A brief break from the deep subject matter expertise posts, because it has me thinking broadly about scientific communication. Specifically, that formal training (i.e. undergrad and grad school) never prepared me for real scientific communication.
The focus in school was always communicating science to non-scientists, usually children from middle school through high school. While getting kids interested and excited about STEM subjects, this focus on middle/high school scientific communication really did me a disservice in my professional life and probably even my personal life.
There are so many more facets to scientific communication that really don’t get addressed sufficiently in higher education circles. I’m thinking about how I have, professionally, had to figure out communicating very technical, jargon-heavy concepts to a variety of really smart people who have expertise outside of my hyper-focused niche. The way I might approach communicating what I do (mass spectrometry, proteomics, transcription factors, etc) completely depends on the audience. A venture capital investor, for example, is thinking about things from a financial perspective, while a pharmaceutical scientist is thinking about this from a drug discovery perspective, and an oncologist is thinking about the outcome and impact on patients in a clinical trial. Nobody is “wrong”, nobody is smarter than anybody else, everyone’s just thinking about the same thing from a different perspective and with a different lens.
It follows, then, that communicating the same topic needs to be framed specifically for different audiences. It doesn’t mean that the core concepts are changing, just that the language needs to be different for the most effective communication. Maybe language is an interesting parallel, where translating the same message into different languages shouldn’t change the core message, but using the right language for the right audience is going to make communication much easier than forcing everyone to do the translations themselves, or even worse just zone out and not even listen to the message at all.
None of my undergraduate or graduate school outreach opportunities touched on this concept of science communication to adults, really. As far as I can recall, it always focused on making fun, hands-on “labs” or demonstrations for kids to learn scientific concepts. Then I got into the “real world” and suddenly cute little demonstrations aren’t really working anymore.
An obvious example of where scientific/STEM communication can go really right or insanely wrong is with policy. Policy makers might consult scientists and doctors and other professionals, piece together all of the best expert advice to write into laws or regulations or recommendations, but without effective communication, policies are relying solely on people following guidance based on an appeal to authority. Sometimes that works, but a lot of times it doesn’t. In my own work, appeal to authority has very rarely worked out. I don’t have much authority outside of my hyper-niche specialty, and so the communication (good or bad) is weighed much more heavily.
I think there’s a lot we could learn about communication, as a scientific community, from novelists and screen/scriptwriters. Crafting a story can help hook an audience into a message. This is another place where grad school trained me, but maybe trained me specifically to give scientific talks to scientific audiences; I’ve had to relearn how to build a “story” based on the sort of “plot” or pacing that communicates the message best. I think there’s parallels between classic literature tropes (e.g. hero’s journey, tragedy, comedy) that could get translated really well through the lens of telling a scientific story. There’s some examples of nonfiction biographies or histories that have done this for biotech stories, like the books Living Medicine and Billion Dollar Molecule, that retell the history of bone marrow transplants and the pharmaceutical company Vertex’s founding respectively, but they do it with a framing that helps tell the historical story and scientific journey in a way that is nice to read.
I’m sure with both of those books that the exact history isn’t perfectly captured, and in part can never be because the way the stories are told involves so many peoples’ specific memories and emotions and motivations, but the general approach is something I really admire from a communication standpoint.
I think the books work so well, in part, because the reader can pattern match the general story arc to other novels. There’s some backstory setting up the scene and the characters, there’s some tension or suspense that puts the main characters through a challenge, and then there’s a resolution by the end of the book. There’s some subplots along the way, maybe some romance or comedy.
Lack of storytelling is why a lot of scientific communication falls so flat. I’ve sat through a lot of scientific presentations that are just a linear chronology of all the experiments that the presenter has ever done. The right story, though, is almost never the chronological story. Although there’s some contexts where the chronological story is motivational to the audience, I think most audiences are thinking ”Why should I care?” so you need to directly say out loud why they should bother listening and paying attention to you. For startup pitch decks, usually the first slide is either directly stating the problem that the company proposes solving, or it’s the financial opportunity (market size); both of which directly tell the audience why they should care because it’s a problem that they themselves can recognize or it’s an opportunity to make money. For a scientific presentation, usually an element of teaching goes a long way, so that the audience cares because you’ve taught them something new. (Put another way, making the audience feel smart/smarter is a good motivator for a scientific audience, who is probably always looking to learn more.)
In scientific manuscripts for peer reviewed journals, there’s definitely a certain pattern that I’ve come to expect from papers. For a basic four-figure paper, the first figure is some kind of method or overall experimental schematic. The second figure is a high-level visualization of the data, like a heatmap or a dimension reduction like principal component analysis (PCA), t-SNE, UMAP. The third figure is a deep dive into some slice of that big dataset, just visualized differently. And then the final figure is some orthogonal experiment to prove figure three correct, and/or a schematic of some biological mechanism that the data suggests. Pattern matching that template helps get through papers pretty quickly, because I can just flip to the figures and usually they follow some general flow like that.
Having some portion of the communication being predictable helps get the message across. If the message itself is unexpected or difficult, then having the medium be predictable or the presentation be predictable can help, I think. Predictability isn’t a bad thing. There’s something comfortable about knowing what to expect, and when it changes abruptly, it can be jarring. I’m thinking about things like when your favorite band has a particular style of music that they produce, but then there’s that one weird random song that doesn’t fit the vibe and sticks out badly. (Of course, some people are amazing across genres, and there’s some scientists like that, too, who can easily hold their own across multiple fields.)
Something I use almost always in my scientific presentations is a “three-act” structure. My talks almost always start with some brief introduction to set the “scene”, maybe 10-15% of the total talk. Then, I set up three main, take-home messages for the audience, and each of the three is about 25-30% of the talk and somewhat builds on each other. Finally, with the remaining 10-15% of the talk, I have some “cliff-hanger” future work, but not whatever the next obvious logical step would be based on what I’ve said, but some more distant future vision. It’s not something that I happen to do, it’s something that I pointedly intentionally do whenever I sit down to organize a talk. I usually start by deciding on the three main messages, set each of those up, then do a little scene-setting/exposition at the beginning that gives just enough context for the three messages, and then a little bit of forward-thinking “cliff-hanger” at the end. I don’t claim to be the best presenter or anything, but I’ve been invited to speak quite a bit so I figure something must be resonating.
None of this is meant to be an immediate solution to any scientific communication struggles, and again to be clear I don’t mean to imply that I’m a significantly better communicator than anybody else. In part, this is because I don’t think we scientists get enough training on communication, and in part because it’s just hard anyway, even if we did get trained. I’m inspired by writers, though, because I think if we structured scientific communication to lean on common literature, like plot devices and story structure, we’d probably capture a wider audience and have more buy-in and support from policy makers, funding agencies, and even the general public.
Lindsay K. Pino 