Translate Science. Control The Narrative.

[Music]

trust the scientists

trust what the scientists are saying

that’s something we’ve all probably been

hearing recently or have at least heard

before

and i want to raise a counter question

and simply ask what if we don’t really

understand what the scientists are

saying

you see scientists have a communication

problem

their work is specialized so specialized

in fact that if a layperson were to go

about reading scientific reports as they

come out in academic journals

the chances are they won’t have a single

clue what these studies are talking

about

there’s an immense amount of jargon and

technical information tied up in graphs

and data

which require advanced knowledge to

fully understand

these articles are written for and by

other scientists in the field

and scientists in different fields say

astrophysics or neuroscience

don’t even know what the other one is

really talking about either

thus while there is genuinely exciting

research taking place in top

laboratories around the country most of

it happens behind closed doors

i know this first hand because i worked

in academia and i worked previously as a

scientist

but years ago when i was a humble

teenager before i had dreams of going

about science myself or

dropping whole-scale criticisms on

institutions of higher learning

i was volunteering at an assisted living

facility for the elderly

and people with dementia such as

alzheimer’s disease when i was in high

school we had this requirement about

community service

to get out of your orbit meet and

interact with different people and

do some good and that was cool and as a

teenager

what i really wanted to do was play

music all day so whenever the time came

to do some community service

i combined passion and obligation pick

up my guitar

and drive across town and play music at

an assisted living facility

now i love old people and already being

somewhat of an old man in my teens

i enjoyed spending long hours at the

nursing home listening to their stories

looking at pictures and singing songs

and there was one sunny afternoon there

where we’d been gathered around the

piano when one of the patients

a woman who because of her dementia

never said much to anyone

she’d smile and would talk and would

mostly repeat the same sentence like

clockwork

but this afternoon after i played some

songs on the piano

she said that she played piano growing

up and asked if she could play a piece

of music and i said absolutely

and she sat down and she played a

beautiful piece of music

far more complex than anything that i

could play but when the song was over it

was like it never happened

she was silent again she would repeat

the same sentence

the moment had passed and she had

forgotten

what makes it such that someone can

remember a beautiful arrangement on the

piano years later

but is unable to recall the conversation

or moment that happened a few minutes

before

that’s the question that got me

interested in science but here’s the

tough truth

we are all brought into science as

outsiders

and as i quickly learned that passion

notwithstanding

i had no idea what i was talking about i

knew nothing about anything

even after majoring in chemistry in

college and taking advanced biology

classes and working in a research lab

i was stunned when it came to studying

the brain

here’s a sample from a paper i was

reading at the time it’s a particularly

important paper published in nature

genetics

towards the beginning of the paper they

describe what they do

under the banner of the international

genomics of alzheimer’s project

we conducted a meta-analysis of four

g-wash samples of european ancestry

totaling over 17 08 cases and 37

154 controls in stage one followed up by

genotyping of 11

632 snips showing moderate evidence of

association p

less than 1 times 10 to the negative 3

in stage 1 in an independent sample that

included 8

572 cases and 11 312 controls in stage

in other words understanding the genetic

basis of alzheimer’s disease was going

to be

way more complicated way more difficult

to manage than the feeling of

inspiration that i got from a touching

moment that i experienced at a nursing

home

now people brand this inevitable lack of

knowledge at the beginning of one’s

graduate studies as a steep

learning curve now despite my lack of

knowledge on the topic

i knew enough to know that i wanted to

learn more and

i knew that i wanted to do better to

communicate my discoveries on paper in a

way that everyone could understand

so i read and i studied and i worked and

years went on and i found myself having

more experience

more familiarity and more confidence

with the work i was doing in the

laboratory

and after years of late nights at the

microscope and long experiments at the

bench

i finished and i put out my paper and i

had my phd

so i’m going to read you a line from my

paper

literally the punch line the big moment

what the research is

all about

we find that dorsal root ganglia and drg

axon secrete a factor supporting axon

girth and identify it as the c-terminus

of the er stress-induced transcription

factor kreb302 which is generated by

cytoprotease

cleavage and sensory neurons now

c-terminal crab302 forms a complex with

sonic hedgehock and stabilizes

association with the patch-1 receptor

and developing axons

our results reveal a neuron intrinsic

pathway downstream of sdp that promotes

axon growth

what no one knows what that means most

people don’t even know what these

proteins are and frankly these people

could be working

one biological inch away from the

sensory neurons that i was studying

so i didn’t beat the system and i didn’t

change the system

my own research was dense and unreadable

and it is here

that i am reminded of the first lesson

that kicked off this talk

science is hard

when i began speaking today i started

with the observation that academic

papers are tough to read and that

frankly they’re inaccessible for most

people

and i’m telling you now yep

that is the case we have specialized

problems

and we have specialized answers and it

