I’m sitting in my hotel room on the outskirts of New Delhi.
I landed two nights ago. The thick mist offered the burden of the people who so arduously build their lives in this incredibly diverse yet so homogenous land.
I can hear the horns screaming outside as commuters attempt to make themselves visible, not trusting anyone to notice them weave through traffic with an almost unbelievable conviction that they’re either invincible or that, if they honk loud enough, they might just go through every solid object in front of them.
Yesterday, I had my first taste of the city with the help of a friend – the one who summoned me here:
“I’m about to celebrate my wedding in this faraway land. Please come and join us as an excuse to discover what the world has to offer,” he said months ago, unaware that I would accept his offer.
If I had to choose a city to explain the concept of entropy, Delhi would be it.
The chaos on the street can be jarring. But, with just the right person, you can feel like a ghost as you cross through the ten lanes of cars, bikes, and buses that morph into 6, 7 and, sometimes, 12 lanes.
Out of the chaos, if you squint your eyes just enough, you’ll notice thousands of stories, thousands of dreams. Thousands of people who simply refuse to stop moving. This is where you come to find those that will pierce through. This is where you come to find people who, despite the looks, know they do not need to honk to get through any solid barrier that stands between them and their goals.
I will not comment on the food, as it’s well-acknowledged now that this country’s cuisine is exceptional, and I don’t have any novel insights on this topic.
This was originally posted as an answer to a Quora question in October 2023
“How can I possibly convince these people that what I’m doing is important?”
Answering that question is one of the most daunting and boring parts of a PhD. But this can also be turned into an incredible expedition, and the most rewarding creative aspect of research.
Writing grants is an absolute nightmare. How can you play with words, while remaining true to the nature of your research, so a handful of people think that giving you money will change the world?
I used to find grant writing horribly boring for three main reasons.
First, Grant Writing is Scary!
When writing grants, you’re exposing the work you want to do (and the work you’ve already done) for experts to find out why YOUR work IS NOT good enough. Why YOUR WORK IS NOT worth the money. This is scary! You’re literally asking to be judged!
Second, Grant Writing is Long!
To write a good, convincing grant, you need to spend weeks, if not months working on your text! You read the literature. You interpret data. You write. You erase. And you write more. No matter how passionate you are about your work, staring at the same piece of text for weeks will lead anyone nuts.
Third, You’re Often Restricted in the Structure and Formatting of Your Text.
“Oh, so you want me to convince you that what I’m doing is worth 30K $ a year? Of course! Piece of cake!” – Until you realize that you have to do it within 2 pages, with 2.5cm margins, Times 12 font, including a progress section and a discussion about equity and diversity.
Such restrictions make you feel incaged, and the task just becomes a chore.
At the same time, over the past couple of years of my PhD, I’ve realized that writing grants is also an amazing exploration. It’s a skill that can be learned like any other. And it is all just a big game.
These are the three ways that I changed my mindset from “Ugh, not grant writing season again” to “Hell yeah! Game on.”:
Grant Writing is an Incredible Creative Exercise
It actually doesn’t take long for this to click in your mind when writing a grant. While exposing your ideas and plans, new more exciting ideas and questions start popping up! You start thinking of exciting ways to answer these questions and solve new puzzles that present themselves to you!
Of course, this happens during all of your PhD, but, when writing grants, you have a bit more time to think about these exciting innovations, and develop them a little bit further!
It is actually while writing these texts that I remember how incredibly creative science is!
Grant Writing is a Skill
Listen, I’m a big nerd. I like learning new stuff.
The moment I realized that grant writing is a skill that I didn’t currently have, I suddenly got a huge burst of motivation.
“Here’s a new thing that I can learn!”.
And what is the best way of learning something than practicing?
Grant Writing is a Game.
I’m an extremely competitive person (as most people in academia are).
Of course, getting grants is a competitive business. But competition without rules is not fun. Once you start learning the rules of the game and start really looking at it as “intentionally playing the game”, it helps decrease the boredom of the task a little bit.
Unfortunately, you can’t get rid of grant writing during your PhD. You will need to get funding somehow. But, focusing on the creative and game aspects of the task will enormously help you have more fun when working on these daunting scholarship documents.
This was originally posted as an answer to a Quora question in October 2023
Why doesn’t our body contain one single “genomic hub” that transmits all of the genetic information to the rest of the body?
