The Care and Feeding of the Alaska Science Forum

Now that the Alaska Science Forum is old enough to vote, it's time to look back over the column's history. That seems only fair, since at the beginning was a historian.

Claus M. Naske, then, as now, a professor of history at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, was concerned about the growing gap between progress in the sciences and what the public knew about science. Fellow members of the board of the Alaska Humanities Forum shared his concern and encouraged him to do something about it. Naske approached Neil Davis at the Geophysical Institute, suggesting initially that he undertake a weekly television show to explain how the university's researchers were nudging the boundaries of what was known about the north.

Davis liked the idea, but not the television part. Producing a show would take too much time and energy, detracting from his main business of scientific research and teaching. But, he thought innocently, he could write the column evenings and weekends, leaving the bulk of his workday for science. Davis wrote a proposal seeking funds for typist's time and other miscellaneous support for a column from the Humanities Forum, and received a grant.

Davis already had received a go-ahead from the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner to run the column. Bob Atwood, then a member of the Geophysical Institute's advisory board, also offered to run the column in the Anchorage Times, but Davis thought beginners should stay close to home. So the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner was the column's exclusive publisher during 1976, its first year in print.

The News-Miner, under editor Kent Sturgis, gave the fledgling column excellent support, including a featured spot inside the popular Weekender section. By the end of its first year, the column had expanded out to the Anchorage Times and a dozen other newspapers, including the Whitehorse Star. Davis had turned to about 30 other university science faculty and agency researchers for topics and articles early in the column's life, but soon the readers had a major voice in deciding what went into it.

By 1982, more than a quarter of the column's topics came from reader suggestions and questions, which had been part of the original intent, as reflected in the original name chosen: Community Science Forum. That was the year when Davis handed column-writing duties over to Seismologist Larry Gedney. A fluent writer, Gedney listened politely but unbelievingly when Davis told him that writing the column and answering readers' questions might absorb two or three working days every week. During the next five years, Gedney learned that Davis had been right. Meteorologist Sue Ann Bowling, who wrote the column for about a year after Gedney retired, knew she would have to adjust her schedule accordingly.

When Bowling needed a nine-month break to advance her research through a sabbatical at another university in 1987, Director Syun-Ichi Akasofu challenged science editor Carla Helfferich: you've been editing the column for scientists, now see if you can write it from scratch. With the help of a university (and several agencies) full of scientists, she could. And now, it turns out, so can science writer Ned Rozell, who has devoted 10 hours a week to the column for more than two years.

Since neither of the authors of this article are beholden to the institute, we can add a final note. Several Geophysical Institute directors deserve kudos for permitting the column to continue. They've had to pay the piper, or the writer, for the past 15 years. Even though that seems so logical--informing the public through a publicly funded institute--it's been brave. After the two original grants ran out, all costs of producing and disseminating the Alaska Science Forum have come under the budget heading of "administration." Ever since Eden's gate slammed shut people have been critical of expenditures for administration. So we who wrote this column thank Geophysical Institute directors Keith Mather, Juan Roederer, and Syun-Ichi Akasofu--and every reader who has helped keep the Alaska Science Forum a truly community project.