Alan Alda's Experiment: Helping Scientists Learn To Talk To The Rest Of Us

"Alan Alda's father wanted him to become a doctor, but it wasn't meant to be. 'I failed chemistry really disastrously ... ' Alda says. 'I really didn't want to be a doctor; I wanted to be a writer and an actor.'"

"Which is exactly what happened, but Alda didn't leave science behind entirely. His new book, If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?, is all about communication — and miscommunication — between scientists and civilians."

"'People are dying because we can't communicate in ways that allow us to understand one another,' he writes. 'It sounds like an exaggeration, but I don't think it is. When patients can't relate to their doctors and don't follow their orders, when engineers can't convince a town that the dam could break, when a parent can't win the trust of a child to warn her off a lethal drug. They can all be headed for a serious ending.'"

"Alda explains why empathy is crucial to successful science conversations, and describes his work at the Alan Alda Center For Communicating Science."