First, it’s really hard to efficiently transport small things over large distances.
Proteins do almost everything within a cell. But for proteins to do their tasks, they have to be positioned in specific places within the cell.
This can be done either by moving the protein itself into its location of action, or by moving the RNA encoding the protein closer to the location.
One way of doing this is through the help of what we call “motor proteins”. These are some pretty cool machines that get things moving around in the cells.
3D rendering of a motor protein called Kinesin, transporting a large vesicle. This vesicle could contain proteins or RNA inside of it.
These motor proteins use A LOT of energy. So having a lot of these walking over large distances would be extremely wasteful.
Because of this problem, some very long cells in your body have more than one copy of the genome. Muscle cells, for example, need most of their energy for contraction. So, they can’t spend a lot of energy on transport! For that reason, long muscle cells have several copies of the genome spread around the cytoplasm so that, whenever a gene is read, the resulting protein is near its location of action.
Other very long cells, like nerve cells, don’t need to spend a lot of energy in contraction. Hence, they can afford to have a single nucleus and rely on transporters (like the kinesin molecule shown above) to move things around their long axons (which can be as long as a meter!).
Second, different cells don’t read the genome the same way.
If the genome has the instructions to make us who we are, and every cell has an exact copy of the genome, how come they don’t all look the same? A brain cell is clearly very different from a skin cell. How does that happen if they have the exact same set of instructions?
Nerve cells (left) and skin cells (right) under a light microscope.
Well, although cells have the same “main manual” (the genome), they don’t all read the same pages (the genes). The combination of pages that cells “read” from the manual is what determines the shape, function, and localization of the cell in the body.
In more Biological terms: different cells express different genes.
If there was one single “genomic hub” in the body, how would different information be transmitted to different cells?
Finally, we evolved from unicellular organisms.
The first two reasons above are very “technical” and “practical” reasons. But I believe that, at the end of the day, the real underlying reason why we have a copy of the genome for almost every cell, is because we evolved from unicellular organisms, each containing their little genome.
I’m not an evolutionary biologist, so I’ll restrain myself from commenting too much on this point. Perhaps a more credible person on the topic could complement my answer, but I remember reading a hypothesis that multicellular organisms evolved from colonies of unicellular organisms that live symbiotically. This hypothesis is actually supported by things such as cyanobacteria (a unicellular organism) that can combine to form colonies or filaments.
This was originally posted as an answer to a Quora question in October 2023
The classes that you should be taking will of course depend on your interests, career objectives, as well as what is offered by your university.
Here are some of my favourite topics, and what I would have taken if I could go back in time during my Biochemistry undergraduate:
Biophysics Courses: The field of Biology is becoming increasingly quantitative. I personally find that applied mathematics gives you new glasses to look at the world. It allows you to answer questions and test hypotheses that were previously unreachable! I like mathematics and physics very much, and I absolutely love molecular biology! Seeing both of them together and learning how to apply maths in biology would have been incredible during undergrad! Thankfully, I’m now getting very exposed to this world during my graduate studies.
Developmental Genetics: How the hell does a single cell (at fertilization) become a multicellular organism as complex as a human being?! I briefly touched this subject in one of my courses in undergrad and I wish I had the time to learn more! It’s absolutely incredible how gene regulation in embryonic development leads to a fully functional complex organism.
Molecular Biology of Aging: Everyone says that “aging is just part of life”. But does it have to be? Recent scientific advancements suggest that it doesn’t, and our understanding of the mechanisms of aging in some model organisms has allowed us to reverse this natural phenomenon to a certain extent. A class on this topic would be fascinating.
Independent Research Projects: This is not exactly a class, but many universities allow you to work on a research project for course credits. If you can, I’d absolutely pursue this opportunity. Learning the ins and outs of how knowledge is created is an incredibly rewarding experience. Plus, this would give you the chance to explore a topic of interest in an amount of debt that very few people ever will.
I hope these were insightful!
Good luck with your studies! Follow for more content on Molecular Biology and Biophysics 🙂
This is an answer I wrote to a Quora question in October 2023
Despite this unfortunately widespread myth, it’s not true that all cells in the body are replaced within seven years. Your brain, for example, does not produce any new neurons from the moment you’re born. Hence, the cells in the brain cannot be “replaced” within seven years.
