Carta do editor

Abstract

Dear readers, It is my pleasure to announce that a new member has joined our editorial team: Luisa Massarani, a researcher who has long devoted herself to studying science communication and who currently serves as head of the Casa de Oswaldo Cruz/Fiocruz's Museum of Life, where she was responsible for establishing the Center for Studies on Science Communication (http://bit.ly/63zyWY). The Center, whose goal is to foster reflection on issues within the vital field of science communication, is the antipode of staying cloistered inside an Ivory Castle, of restricting ourselves to an esoteric jargon spoken only with peers, or of sealing ourselves tightly within the competitive world of "publish or perish"-a world often times quite foreign to the needs, reasoning, or language of social groups dwelling outside of academia. História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos once had a department on museums, but it was eliminated, despite the good number of articles we published on the topic, including a special issue that completely sold out in print: Museums and the Sciences (vol.12, supplement, 2005, available online at SciELO). Dialogues Between Science and Art (vol.13, supplement, Oct. 2006) was another successful endeavor. Now, with the help of Massarani, we intend to make studies on science communication a permanent fixture here at the journal. These articles will be of value not only to the readers and contributors who are already in the habit of visiting our pages but also to those enticed into the fold by our new effort. We will not be creating a specific department on science communication, as we did with the topic of museums before. Instead, our new editor will work at gathering good contributions to our current departments in the form of historical studies-including those in the present tense-about science and technology communication in whatever form it takes: museums, newspapers, the internet, television, exhibits, cartoons, movies, comics, outdoor events, plastic arts, and so on. Science communication has advanced in Brazil, as exemplified by the outstanding journal Boletim da Fapesp (http://bit.ly/93aU20). It has seen growth as an academic field as well. According to the data bank maintained by Brazil's federal research funding agency Capes, in 1985 only one doctoral dissertation was defended on the topic, while some forty theses and dissertations are now written every year. In 2009, the Casa de Oswaldo Cruz,