Science is Hard

This blog will make you smarter (statement not evaluated by statistically significant research). It will hopefully provide you with a way to read about biomedical research in an easy and fun way. It will contain occasional updates from the world of biomedical science. These will be entries based mostly on primary literature (AKA journal articles) of interesting biological and medical significance. The idea is based on an assignment from my first year of graduate school writing class. We were required to read a scientific article and then write a blog style paper about it for someone who only has a basic understanding of biology (like a freshman college biology course). This probably does not sound very difficult, but for someone who is so immersed in the world of science, learning to use lay terms can be challenging. Explaining something like performing an RNAi screen can be very difficult when the lay person probably doesn’t know what RNAi is. During our class the Vice Chancellor of Communications at UMass Medical School, Edward J. Keohane, gave a lecture on communicating with the lay person. He emphasized this as an important task for us, as student pursuing a PhD in the biomedical sciences, in order to communicate our research and findings to different groups of people. Most important of these groups (in my opinion), is the taxpayer. Paying taxes sucks. But we all agree to do it in exchange for something; protection from criminals on a local (city police), regional (state police), national and international level (armed forces, CIA, FBI, etc), education for our children at least through high school, and the advancement of science, among many other things. In my mind, the American (and Massachusetts) taxpayer pays me to research cancer and find new treatment options. This means that the most important people I need to communicate with are the taxpayers. The people trust me to do the research that will make a difference, and who will ultimately benefit from my contributions.
Although I think effective communication to a lay audience is important, I also think the exercise of writing a blog style paper is especially good for our growth as scientific leaders and teachers. I have heard a quote (some online attribute it to Albert Einstein, but I honestly don’t know for sure) that says

“If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself”.

Writing a blog about a heavily scientific paper for someone with only a basic understanding of biological concepts forces us to boil down all of our complex ideas and techniques into simple explanations and concise thoughts. Most importantly it forces us to examine the work to try and answer the question “who cares?”. If the answer is “no one” then it signals to us that it is time to rethink our research goals.
I will start the first few entries of this blog by posting entries that resulted from the writing class assignment to give a broad range of topics. I focus my research on cancer, but there are a lot of other interesting areas of research going on every day and I hope to cover those as well. Any suggestions for articles to blog about or general ideas are encouraged!

Post authored by Sally Trabucco