Some previous answers have wrongly stated that memories are created through the formation of proteins. This is misleading, as it implies that the memory is recorded within the protein structure, which is completely false.
Memories are encoded by connections of specific neurons.
The brain is an interconnection of neurons. Each one of them can be connected to one or more different neurons.
Let’s imagine that you have a brain containing 100 neurons and that each neuron is numbered 1 to 100.
The memory of the taste of chocolate is encoded through the connection between neurons 1, 15, and 72.
And the memory of your favourite song is encoded as the connection between neurons 23, 42, 66, and 81.
Whenever you remember what chocolate tastes like, what your brain is doing is “firing” neurons 1, 15, and 72 together. And you remember your favourite song it fires neurons 23, 42, 66, and 81 together.
People that have Alzheimers for example forget things because their neurons are dying. They’re losing the connections. In our examples above, if the person lost Neuron number 15, they would no longer be able to remember the taste of chocolate.
This is an overly simplified explanation of memories, but it gets the gist of it.
I lied to you.
When I said earlier that the cells in the brain do not get replaced, I was partially lying to you.
Determining if a cell gets replaced or not depends on how you define “replaced”. If by “replaced” you mean a complete turnover of all the molecules that make up the cell without destroying the cell, then yes. No cell in your body is made of the same atoms as they were 7 years ago.
What I’m describing here is equivalent to saying that I’d replace every brick that makes the Empire State Building, one at a time, without ever destroying the building. Would it be a different building? Technically yes, but it would still be the Empire State Building.
The reason why you’re able to remember things even if every atom of your cells is replaced after a certain period of time (which may or may not be 7 years), is because the structure of the cells remains the same! The connections between the brain cells are still identical. Hence, the memories remain.
I hope this was informative!
Consider following for more content on Biophysics and Molecular Biology
Today, with so much information available, it is tough to determine what is true on the internet. Influencers without the appropriate background easily trick their audience into believing false scientific information by simply sounding “sciency” enough. Is it the fault of the users who do not think critically and are led to believe anything they see on social media? Or is it the fault of actual scientists who fail to educate the general public about their findings and their methods to do their measurements?
The lack of science education is certainly not due to the lack of science being done. It is safe to say that, each year, hundreds of thousands of scientific articles describing new technologies and discoveries are published and that’s probably only in the field of medicine! Why, then, do people still believe that 5G radio waves can cause a virus infection? Why are people afraid of a vaccine developed with technologies that are decades old? One reason is that scientific information is not available or exciting to most people outside of STEM, causing people to mistrust scientists and fear the new technologies created.
Where are the people?
For people to start trusting science, scientists must become more open, more public, and more relatable to the average citizen. The easiest way to do that is through social media. Scientists should become more active on social media platforms to showcase their work and make it more relatable to the public.
The best place to reach people is to go where the people are. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2021, 72% of the US adult population has at least one social media account. However, most of the work done by scientists is published in journals that demand a high fee for access. Even experts sometimes have trouble accessing articles. Without an actual need, someone outside of STEM is unlikely to go out of their way to read an academic paper. Instead, scientists could make a small effort to share their work where people are more likely to see it: Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Youtube, or any other social media platform.
Most Scientists are only writing to other scientists
Now, suppose that people have good access to scientific articles. Even in this case, people would still have difficulty understanding what is written. Scientific language is complete gibberish to the general public! Sometimes it’s even gibberish for us scientists, who read scientific articles every day! However, the generally short format of social media posts forces us to make the information much more digestible, comprehensible, and less scary. Instead of posting a 15-page article discussing the intimidating principles of biomolecular mechanics, I could share a 60-second story on Instagram showing how I prepare microscope slides.
I’m not proposing that we change the way scientists report their findings. After all, all the technical terms and jargon are essential to describe our research fully. People would require a high level of knowledge to fully understand data, and scientists would need incredible vulgarisation skills to present it, assuming that it is possible. Instead, I suggest we start showing how science is done by showcasing our daily lives in the lab or the field. How do our instruments work? What are you trying to measure in your latest experiment? How is your routine structured in the lab? Taking the time to answer such questions on social media should make science more relatable and more enjoyable to people online, igniting people’s curiosity and stimulating their critical thinking.
What do scientists get out of it?
Scientists can also benefit from an increased presence on social media. As the general public learns more about their work and their audience increases, they gain greater trust with the public. This greater trust can serve as leverage to advocate for social justice supported by their research, which is beneficial to the whole population. In addition, the public’s confidence may increase their reputation, which can certainly come with many more advantages, including new funding sources for their research.
