On Thursday, January 8, 2015 at Peterson Hall in New York City, CLBB presented “Why Science Needs Storytelling (and Vice Versa), – an Evening with Malcolm Gladwell,” a conversation between The New Yorker author and Harvard psychiatric geneticist Jordan Smoller, MD, ScD. The two thinkers discussed the difficulties of translating scientific research for general-audience publications, the gap between scientific consensus and public understanding, how storytelling can help, and why it’s more crucial than ever.
Malcolm Gladwell is the author of five New York Times bestsellers — The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants. He has been named one of the 100 most influential people by TIME magazine and one of the Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers. Gladwell has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He has won a national magazine award and been honored by the American Psychological Society and the American Sociological Society. He was previously a reporter for The Washington Post.
Jordan Smoller, MD, ScD is a CLBB faculty member and Director of the Psychiatric and Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit, Associate Chief for Research in Psychiatry, and Director of Psychiatric Genetics at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health. Additionally, Smoller is the author of the popular science book, The Other Side of Normal: How Biology Is Providing the Clues to Unlock the Secrets of Normal and Abnormal Behavior.
To watch video of the entire Found in Translation event, or explore past events on memory, free will, and empathy, see CLBB’s Vimeo channel.