Ep. 820 SOS Special | Everybody Needs A Bit Of Scienza

This episode is brought to you by the Italy International Academy, the toughest Italian wine program. One thousand candidates have produced two hundred and sixty two Italian wine ambassadors to date. Next courses in Hong Kong Russia, New York, and verona. Thank you, make the cut. Apply now at viniti international dot com. Welcome to our special SOS, everybody needs a bit of Shanza installment. This is a shout out to all the wine geeks out there. We need some feedback on the professor's new book, the English version of jumbo shrimp guide to the origins evolution future of the grapevine. The Italian wine podcast is part of the mama jumbo shrimp brand, and mama jumbo shrimp is all about breaking down difficult concepts into small bite sized pieces. The issue here is that the new book is while a bit difficult to chew at this point. So we want to invite wine lovers out there to give us their input and advice to make the final product more reader friendly. So have at it wine lovers. Don't be shy. Send your comments to info at Italian wine podcast dot com. Now on to the show. Hello. My name's Stevie Kim. Welcome back to the Italian wine podcast. It's a daily show and we're very, very excited that it's doing extremely extremely well. Thank you all for listening in. And today, it is another installment of everybody needs a bit of, but the reading audible version of the new book that Professor Shenze is writing. And we have with us as usual, Richard Hoff, who is has not only translated and edited the book. We are trying to make this into a beautiful project, and we need your help. So which chapter will we be reading today, Richard? Okay. This is chapter fourteen, which is And what is it about? The the title is the duty of researchers to explain science So you'll be pleased to hear it's a less technical chapter and it explores some of the ethics behind science and especially issues around science in the age of fake news. So it brings us right up to date Yeah. It's it's very timely. Yeah. Okay. Alrighty. Take it away with it. Okay. Scientists should encourage the building of public consensus around their discoveries by sharing the methodology behind them Why then is the value of science not adequately explained? The fact that science is often viewed in a negative and even sometimes criminalistic way makes it very difficult to explain its value. Scientists and their findings are perceived as people who can undermine comfortable hegemonies, privileges, or established interests. They are looked upon with suspicion and are denied credibility often by people lacking in competence and with ideological motivations, sometimes even spurious. The mass media in this post post truth era often disinforms more than in farms searching for sensational news that associates genetically engineered plants with health risks to the monopoly in research by multinational companies to the loss of biodiversity and catastrophic tones. In medicine, we go with these from miracle cancer cures to unproven treatments for degenerative diseases. To the recent and dangerous media campaign against vaccination, even universities have their fault as they have underestimated the role of the so called third mission, the targeted use and transfer of academic knowledge to help resolve diverse societal challenges. The absence of a scientific culture is the true Achilles heel of our country, and unfortunately, there is a tendency to only turn to signs at moments of desperation or emergency has happened with the arrival of phylloxera. History is now repeating itself in relation to the climate emergency and the fight against COVID nineteen, forgetting that science often does not have the necessary resources to meet the demands that events require. Science and scientific thought have never found favorable ground in Italy. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Benedo Crocce stated that natural sciences were nothing but buildings of pseudo concepts for Giovanni gentile, the self styled philosopher of fascism, science was soulless, the logically necessary tendency of science to perceive nature as a nameless reality alien to the spirit. Unfortunately, the rhetoric of wine has with it sacredness made Viticulture lose contact with reality and with the problems of its production six percent of the vineyard area in Europe. Employs sixty five percent of chemical products in agriculture. This is an ancient problem. As Lamar said about the difficulty he encountered in making his ideas understood. It is not enough to discover and demonstrate a useful truth. But it is also necessary to be able to propagate it and make it known. The foundation of this difficulty is the lack of communication between humanistic and scientific culture in Italy two absolutisms have opposed each other, post enlightenment positivism on the one hand and idealism on the other. Until recently, the ruling class of our country was formed under the disastrous influences of Croche and gentile. Scientists must sacrifice some of their time dedicated to research for the dissemination of scientific culture in the simplest and clearest way possible. Scientific popularization should become the true cultural paradigm, a parallel culture that allows the modern scientist to be an effective and convincing persuader, a true cultural innovation awaits us on which we can reflect without prejudice to find a convincing answer to all the questions we ask ourselves every day, which can often be resolved through research. The wealth of a country and its well-being depend on many factors, but two are essential individual freedom and scientific development. Investing in science and betting on innovation, imply the will to think for the future, and the future is integrated Viticulture. Where the crucial aspects of sustainability the maintenance of biodiversity, the reduction of chemicals in the fight against parasites, the application of precision viticulture, and genetic improvement for resistant are successfully addressed Among the few positive consequences, perhaps the only one of the COVID nineteen pandemic is a renewed focus on knowledge and science. The internet and social media have opened up a new perspective. That of being able to talk about scientific topics without having the skills. It is no longer the time for grifters who by gathering some data here and there on the internet come up with alternative theories promising miraculous results faced with such a big problem, people want to understand, and to do so, they turn to scientists. The key to successfully facing the challenges of our time is investing in people's intelligence in education, not least because no scientist has all the answers in his pocket, and his first imperative should be the socratic paradox. I know that I know nothing. In April twenty twenty, in the wake of the COVID nineteen pandemic Yale University proposed a new online course entitled understanding medical research. Your Facebook friend is wrong. Within a few hours, there were over ten thousand subscribers. So much desire to understand. But there's more. The success of the course probably demonstrates a renewed interest in science and demand for empowerment that is to refine the tools of a critical spirit to reduce the distance between tables with numbers and graphs to be able to look beyond that bad