Science in the Eyes of Non-Scientists

I recently had a conversation with a colleague of mine about how non-scientists view science. Somehow it came up that funding for cancer research might be cut sometime soon since we've been working on the problem for so many odd-number of years, but still have not found a cure. And in the culture of today's world where if you don't find the answer now, you give up and move onto a new problem, I feel that this phenomenon poses a significant threat to how politics shape science.

As a scientist, I've developed an appreciation for the thought and careful work that goes into discovered small parts of the bigger problem since without these little discoveries, we'd never be able to put the pieces of the puzzle together to solve the bigger problem. This past summer, I met a guy around my age who was writing a book about a genetic engineer. When I told him that I was a bioengineer, he immediately assumed that I cloned animals for fun. (He was a literature major in college.) He also started arguing with me that we should have already found a cure to cancer already since we've discovered various genetic markers that are related to various cancers. But I told him that there are many problems that we encounter that delay us in engineering solutions to, say, curing cancer, despite knowing underlying causes. For example, we know the underlying causes to why minorities in inner-city schools don't graduate from high school at high rates. But has this problem been fixed yet? No.

So, if you know nothing about science, you can tell me your opinion about how we should go about curing cancer, but I'm probably not going to take you seriously because you don't understand the scientific method (especially if you think all bioengineers do is clone animals for fun). And don't tell me evolution isn't "real" because all monkeys haven't turned into humans. Evolution may be just a "theory" (which is a good word in science), but there is tons of scientific evidence for it. To conclude, don't act like you're an expert in something that you've only read through some news source, because chances are, they don't know what they're talking about either.

For the record, even though I'm a bioengineer, I don't work on cancer research. I don't even clone animals (I may "clone" bacteria, but they clone themselves). And I'm not a mad scientist looking to clone people in the future... I'm a person with ethics too.