Bringing parasites to the people: The Wellcome Trust Centre for Molecular Parasitology
The Wellcome Trust Centre for Molecular Parasitology:
- produced a series of comics depicting the beauty and danger of parasites
- mounted an exhibition at Glasgow Science Centre
- presented expert talks by Centre researchers
- created a new website for the public
- reached an audience that included ten media professionals, 800-1000 members of the public per day at the Science Centre and tens of thousands of website visitors.
Parasites, creatures that take up residence inside, evoke a mixture of fascination and revulsion. Striking a balance between the two was vital for the Glasgow researchers when they planned their public engagement work for the Centre for Molecular Parasitology, which studies organisms that live in or on people and animals and cause sleeping sickness, malaria and other conditions.
The team in Glasgow combined several different approaches to invite local people to share their research on organisms. Their researchers already run a school's science club, but for their 75th anniversary project, they targeted wider audiences with a new set of comic-strip style explanations of what parasites are and what they do.
The comic found multiple uses: it became a set of parasite postcards, was used as part of an exhibition at the Glasgow Science Centre and formed the basis for a new website. This was supplemented by talks from Centre staff (Dr Sonya Taylor, Dr Richard McCulloch and Dr Markus Meissner) about their favourite parasites.
The approach
The researchers work in a city with areas of deprivation, and Centre director Dave Barry feels a "moral imperative" to target the whole population with public engagement efforts. However, this was difficult on the modest budget for the project. Early ideas included putting posters on the Underground or old shops or projecting images onto buildings, but mounting an exhibition in the Science Centre was a new idea that tapped into an established audience - with 800-1000 visitors a day. In the end, the researchers decided that was the way to go.
The comic approach came out of earlier work in which PhD researcher Jamie Hall collaborated with an old friend, artist Edward Ross, on a comic book about parasites. As Hall explains: "We knew the artist, and we thought it would work."
The medium calls for clear images and minimal text, reinforcing the invariable requirement of public engagement - knowing what you want to say. "One of the things about these projects is that it really makes you decide what your message is," says Hall. "You can't communicate everything."
There were plenty of candidates for the featured parasites, because "everybody is passionate about their own organism". In the end, three (which are important causes of disease and feature heavily in the Centre's research) were chosen: Plasmodium, which causes malaria; trypanosomes, which are responsible for sleeping sickness; and Toxoplasma gondii, which can live in almost any body cell and causes persistent cysts.
Once the parasites had been chosen, it was important to develop the right emphasis for the audience. Parasites are weirdly wonderful, and biologists - as Hall confesses - "often start looking at things from the organism's point of view". But someone who is hosting a parasite might not appreciate that it is an evolutionary marvel: "You have to be sensitive to the fact that this exquisite biology is responsible for horrific suffering."
Putting disease first also fitted advice on what would work in the proposed Science Centre exhibition. A tentative plan to put the viewer in the parasite's place was shelved in favour of something that would draw people in more easily in competition with other exhibits. The comic-strip panels were scheduled as an exhibit for a long stretch (from November 2011 until the following July), with no one on hand to explain further. "We really had good exposure," says Parasite Centre administrator Alex Mackay, but the panels had to speak for themselves.
The final comic narratives provided a simple introduction to parasites, which can now be seen on the website. The web pages offer simple depictions of the organisms – they look rather attractive, but they are described as "the tiny creatures that kill". There are brief accounts of how parasites enter the body and how the immune system seeks to eradicate them, then thoughts on why it might fail and what research can do about it.
The website is the main public engagement gateway for the Centre, and the basic presentations link to more detailed information presented by organisations such as the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control.
The presentations were based on the three selected organisms, and they emphasise their fascination as well as their threat. As one of the public lecturers, Dr Markus Meissner, put it, Toxoplasma (which infects between 30 and 40 per cent of the human population), is "a beautiful creature with weird biology".
Similar imagery and text were adapted for the Science Centre display, which was also a simple introduction to parasites and their effects. The scientists worked with visual artists and experienced exhibition designers to distil their messages into stories that were suitable for the display.
The reasons for adopting a comic book style were explained by the commissioned artist, Edward Ross: "I think this is where comics show a lot of their strengths for communication. If science is a distant and specialist subject in the public imagination, then comics are perhaps the opposite, considered approachable and non-threatening to most. Well, that's the idea behind it, anyway."
But the format can be tough to work with when there are unfamiliar ideas to get across. For Ross, "It was an amazing challenge, boiling down some very complex science into digestible, family-friendly information."
The displays formed a backdrop to the three public lectures, each delivered twice, which told more detailed stories based on the Centre's own research. The lectures were carefully developed to appeal to the general public, with video links to images of the organisms under discussion and a glimpse of live mosquitoes for the audience learning about malaria. Along with the postcards, website, display and lectures, the whole effort was set off by a giant banner - hung down the inside of the researchers' building in Glasgow - highlighting Edward Ross's images of three parasites and drawing attention to the work going on in the middle of the city.
Next steps
Centre administrator Alex Mackay believes the project has given a long-term boost to the Centre’s engagement efforts, and she says the exhibition panels can be used more or less indefinitely: "They last forever, and there's nothing that’s going to date." The exhibition was displayed again during the Glasgow Science Festival in June 2012 and has also been on display at a smaller science centre in the Govan. "We're trying to get into places which wouldn’t normally see a display on parasites," says Mackay. "Shopping centres are next on the list."
Two of the public lectures were repeated at the 2012 British Science Festival in Aberdeen, and there are also plans to video them. The recorded versions will then be used as part of the development of the website, along with shorter explanatory videos from the Centre's principal investigators. They are also suitable contributions for the university's wider online offerings about its research.
The Centre now runs its own public engagement course, and the first offering was oversubscribed. Alex Mackay says that so many people wanted to enrol, they had to set up a waiting list, adding: "We will certainly be offering this course again. It's great to see that our Centre's passion for public engagement is spreading among other student and staff members within the wider College."
Further information
To see some of the results, see the Parasites website.
Visit the Centre for Molecular Parasitology website to learn more about the Centre.
To learn more about the project, contact Alex Mackay: alex.mackay@glasgow.ac.uk.