can all be movie magic

and i don’t have the golden solution

here but i’m going to wager from my

experience

that one can constructively address this

problem

that is we can still improve scientific

communication

maybe targeting the journals is just the

wrong spot to do it

here are some possible solutions there

could be a requirement

say by high schools colleges and other

institutions of higher education

to teach classes that show how to

communicate science effectively

you can build communication into the

curriculum and really ask

what did this study say to you to guide

your experiments and understanding of

the field

and what does it mean for an outsider

every paper

every study focus on the main takeaways

do this in classes

in journal clubs and continue doing this

in academic publications

because some academic journals have in

fact developed a feature that paints

what the study is about in broad

brushstrokes

this puts scientists at the narrative

helm of their own work

they control the story and can prevent

it from being misinterpreted and

misunderstood

to quote my dad you could be the

smartest person in the entire world

but if you can’t get your ideas out in a

way that someone else can understand or

use them

then it doesn’t matter what you know you

can only live in your own head

as an academic community how do we get

outside of our own heads

and make sure that science gets

translated effectively

i want to give two easy pointers about

what people can do to communicate

science more effectively

number one never lose sight of what you

want to say translation

from one language to another takes many

forms let’s say you take a

story from ancient rome and translate it

in a way that completely misses the

poetry and only captures the prose

similarly you could miss the mark and

get so caught up in descriptions of

battle scenes that you totally left out

the emotional and narrative backdrop

before you communicate science you want

to identify the translation that you

were trying to make

number two stick to the main points my

old advisor would often point out that

young trainees would give talks about

their research and spend precious time

pouring over all the technical stuff

and by the end of the talk they would

forget to explain why they ever did what

they were doing in the first place

these speakers focused so much on the

how they for completely forgot the

points of the why

and what the heck does this even mean

when communicating their work

especially to the public scientists must

be able to explain

in a balanced way what they did how they

did it

why they did it and what it all means

so why am i saying all of this because

you should expect in fact

as a member of the public that these

needs are being met by the scientists to

explain things to you

you might not know or fully understand

the data at the end of the day

but you can and should know what to look

for when you read or hear about someone

else’s research

i want to talk about why this matters

why effective science communication is

important

at this point the kova 19 pandemic has

killed over 2 million people globally

and continues to mutate into dangerous

strains and yet there’s an excellent

technology

that could stop this virus straight in

its tracks and we’ve had it for decades

and it’s called a vaccine we know this

and at this moment across the u.s people

are being vaccinated with pfizer and

madarina vaccines that could bring us

out of this pandemic by neutralizing the

deadly effects of the virus

but that progress has been hampered by

rampant vaccine skepticism

in fact a poll from ap news reported as

recently as

early february 2021 that around one in

three u.s adults are skeptical about

receiving these fully

vetted vaccines one problem was that the

vaccine almost immediately became

political

as leading figures on both sides of the

aisle took shots of whether they would

take it

and numerous videos spread falsely

claiming that the vaccine was

ineffective or harmful or would even

change your dna

the longer the time has gone on medical

centers pharmaceutical companies

and other institutions have taken great

pains to explain how the vaccine works

but the stories and skepticism have

already run amok and a lot of damage has

been done

this was poor scientific communication

at its peak

not just by the scientists themselves

but by the journalists and politicians

who capitalized on a sensational moment

for their own gain

this is a failure in scientific

communication it also illustrates that

if you’re working on important research

how important it is to take your work

into your own hands and control the

narrative

otherwise someone else will

to close we do have to trust one another

we do have to trust the scientists but

we also have to be vigilant because

scientists are people too

and they make errors and they have

motives we have to accept the

limitations of our own knowledge and

leave some things in the hands

of the experts as difficult as that can

be whether it’s the details of a paper

about the molecular underpinnings of

dementia

or the release of a fully vetted vaccine

yet at the same time we all deserve to

know what goes on behind the closed

doors of a lab

research is funded by the government

which means your taxes

or your parents taxes go towards funding

research

you deserve to know what your money is

going towards

i think translating science effectively

is a force for unity

it brings us together as a practice it

keeps the public abreast of how the

frontiers of knowledge expand

every day as a scientist good

communication keeps you focused on the

big picture

what is this really about what are the

real world implications of my work

now personally i have both failed and

succeeded

at scientific communication but the

constant dialogue between failure and

success is also what science is all

about

we must embrace it accept it and use it

to grow to move on to discover even

better things

and then we must take care to explain in

a balanced way

what we did how we did it why we did it

and what it means thank you