Osborne Memorial award 2017

Alan Alda

Alda has for a long time campaigned against scientific jargon. Alda works as a ‘visiting professor’ at the Stony Brook Centre for Communicating Science, which was renamed in his honour in 2013.

For 13 years he was the host of the PBS series Scientific American Frontiers, which he calls ‘the best thing I ever did in front of a camera,’, clearly forgetting his eleven years as Hawkeye on M*A*S*H*. After his time on Scientific American Frontiers, Alda ‘became convinced that many researchers have wonderful stories to tell, but need to learn how to tell them better’.

As Alda has said: ‘There's no reason for the jargon when you're trying to communicate the essence of the science to the public because you're talking what amounts to gibberish to them.’