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