Marin Science Center

Organizer: Alfia Wallace

Teens and Alcohol at the Science Seminar - What could go wrong?

It was my second year of coordinating the Marin Science Seminar, a science cafe which targets local teenagers.  When searching for speakers, I first reached out to local talent, scouring nearby colleges and industry for speakers who might be interesting to the teenagers. I thought I had hit gold with a local physician whose research work was on the neurological processes of alcohol addiction.  The speaker was a woman, relatively young, very pretty, and with a topic which teenagers should be thinking about. 

The turn-out was good, as we suspected.  The teenagers wanted to hear about alcoholism and were ready with lots of questions. The speaker was engaging, prepared, and had plenty of multimedia.  She presented the results of her research in some detail, answering questions along the way, and everything went well until someone asked her what she thought should be done to help combat alcoholism.

The speaker didn't believe that anyone should ever drink alcohol for any reason.  She was arguing that, since some people are genetically predisposed to alcoholism, even trying alcohol once would lead them down the path to perdition, whereas if they never tried it, no such problem would arise.  Well, the crowd went wild. 

What started as a mild-mannered discussion of how some genes are associated with alcoholism and how they manifest in certain neurologic responses when alcohol is present, devolved into an unruly policy debate over whether recreational alcohol consumption should even be legal. The speaker was accused of being a fascist, a participant was accused of condoning the abuse caused by alcoholism.  It was ugly.  Luckily, this happened only in the last 15 minutes of an hour-long session, but it was still disappointing because disrespect was shown by some of the participants.  This is the only time this has happened in four years of the science seminar. 

We have had multiple stem cell researchers, HIV researchers,  nuclear engineers and other controversial speakers at our science cafe, but never have we had such an acrimonious response as we did to the researcher who thought that alcohol should be illegal!

Lessons learned:  Jump in to mediate the discussion if this is necessary.  Ethical concerns in science are not uncommon, and discussion about them should be encouraged, and undertaken coolheadedly, if possible.