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You want to eat your neighbour?

It sounds a bit cheesy - and it smells like it. As reported in Nature (vol 503, Nov 14, 2013), a bunch of science artists at the Dublin Science Gallery presents a cream-cheese that is prepared from milk and cultures from a persons skin. They don't expect you to eat that monster, though. The whole event is rather about life after nature - it is about manipulating biology, designing life-forms, hacking evolution. Not necessarily with the goal to entertain the fromage-conoisseur.
The Science Gallery is one of a few projects aiming at getting the excitement of science to the public, and doing so not by mashing up sci-fi talk with scientoid babble (the ubiquituous time-travel, worm-holes (not in cheese but in space-time, for once), and code-breaking quantum computing, topped off with mind-numbing what-if stories of the kind bigthink and their protagonist Michio Kaku like to sponsor). Instead they show off the excitement and the real emotions of a scientifically curious approach to the world. Shows like this aim at the high-end, widely awake cultural person. They are miles apart from the often patronizing endeavours of TV science-blunder that is decorated with the archetypical Mad Professor joking his way through a cartoonized science-world. Do you really wonder why kids are turning away from science? Most of the stuff is simply too childish for our children.(My 4 year old asked me, why the heck the blood in her biology book is depicted as litte guys with a red swim-ring around its belly. What the §$%& do I know?!)
But science is too important an element of our culture to be ridiculed by default. Many of those proudly admitting at a reception that they never understood physics, might be as far off from getting a clue what that Shostakovich guy whom they routinely mix up with Tchaikovsky is all about. Incompetence in conventional culture is too comfortably covered up by droning on about emotions with the intellectual depth of an underage deep-frozen Gorgonzola.
Bon appétit!
(oh, and check out the relation between verbal dexterity and Camembert)
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