science amplified every day by social media. Science seems to come out well from this period of health emergency. The language has been mainly technical, and the skills have returned to the fundamentals after the ultra simplification and derision of the experts in the post truth of the recent past The emergency situation has broken down the perception of science on several levels. Science is essential to understand the disease. It is useful to know how to use the means of prevention. The science that learns, the experts refer to the scientific method, slow, made of trial and observation. In the meantime, the relationship between science and politics has intensified even if the inclusion of science in the political process is not yet a natural step. Why are we hesitant to bring science into it? It's difficult to think that this is just the result of distant languages. However, something new has been set in motion. The awareness of the need for a new communication paradigm on scientific issues, the need to adopt innovative ways of approaching the subject to strengthen the knowledge and skills of everyone without exception. The serendipity that intimately binds the two cultures from a conceptual and also a methodological point of view through the role played by intuition is rarely used. And why is serendipity the matrix of the two cultures? If intuition or serendipity is escape, a flight that takes support to an enchanted country, and the poem is the account of the return journey with the treasure according to Garcia Lorca cataloging and narrating is hard work, even for scientific culture. Intuition invention is the Primus province, the prime mover, without which there will be no scientific product of value. But the road from the first step to the final product is tiring. Like the port's journey from the fairy tale land, the rest is effort and sweat inspiration and perspiration. Isn't the discovery of crisp cas9, a protein used by bacteria to defend against viruses and which is now successfully used in genome editing to cut the strands of DNA that are to be modified, perhaps a serendipity. On the training front, this means that before promoting collaboration between experts from different disciplines, and the writing of books and teams universities should continue to take care of the good health of the individual disciplines and the good quality of the scholars who profess them. In this regard, Piero Angela considers the problem very current and alive, especially in Italy, where schools tend to make a clear distinction between the two fields of study and the ways in which individuals are trained. He concluded by quoting a sentence from Dorado de Francia. We must not only make technology fit for man, but also men and intellectual fit for technology. Okay. Fantastic. I I wonder if our audience know who, of course, the Italians, who Piero Angelo is. Do you do you know who he is? That's a good question, I would probably have to Google that my first. So he's, he is a a very famous anytime. You said. Yeah. We would just call him a television host or is more than that Yeah. He's he's very, very famous. He's I I don't know an equivalent, stateside if there is one person, but he takes definitely scientific information into a a more decipherable, more layman, more easily accessible language, and he presents it in a he used to have a show, like, as a documentary, or it's a science program, but it's much more not like national geographic, but it's something similar to that. Everything that deals with science, you know. So that's kind of his his, his role. I think now his son has taken over. I think he's retired, but he's a very important figure in Italy. So that's something that we should probably put like an asterisk to most of these references in the book. We've included some foot notice, giving some some context and some background because obviously they're they're not personality, sometimes that are widely known. I tried a particular. Well, outside of Italy perhaps. Right? Because he's everybody knows. He's a household name in Italy, but I I'm not sure that anybody else would know outside of Italy. Okay. Very good. How many more chapters do you have? Well, there there are a few more chapters that are that are translated. What I'm trying to do is is is pick and choose some chapters at the moment that give a a flavor of the really diverse range of topics and subject matter that that the big involves, but we can we can keep going till till Christmas, I think. Maybe we won't do that. Right? But like, like we said before, please send us your comments. We need your feedback to improve this product that we're currently working on. We don't have a a title yet. Were you what do you think in terms of title? What are you thinking? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know whether to keep it something Latin and quite high high sounding or high brow or No. I would vote no for that, which gives it a sense of gravitas Right. Or whether just to try to really simplify it. We'll scare them away already. Uh-huh. But I'm a big fan of or the the homo sapiens book that was published a few years ago, and I think sometimes we shouldn't be afraid to to use these technical technical language as a an access point for people to see. So have you got any ideas? What are your suggestions so far? Well, I mean, at the moment, I'm just calling it Janice Vites Oh, Genesis Vites. With a with a subtitle, the jumbo shrimp guide to the origins evolution and future of the great time. Okay. So we are open to any suggestions that you may have, from the listeners at Lodge. Please join us next time for another reading with Richard Hoff. That's everybody needs a, but a special reading installment because it's a new book from Professor Shanesa. Again, please follow us. Subscribe to Italian wine Podcasts wherever you get your pods, of course. But we are also now available on, YouTube channel. We have our very own YouTube channel for special on the road series, mostly with myself. And it's called mama jumbo shrimp. We do some fun stuff. We make some TikToks also as mama jumbo shrimp and Pinterest. Otherwise, get us as Italian Wine Podcast on Insta and Twitter, Facebook, and wherever you get your social media. We're all over the place. Thanks again for joining us and supporting us. Don't forget to subscribe and spread the gospel of Italian wine. Chinchen with Italian wine people signing off here at Italian wine podcast. Listen to the Italian wine podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We're on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, email ifm, and more. Don't forget to subscribe and rate the show. If you enjoy listening, please consider donate eating through Italian wine podcast dot com. Any amount helps cover equipment, production, and publication costs. Until next time. Hi, guys. I'm Joy Livingston, and I am the producer of the Italian wine podcast. Thank you for listening. We are the only wine podcast that has been doing a daily show since the pandemic began. This is a labor of love, and we are committed to bring you free content every day. Of course, this takes time and effort not to mention the cost of equipment, production, and editing. We would be grateful for your donations, suggestions, requests, and ideas. For more information on how to get in touch, go to Italian wine podcast dot com.