email: avraamidou.l@unic.ac.cy
This
theoretical paper explores the use of narrative as a captivating vehicle for
representing and communicating scientific information. It does so with the use
of a narrative-based exhibit found at the
Penicillin, Nobel Lecture, December 11,
1945:
“I am going to tell you about the early days of
penicillin, for this is the part of the penicillin story which earned me a Nobel
Award….The origin of penicillin was the contamination of a culture plate of
staphylococci by a mould. It was noticed that for some distance around the
mould colony the staphylococcal colonies had become and seemed to demand investigation,
so the mould was isolated in pure culture and some of its properties were
determined…The mould was found to belong to the genus Penicillium...Having got
the mould in pure culture I planted it on another culture plate and after it
had grown at room temperature for 4 or 5 days I streaked different microbes
radially across the plate. Some of them grew right up to the mould - others
were inhibited for a distance of several centimeters. This showed that the
mould produced an antibacterial substance which affected some microbes and not
others…” (Alexander Fleming, 1945)
The story captured in the above Nobel lecture extract is at the
core of
1. Introduction
Our interest in the role of narrative in communicating science to
the public stems from criticism on the way science is portrayed and
communicated to the public. Many researchers have discussed how science is
often miscommunicated and misrepresented through the media offering
stereotypical images of scientists, which in turn limits the public’s
understandings of the nature of science. To
address the problem of making science approachable and meaningful to the public
we believe it is necessary to explore new modes of communicating science’s
explanatory themes to the public. As
Turney (2001), for instance, has noted
that ‘every successful non-fiction writer will tell you that the way to
interest and engage the general reader is to tell a story…stories involve
struggles, conflicts or adventures, have heroes and villains, complication and
resolution (p. 47). Other reasons for the use of narrative are provided by
perspectives from discursive psychology – a disciplinary hybrid combining
psychology and linguistics, that sees narrative which provides support to
narrative understanding as a major meaning-making strategy (Lyle, 2000).
Studies of memory based on examination of the everyday talk have shown that
memory is narrative reconstruction of events and that ‘there is no one-to-one
correlation between what happened and
people’s memory when asked to account for events (Edwards & Potter, 1992,
p. 48).
Bruner
(1991) differentiated between two distinct ways that humans order experience.
He called the first one paradigmatic, which
refers to organizing thought that is logico-scientific, which is based on
reasons. The second way that humans
order experience, according to Bruner, is narrative
and deals with the creation of stories. As he described, narrative is used to
refer to: a) a way of sculpting and structuring information through expressions
of different media into readily understood forms that guide learners’ comprehension;
and b) a cognitive mode that learners use to make sense out of information or
experience. Narrative then becomes part
of how people understand the world in which they live and serves as a way of
communicating that understanding to others.
The corollary, as Graesser, Olde and Klettke (2002) have argued, is that
narrative has a privileged status among various types of discourse:
The situations and episodes in narrative have a
close correspondence to everyday experiences, so the comprehension mechanisms
are much more natural than those recruited during the comprehension of other
discourse genres such as argumentation, expository text, and logical reasoning
(p. 229).
Although
narrative is as old as Aesop, in contemporary culture it is expressed through a
growing diversity of different mediums such as books, plays, films and can be
experienced in different ways. Moreover,
because of narrative’s dominance as a form of communication it has been
examined throughout the years in a number of different disciplines such as
education, sociology, philosophy, history, fiction, film and others. For instance, Chatman (1978) in her book Story and Discourse, defined narrative
and described the ways in which it can be actualized:
Narrative
is basically a kind of text organization, and that organization, that schema,
needs to be actualized: in written words, as in stories and novels; in spoken
words combined with the movement of actors imitating characters against sets
which imitate places, as in plays and films; in drawings; in comic strips; in
dance movements, as in narrative ballet and in mime; and even in music (pp.
117-118).
However
our concern is with narratives realisation in text, as in stories. Stories are
used every day as a way of making sense of and communicating events in the
world. Movies, books, televisions and everyday conversations are filled with
the telling of stories (Shank & Berman, 2002). Stories are essentially a
sub-set of the narrative genre and describe a series of actions and experiences
made by a number of real or imaginary characters (Ricoeur, 1980).
According to Shole (1980), a story is a narrative with a certain very
specific syntactic shape (i.e., beginning-middle-end) and with a subject
matter.
