3 Ways Being a Science Communicator has Made Me a Better Scientist

Hold still while I place the electrodes on your head!

My first research presentation in college is forever etched into my memory.

It was the end of our fall semester biology lab, and my group met in the library the week beforehand to prepare our PowerPoint. I was in charge of making slides with background information.

For our project, my lab group had measured polyphenol oxidase—an enzyme involved in the browning of fruit—in three different apple varieties.  As it turns out, every group had done this experiment. It was the coolest thing we’d learned how to do that semester, after all.

So I wanted our group to stand out. I interspersed the boring, informational slides with a little storytelling, and the experiment took on a life of its own:

It’s almost time for the annual county fair, and you want to make the best apple pie! You know that the key to success is using an apple that won’t brown right after you cut it. Which variety will get you the blue ribbon?

My group was a bit skeptical, but they ultimately buckled under my persistence.

We got our grade a week later—an A. But the professor wrote a note underneath: “Good presentation, but a bit gimmicky. Don’t do that next time.”

I was deflated. While my approach, in retrospect, may not have been the best for a class assignment, I knew that what I had done wasn’t inherently bad or wrong—I was telling a story.

Scientists are often told to reach out to general audiences about their research for the public’s benefit. We need to establish trust! Taxpayers deserve to understand where their money is going! We need to clear up misconceptions about GMOs and vaccines and climate change!

While these arguments are absolutely true, many scientists find this hard to do. Science communication can become a time-consuming side job. And for many, such a responsibility to the general public can be extremely daunting.

But it’s okay for scientists to practice their communication skills for non-philanthropic reasons, too. Despite my initial college lab experience, telling stories as a science communicator today has made me a much, much better scientist in a few unexpected ways.

Colin Firth and the Slippery Slope of Scientific Authorship

Colin Firth CBE...PhD? Nicogenin (Flickr)

I’ve been in research for about seven years now. But if you search my name in PubMed, precisely one scientific paper will pop up—a manuscript published this past spring from my current group. I’m pretty far down on the author list, which reflects my contribution relative to my colleagues on this particular paper. While I helped with some of the writing, the data collection and most of the analyses were performed by others.

As you snuggle by the fire this holiday season to watch Love Actually, you should know that you’re also viewing the work of a published academic neuroscientist. That’s right—another PubMed search reveals that actor Colin Firth is cited on a 2011 brain imaging study in the journal Current Biology. 

And it doesn’t take an insecure graduate student like me to accuse Mr. Firth of not pulling all-nighters in the laboratory.

Authorship in science is tricky. In some laboratories, it’s a bit of a taboo topic. Ask your average scientist if they’ve witnessed abuses in authorship, and they’ll likely be brimming with stories for you—from people being “gifted” an authorship they don’t truly deserve, to hard-working (often junior) scientists being wrongly shafted by their colleagues. These stories are rarely discussed among labmates, and almost never between junior and senior investigators.

And then there are the extremes, like the 2001 Nature paper on the sequencing of the human genome boasting 2,900 authors and the 2012 paper detailing the Higgs boson, which cites a whopping 3,171 co-authors. Where exactly do we draw the line between who has made a meaningful contribution to a project and who is better suited for the “Acknowledgments” section?

Welcome to "Gaines, on Brains"

Welcome to my new blog!

My name is Jordan, and I'm a 22-year old graduate student beginning the pursuit of my Ph.D. in Neuroscience at Penn State. I'm not entirely certain what I'd like to do with my degree yet. I just know that I want a Ph.D., something I've wanted since 8th grade before I even knew what "neuroscience" really was. That could be me wanting to seriously pursue the scientific endeavor with all of my heart and soul, or me wanting to prefix my name with "Dr." without the daunting responsibility of treating patients.