The heroes we don't celebrate

Why we need more statues of scientists on university campuses

Ever heard of Dan Stein? I must admit, to my own embarrassment, neither have I. It is partly because I don’t read psychiatry journals, the discipline where Prof Stein would be a household name. But it is mostly because, as I’ll argue below, our society tends not to celebrate the people who make the world a better place. Because that is indeed what Stein has done, as is evident from a dataset just published.

Stein is head of the Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health at the University of Cape Town. He is also, according to a new report by the scientific publisher Elsevier and a team of Stanford scientists, one of the thousand most cited scientists in world history. Let that sink in for a moment: of all the people that has produced knowledge ever – not just in psychiatry, but in all fields, from cosmology to microbiology, mathematics to theology – Stein is in the top 1000, number 922 to be precise. What a remarkable achievement!

And yet, Stein is hardly a household name. And this is not because Stein is a recluse. While I can imagine most South Africans would know the names of at least a handful of politicians – Cyril Ramaphosa, Helen Zille, Julius Malema, Gwede Mantashe, Fikile Mbalula, not too difficult, hey? – I doubt many would be able to do the same for scientists. Try it: see if you can name five South African scientists. We tend to immediately think of those who wrote for newspapers, like Jonathan Jansen or Steven Friedman. So, let me ask it differently: Who are South Africa’s top twenty scientists?

Again, I am embarrassed, because the names I had in mind were not close to the ones that are indeed the top twenty. Here they are, ranked by Elsevier.

Now, as a good scholar should, it is important that I point out a few issues. I’ve removed scholars from the list with what I consider a tenuous South African connection, like temporary appointments and research associates. I’ve also included only scholars that have actually published a paper in the last three years; the idea would be that these are still active scholars.

There are also broader concerns. As always when talking about bibliometrics, certain fields are clearly overrepresented while others, like those in the social sciences and humanities, are likely underrepresented. That is partly by design: natural scientists tend to publish shorter papers and do so more frequently, which means that they generate more citations. They tend not to publish books, which are usually not picked up by these metrics.

These concerns aside, twenty scientists at South African universities have made it to the top 15 000 scientists ever cited in Elsevier’s database. Is that a large or a small number? It is fewer than 0.2%, or 2 in 1000. Perhaps it is partly expected, given the relatively low ranking of South African universities globally, but it still feels like a surprisingly low figure.

One positive thing is the broad dispersal of world-class scientists across South Africa’s universities; as the figure shows, the top three – 20% at UCT, 14% at Wits, and 12% at Stellenbosch – are home to fewer than half of the top scientists. This is, of course, based on historical performance; it is not necessarily a prediction of where the next generation of scientists will come from. But it still bodes well that there are several centers of excellence across South Africa.

What doesn’t bode well is that we don’t know these people who make the world a better place.Why don’t we recognize more of the names on this list, names like that of applied mathematician Abdon Atangana, the geneticist Michael Pepper, the evolutionary biologist Steve Johnson or the chemist Tebello Nyokong?

Part of the reason is that these scientists prefer to work in laboratories, and not in the public eye. Few write books aimed at a general audience and even fewer care about winning popularity contests on social media.

But part of the reason, too, is that we simply do not pay attention to their work. Our attention is on the here and now: on political speeches, interest rate changes, and crime news. Research happens, relatively speaking, at a glacial pace. I published a paper this year after obtaining the first set of results in 2015. It would be difficult to get any newspaper excited about a story that is seven years old.

Behavioural scientists also know that we have a ‘negativity bias’, that we tend to focus disproportionately on bad things. The good news of a new mathematical solution, a new interpretation of a historical text, or a new molecular diagnostic technique rarely reaches the front page.

Scientists are therefore rarely celebrities. We know that Rassie Erasmus was Coach of the Year at the 2022 South African Sports Awards, or that Will Smith won the Oscar for best actor this year. In October, the Academy of Science of South Africa honoured South Africa’s leading scientists. Try to find a news article that covers the event.

It happens even within universities, the places where you would expect to celebrate scientific excellence. We build statues of politicians on our campuses. We name university buildings after business leaders or their companies. I have yet to see a statue of a South African scientist.

Not celebrating our scientific heroes matters. Economic historian Deirdre McCloskey argues that rhetoric – the way we talk about things – shape what we do. It was a shift in rhetoric about science and business that created ‘the great enrichment’, the Industrial Revolution that started in England and then spread everywhere.

Consider how we talk about scientists in South Africa. Despite their incredible achievements in expanding our knowledge of nature to make us more productive, allowing us to all live richer, healthier, and more meaningful lives, we tend to treat them with indifference. There are exceptions of course. When a global pandemic hit in 2020, we were only too eager to listen to the epidemiologists and learn from their scientific advice. But it took a pandemic to do so. Funding for research and development in the national budget has generally shrunk. Read the State of the Nation address or Budget Speech of the last two decades, and count the words ‘science, innovation, technology ’ mentioned. Rarely.

Just as the Buddha said, ‘what you think, you become’. Whom we celebrate – and whom we build palaces for – is what we will become as a country. We are not celebrating our scientists enough – and not investing in their ‘palaces’, their laboratories. And because science is the bedrock of a prosperous society, that is likely to hurt us in the long run.

An edited version of this article was first published on News24. Photo by DeepMind on Unsplash. Data by Codera Analytics.