{credit}Cody Anthony Hernandez{/credit}
By Kendall Powell
By Eileen Parkes
“Exciting new line of attack for aggressive breast cancer”
I read that headline recently. “Fantastic” I thought, quickly followed by, “How have I missed this?”. My disappointment as I read the article (the new treatment had only been shown to work in cells in the lab, not in humans) turned to anger as I thought what someone with breast cancer might think whilst reading this. Someone who had coped with bad news and difficult treatments, hoping for a cure only to be disappointed again and again by overblown headlines.
By Jessica Eise
I recently had a phone call with a frustrated colleague looking for some advice. She had two key pressure points, both common in the field of science communication.
First, she often couldn’t make sense of what scientists were telling her. They would explain their advanced, varied concepts increasingly quickly and impatiently as she struggled to understand them. Both parties would leave frustrated, having not achieved much. The scientists might wrongly assume she’s stupid to have not understood.
Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy asked “What is the answer to life, the universe and everything?” To communicate effectively, scientists should simply ask “So what?”{credit}By IllusionConscious [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons {/credit}
To-do lists work for some, but a more holistic approach to researcher development may bring larger rewards.{credit}By FOTO:Fortepan — ID 2278: Adományozó/Donor: Unknown. [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons{/credit}
Put simply: I did not think about teaching in the lab.
Now, after guidance from recent research on mentoring, I realize that if graduate students like myself were more invested in mentoring, there would be many more small-but-important teaching opportunities.
By Chris Woolston
The analysis—which covered 486,644 biomedical articles with two to nine authors published between 1946 and 2009—found that female, black and Hispanic authors were less likely than were white men to hold prestigious last-author spots. And while all scientists tended to land more last-author spots as their careers went on, that trend was slower for women and minorities. “There’s a lack of progression for those groups,” says Bruce Weinberg, a co-author of the study and an economist at Ohio State University in Columbus. Continue reading
Pixabay
This piece was originally published on the BioMed Central blog network, part of Springer Nature.
I never actually liked science very much when I was at school. I was much more of a fan of English, History and Drama. But when I was 15 and studying for exams, I had to teach myself about plant hormones, because I’d been absent for that part of the year.
I found the subtlety and complexity of the topic far more interesting than the multiple choice questions and fact sheets we’d studied from in class, and so I realized that actually science was a really fascinating way to understand and discover new things about the world.
While I could always read, write and act as a hobby, I realized I could only do science as a job, so decided to study biology at University of Bristol. I still think it’s a shame that it’s so hard to do science as a hobby, and so after university, I did a Science Communication Masters at Imperial College London.
Here I learned more about people doing innovative science communication, which actively involved non-scientists in the scientific process. I worked in policy and media for a while, including in the media team at BioMed Central, before joining the British Science Association. Their vision of bringing science out of its silo, involving everyone in it, and putting it at the heart of culture and society really chimed with me.
In my job, I work with professional communities, encouraging and helping them to actively involve the public at the heart of science. I work with science communicators, to encourage best practice in creating truly two-way conversations with their audiences – we recently ran some research on the community and their needs, so that our work is really evidence-based.
I run our work with Sciencewise, a government program to encourage deliberative dialogue – a technique where the public meet with scientists and policymakers to discuss science policy issues, in order to create better policy.
Finally, I run our Media Fellowships, where we link up scientists with journalists to help create understanding between these two groups. Every once in a while, I also help out on a few other campaigns and programs, including our essay series, Not Just for Scientists, and Science Matters, a series of films we released just before the general election.
All of this work involves a lot of relationship building, so lots of my time is in meetings and on the phone, or finding new and important thinkers and ideas. And because we want our ideas to be challenging and evidence-based, it’s amazing how much thinking, analysis and planning is involved.
I spend much of my time at work thinking about the different ways that science can play a role in everyone’s lives. Whether that’s in more traditional ways, as a job, or watching documentaries and learning about science, or in some of the newer ways that are emerging – citizen science, makerspaces, and home experimentation.
It could be people having a more democratic involvement in science – in decisions about funding in the way that some medical research charities do, or in conversations and discussions with researchers to design experiments. Or even as a mindset that any of us can apply to our daily lives.
Within my team of five, only two of us did a science degree, which really helps make sure we’re constantly challenging each other, asking questions and thinking really openly about the role science can play in people’s lives.
I like the ambition and creativity that we’re able to bring to this work, and being able to be part of an organization that listens to a range of viewpoints, and working with people in and outside of science to challenge our views of what science can do.
Mostly, this involves being truly open to new ideas, which you can only really learn by listening, critiquing and challenging deeply held assumptions – both your own and other people’s. A lot of the same skills involved in science really!
The most rewarding things I’ve done have been things that scared me a little. Taking on curating the program for TEDxAlbertopolis – an event in the Albert Hall for 4,000 people, was terrifying, but one of the best experiences I’ve had.
We brought together scientists, designers, historians, musicians, dancers and a crossword compiler, who all shared a fascinating common ground in the space between science and other subjects. I would advise myself that sometimes areas and ideas like these that seem scary or unfamiliar are actually the most valuable, because that’s where you find and learn the most.
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Mark Clemons has published over 250 papers over the past two-plus decades, nearly all of them involving breast cancer. So imagine his surprise when Clemons, a medical oncologist at the University of Ottawa, Canada, received a flattering email inviting him to submit his work to, of all places, a journal focusing on yoga research.
The typical scientist, and particularly the typical early-career scientist, is so busy focusing on their research and their outputs (and grant applications and publishing and more grant applications and more publishing) that they don’t give priority to communicating their research, or even their successes, outside of that framework.
This picture of Garry Cooper was taken at as he spoke to a crowd of almost 60,000 scientists and supporters, during the March for Science on April 22 2017. It was submitted to Naturejobs as part of the #ScientistAtWork 2018 photo competition. Cooper tells Rebecca Wild about the story behind the picture.
Entries to the #ScientistAtWork competition close on 31 March. You can find out more at this link.
