The Rural Voice, 1988-03, Page 32AGRICULTURAL
RESEARCH PART FIVE:
INCOMPREHENSIBLE RESEARCH=
The Good, the Bad,
C
ontribution No. 1234
from the Agriculture
Canada Research Station
in Winnipeg, published
in the International Journal of Insect
Morphology and Embryology, is en-
titled "Morphology and ultrastructure
of an isolated cell type corpora allata
in adults of the bertha armyworm,
Mamestra configurata Wlk. (Lepi-
doptera: Noctuidae)."
This is quite a mouthful and, for a
non-scientific reader, a mostly mean-
ingless mouthful. Not only are many
of the words unrecognizable, but any
sense made by the title is decidedly
not agricultural. A reader unfamiliar
with this type of research will be led
to wonder first what the paper is about
and second just why this sort of work
is being done at an agricultural
research station.
These two questions point to one
of the biggest problems facing science
today: its incomprehensibility to the
general population. It is a problem
that is not easily overcome, either.
Science, by its very nature, examines
Life in far more detail than most people
would ever dream of doing. There are
no words in our language for the struc-
tures, functions, and concepts scient-
ists work with, so they have had to
invent languages in order to be able to
communicate with each other. Com-
pounding this problem is a social sys-
tem that attaches little importance to
scientific literacy and understanding.
Most people hear very little about
science, and what they do hear is often
misleading. Movie portrayals of
scientists show them as unable to talk
to "lesser beings," either because their
minds are somewhere else or because
the Ugly, and the Incomprehensible
by Ian Wylie-Toal
they have something to hide. It has
been easy for filmmakers to take the
specialized language of science and
tum it into something strange and
sinister. With nothing to contradict
this strangeness, people have come to
view science with some apprehension,
and to be put off by its language.
This need not be the case. The
language and ideas of science are no
more complex than the language of
medicine, yet medical terms are
familiar to many people. Haemostat,
resuscitate, electrocardiogram (EKG),
and fibrillation are all technical medi-
cal terms repeatedly used in popular
medical shows and in the media. The
meaning of the words may be unclear,
but they are familiar and can be put in
a context, which shows that the gener-
al public can become comfortable with
a language that encompasses complex
and unfamiliar information.
A little familiarity can go a long
way. For example, read through the
complicated title given at the start of
this article, add a little information,
and translate it into simple language.
The key phrase is "corpora allata."
This is a gland found in the head of all
insects.
"Morphology" is the study of
structure, the examination of the
organs and body parts of an animal.
"Ultrastructure" takes the study of
structure one step further, to the
microscopic level. The term is a bit
misleading, as "ultra" is often used for
"big," but in this case the microscopic
structures are big. Ultrastructure
examines whole cell organs and struc-
tures, much as morphology examines
whole organs of whole animals. The
paper is an examination of the large
scale and microscopic scale structure
of an insect gland.
"Isolated cell type" refers to the
shape of the insect gland. The cells
are isolated from each other, resem-
bling bunches of grapes on a stem.
This is not the common shape for the
gland: in most other insects it is made
of tightly packed cells enclosed in a
capsule -like membrane. With this
information, we can tell that the sen-
tence refers to the examination of the
large and microscopic scale structure
of a unique form of insect gland in
which the cells are isolated from each
other rather than enclosed in a capsule.
"Adults of the bertha armyworm"
means exactly that — the insects are
the adult form of the bertha army -
worm, a sporadic but serious pest of
canola. The adult stage is specified
because the corpora allata gland has a
different function in the adult than it
does in the immature larval stage.
"Mamestra configurata Wlk." is
the scientific name of the bertha army -
worm. Each identified organism in
the world has been assigned a two-part
Latin name, the form of which obeys
international rules and is therefore
recognizable in any country or lang-
uage. The first part, Mamestra, is the
30 THE RURAL VOICE