The question then becomes one of: what is
a story, and what purpose does it serve? According to Shank and Berman (2002),
a story is, “a structured, coherent retelling of an experience or a fictional
account of an experience” (p. 288) and that ‘in some sense, all stories can be
considered didactic in nature, in that they are intended to teach or convey
something to the listener.” Likewise, in
a book aptly entitled Teaching as
Storytelling, Egan makes the case that stories form a natural vehicle and
means of educating students not only about their cultural and historical roots
but also the scientific descriptions of reality.
Stories then are a vehicle through which
experiences and events are communicated amongst people. Researchers have contended that stories have
a significant effect on influencing people’s understandings and beliefs, and
essentially, promoting a societal and cultural change (Brock, Strange &
Green, 2002; Shank & Berman, 2002).
Brock et al., (2002) argued, for instance, that the impact of stories on
people’s beliefs and behaviours is enormous, citing the impact of the
best-selling books like Uncle Tom’s
Cabin. As they stated, “it is very hard to make the case that any
rhetorical presentation of the 19th century had an impact that was
even remotely comparable to that of the fictional narrative” (p. 3). According to Schank and Berman (2002), “for
communication, memory and learning purposes, stories are likely to be richer,
more compelling, and more memorable than the abstracted points we ultimately
intend to convey or learn when we converse with others” (p. 293).
Built upon these theoretical
underpinnings that point to the value of narrative for learning, one question
emerges for us - What are the necessary components, if any, of narrative that
may be of value to science education? Our answer draws on our meta-analysis of
work done on narrative (i.e., Chatman, 1978; Guilbert, Norris, Hakimelahi &
Philips, 2003; Toolan, 2001) and is presented in Table 1. We argue that
narrative has seven essential elements though not all are equally important.
Narrative Element
|
Description of element
|
|
Purpose |
To help us
understand the natural and human world.
In the case of the natural world, narratives help the reader to invent
new entities, concepts and some picture of the scientist’s vision of the
material world. |
|
Events |
A chain or sequence
of events that are connected to each other |
|
Structure |
An identifiable
structure (beginning, middle, end) where events are related temporally |
Time
|
Narratives concern
the past |
|
Agency |
Actors or entities
cause and experience events. Actors
may either be human or material entities who act on each other. |
|
Narrator |
The teller who is
either a real character or alternatively, a sense of a narrator. |
|
Reader |
The reader must
interpret or recognise the text as a narrative |
First, we would argue that the purpose of narrative is not just to help
us understand the human world, as Guilbert et al., (2003) have stated, but also
to understand the natural world. For if there is any value to narrativising
science it must be to gain an understanding of not only the human and social
world but also the natural world which is populated with non-human agents. At its core science is about developing
causal explanations of the material world – what causes global warming, why do
people get AIDS, what do rainbows occur and more. Causes are commonly modelled on the action or
agency of one object on
another. Canonically this is associated
with a person but is commonly projected onto objects endowing them with
agency. So, the increased level of
carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere (an event) prevents (is agentive) such that long wavelength infra red
radiation is prevented from escaping from the atmosphere. In such a manner, one object affects
another. The explanation is constructed
by bringing into being imagined entities that can, in turn, affect other things,
or be affected by them. Agency is then
inherent to all causal action and not just to human agents.
3.
The
The Alexander Fleming museum has in our
view, a strong narrative – a feature which makes the conveyed information not
only a successful communication of the history of science but also a memorable
experience. To illustrate why we believe this to be so, we use examples from
the exhibition. The
Alexander Fleming museum is a small, 3-room museum portraying information on
the discovery of penicillin. The first room is the laboratory in which
Alexander Fleming used to work, which is restored to its condition in 1928,
when penicillin was discovered. The second room presents a video and the third
room includes displays presented in a chronological order. Both the video and the displays, we argue,
are structured as narrative and present information about Alexander Fleming’s
life and work and its significance to the society.
The story of Alexander Fleming and the
discovery of penicillin is presented in this manner:
Alexander Fleming was born in 1881 at
Lochfield, a farm outside Darvel, a small town in
The displays and video presented at the
museum provide biographical information on Alexander Fleming’s life. Examining
the way this information is structured in light of our perspectives on
narrative there are two clearly identifiable components:
·
The time is past tense
·
There
exists a sense of a narrator – an
essential distinguishing feature of narrative
·
There
is a human actor: Alexander Fleming
The story then continues providing
information on how Fleming attended the medical
When Alexander Fleming returned from a
2-week holidays, he noticed a clear halo surrounding the yellow-green growth of
a mould that had accidentally contaminated the plate. Unknown to him, a spore of
a rare variant called Penicillium notatum
had drifted in from a mycology lab one floor below. Luck would have it that
Fleming had decided not to store his culture in a warm incubator, and that
Components of
narrative that are present in this part of the story, as we see it, are:
The exhibit goes one to discuss Fleming’s
discovery in relation to the world’s reaction:
Fleming contributed his findings to the
medical world in 1929, but few seemed interested. He even published a report on
the benefits of penicillin in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology.
