I love a researcher who can speak English
[Note to all the knee-jerk reactionaries out there - I am not referring to foreign scientists. Swallow your hypersensitive wrath and read on.]
I attended a seminar on stem cell research for reporters and writers a couple of days ago. Great talks, learned a great deal, and by the end of the day I could almost see stem cells floating in the air in front of me.
But what struck me the most was not the talk of nuclear cloning techniques or the ethics of therapeutic or research cloning. No, it was the speakers themselves and how they spoke to the audience. The best speakers were by far the oldest researchers, the ones who had been in the business for at least 20 years. They knew how to speak to the audience in plain language and as educated lay people.
The worst speaker of the day was the youngest. He was precise, direct, and brilliant, but got bogged down in the minutiae of his work. No one in the room needed to know about the structure of the transfection cassette he used to insert GFP into the ES cells harvested from his chimeric blastocysts. Nor did anyone understand it. Nor, frankly, did anyone care; such information was beyond the needs of that audience.
Now, this shouldn't be surprising, as with age comes understanding, experience, and an increased ability to read your audience. But it does raise an interesting idea. As I've said before, researchers need to be able to talk about what they do for it to mean anything to anyone. But why should it only be the most senior researchers that can do this?
Is it time for graduate and postgraduate programs to integrate media training/coaching into their curricula? Not for the benefit of reporters, really, but to equip students and postdocs to relate to the rest of us what makes their work important. After all we are paying for it. But more importantly, the public needs to be better informed to be able to debate the societal merits and pitfalls of scientific breakthroughs.
And how can we do that if scientists can't tell us in plain English what they do?
I attended a seminar on stem cell research for reporters and writers a couple of days ago. Great talks, learned a great deal, and by the end of the day I could almost see stem cells floating in the air in front of me.
But what struck me the most was not the talk of nuclear cloning techniques or the ethics of therapeutic or research cloning. No, it was the speakers themselves and how they spoke to the audience. The best speakers were by far the oldest researchers, the ones who had been in the business for at least 20 years. They knew how to speak to the audience in plain language and as educated lay people.
The worst speaker of the day was the youngest. He was precise, direct, and brilliant, but got bogged down in the minutiae of his work. No one in the room needed to know about the structure of the transfection cassette he used to insert GFP into the ES cells harvested from his chimeric blastocysts. Nor did anyone understand it. Nor, frankly, did anyone care; such information was beyond the needs of that audience.
Now, this shouldn't be surprising, as with age comes understanding, experience, and an increased ability to read your audience. But it does raise an interesting idea. As I've said before, researchers need to be able to talk about what they do for it to mean anything to anyone. But why should it only be the most senior researchers that can do this?
Is it time for graduate and postgraduate programs to integrate media training/coaching into their curricula? Not for the benefit of reporters, really, but to equip students and postdocs to relate to the rest of us what makes their work important. After all we are paying for it. But more importantly, the public needs to be better informed to be able to debate the societal merits and pitfalls of scientific breakthroughs.
And how can we do that if scientists can't tell us in plain English what they do?
posted by Tom Ulrich at 9:38 PM
2 Comments:
How did you become interested in science writing?
DG
DG-
It all started when I was in grad school, but I hold my undergrad history professors to blame.
I was halfway through my thesis research when I realized that I was miserable in the lab,that I didn't have the patience, tenacity, and drive to be a good scientist. I knew I would finish my masters degree (by God!), so it came down to what to do with it.
Now, I had been a history minor in college, and really enjoyed writing papers. Okay, we have science, we have writing...why not give science writing a try?
So in a moment of unusual chutzpah, one fine August morning I marched across the street to my grad school's public affairs office, walked into the assistant director's office, and said, "Give me an internship." The guy looked me up and down and said, "You can start on Tuesday."
That was almost 7 years ago. What has kept me fired up about it is:
a) A continued fascination with science (I want to learn about it, I just don't want to DO it), and
b) The challenge of making scientific concepts understandable and interesting for people like my wife, who is very intelligent (probably more than me), but doesn't know a lot about science and had some really bad science experiences in high school and college (bad teachers, etc.), experiences that turned her off to science in a big way.
While that's probably a longer answer than you wanted, DG, it's the whole story. Thanks for asking!
Post a Comment
<< Home