Although Fleming continued working with the mould for some time, a team of
chemists and mould specialists eventually took over the work. The research was
slowed when several of them died or moved away.
More events, as components of the
narrative, are described in the above extract. The actor (i.e., Fleming) caused
events: contributed his findings to the medical world by publishing a report to
a journal; a team of chemists and mould specialists took over the work with the
mould.
Other parts of the display
illustrate the significance of the discovery of penicillin to the world and
particularly its use during the World War II where the need for an
antibacterial was great.
Unfortunately, the interest
in penicillin did not peak again until World War II, and Howard Florey and
Ernst Chain picked up the research again, found a way to purify it, and
presented this powerful antibiotic to the world. Dr. Fleming and his many years
of research were not forgotten. He was knighted in 1944 and shared the 1945
Nobel Prize for physiology/medicine with British scientist Ernst Boris Chain
and Sir Howard Walter Florey. In 1947 Dr. Fleming became director of the
Wright-Fleming Institute of St. Mary's Hospital.
It becomes
evident throughout the story of the discovery of penicillin, that there is a
sense of a narrator sharing the purpose of the narrative: information is
provided about Alexander Fleming’s life; how penicillin was discovered and
explained as is its role and value in World War and its enormous medical
impact. Moreover, there is an identifiable structure
(beginning, middle, end) where events are related and that structure is, in
this case, a chronological description of Alexander Fleming’s actions. There is
obviously a sequence of events about the discovery of penicillin that are
connected to each other and are caused by the actor (Fleming) in this story.
With respect to the last component essential for narrative (i.e., the reader
must recognize the text as narrative), we argue that the structural and
sequential design of the exhibit strongly cues the reader to recognize the
exhibit as a narrative of a scientific discovery. For the reasons above, we
would argue that this exhibit is an exemplar narrative-based exhibit. Our
hypothesis is that such exhibits are more likely to communicate their message
effectively, and be remembered – an area to which research should be directed.
4. Concluding thoughts
In this paper we have attempted to make
the case for the use of narrative in communicating science as a way of making
it meaningful to and accessible by the public. We have built our case on
Montgomery’s (1996) view that the language of science “makes us feel excluded
from a certain grown-up world of truth and truth telling” (p. 2) and we have
drawn upon Bruner’s (1991) argument that narrative is central in how people
understand the world in which they live and serves as a means to communicate
personal understandings to others. In an attempt to apply these theoretical
perspectives in practice, we provided an example of a narrative-based museum
conveying the story of the discovery of penicillin.
However, there exists the question of
what kind of science is communicated through narrative. Or, if it is at all
possible to portray through narrative how science is practised by scientists
and how scientific knowledge is constructed. The crucial question then becomes
one of: Is narrative an appropriate vehicle to enhance public understanding of
science? We argue that narrative is a useful means of translating the
conceptual complexities of science and supporting scientific literacy as long
as content knowledge is not the only criterion for public literacy and the
purpose of science education is not to produce scientists. Rather, we maintain,
the purpose of science education is to provide future citizens with an
appreciation of the cultural value of science and its strengths and weaknesses.
In this sense, we argue, narrative becomes of value in supporting the understanding
of scientific matters by non-experts. We share Bryant’s view (as cited in
Stocklmayer, 2001), on what the public understanding of science ought to be
about:
The
public understanding of science is the comprehension of scientific facts, ideas
and policies, combined with a knowledge of the impact such facts, ideas and
policies have on the personal, social and economic well-being of the community
(p. 145)
This definition
includes an understanding and knowledge of the interrelationship between
science and society, the potential impact and the effect of the cultural
context and its values on science. All of these are exemplified through the
Alexander Fleming narrative-based displays. This is not to argue, however, that
all exhibits and exhibitions should be designed and structured in the form of
narrative. Rather, the intent is to provide a perspective on exploring new
means of communicating science in informal settings. We hope these arguments
about narrative have helped to establish the case for its role in communicating
science – a role which our work seeks to explore and analyse.
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