It works!
A higher public scientific presence during the COVID-19 pandemic has already restored people’s trust in science. In 2020, an international survey performed by 3M reported a decrease in the number of people saying that they are skeptical of science for the first time in three years! The mistrust in science decreased during the pandemic partly because scientists were forced to do more sci-comm, as governments had to keep people informed. Dr. Anthony Fauci in the United States and Dr. Theresa Tam in Canada are great examples of new familiar faces from science. Plus, many scientists using platforms such as Tiktok and Youtube have increased their audiences since the beginning of the pandemic. Some of my favourite examples are @dillonthebiologist, @lab_shanigans, and@doctor.brein on Instagram. These serve as great motivation for more scientists to get out there and start showing people how science is done and how it is not as scary as many think it is.
The music is loud, the lights are out, and you’re on your third glass since entering the club. Your friends? They’re somewhere, probably twice as glazed as you. You dance and jump and move around without any real sense of direction. Your legs cross, changing the path where you were going whenever a stranger bumps into you. You can’t make out the music, but the compassed beat of the base, synchronized with the movements of everyone around you, creates a collective euphoria to the point where there’s no more you. You are the crowd, and the crowd is you.
Why are humans made of so many atoms?
I recently came across this question by reading a small book written by a very popular physicist called Erwin Schrödinger who’s well known because of a thought experiment involving a cat in a box. In this little book titled “What is Life,” he apologetically dives into the much different field of biology. Apologetically because, as a physicist, he was likely to make mistakes on his accounts of biology, the same way that I – as a biochemist who recently got into biophysics – am bound to make mistakes when it comes to physics. That being said, let me apologize in advance to my physicist friends if my takes on the physical concepts presented here are incomplete.
I firmly believe that understanding small seemingly useless concepts, such as the one I’m summarizing here, can unconsciously contribute to groundbreaking realizations. After all, ideas are made to create new ideas. For this reason, I want to translate Schrödinger’s attempt (and perhaps success) at answering the question in the title. Despite being a fantastic science communicator, Schrödinger’s language in the original text is quite philosophical and requires much concentration. So, here’s my summary of his fascinating answer to the question, “Why are living organisms so large compared to the size of an atom?”
A football field-sized cell.
It’s helpful to start this conversation by saying just how tiny an atom is. The average human cell is about 0.1 mm in diameter. That’s ten times smaller than the smallest measure in an ordinary ruler. Imagine that you can scale that cell up to the size of a human1. For a cell of that size, an atom would still be smaller than your average human cell.
Still can’t visualize it? All right. Let’s scale that up even more. Imagine you scale your average human cell to have a diameter equal to the length of a soccer field, which is 125 meters (or 136 yards). If, somehow, with some crazy magic, we get a cell as big as a soccer field, the atoms composing that cell would only be as big as a grain of sand2.
In his original text, Schrödinger illustrates the massive number of atoms in everyday objects by quoting an example given by Lord Kelvin3. It goes as follows. Imagine that you can tag all the atoms in a glass of water. Then, pour the tagged atoms into the ocean and mix all the water of the seven seas so that they are distributed equally across the globe. If you then filled a glass with water out of any ocean on the planet, you would find roughly one hundred of your tagged atoms within your new glass!
Of course, if you repeated this experiment several times, you wouldn’t get exactly 100 atoms with every attempt. Sometimes you might get 95, 88, 102, or 112 atoms. But very rarely would you find as few as 50 or as many as 150 atoms. The inaccuracy expected with each measurement is defined by some pretty general laws of statistics that we have to cover to answer our original question fully.
A tiny bit of statistics
Or the √n rule.
Statistically speaking, the deviation in the results of a physical law is expected to be in the order of √n, where n is the number of samples in our experiment. Therefore, we expect to see a deviation of plus or minus 10 atoms per glass of water in the glass of water experiment, which means that most of our experiments would have between 90 and 110 tagged atoms in the final filled glass. So, you have a 10% inaccuracy with every measurement.
Now, imagine that you’re filling 100 glasses of water. In this case, you expect to collect around 10000 tagged atoms plus or minus 100 atoms, a 1% inaccuracy. In the same way, if you filled up a container large enough to collect one million tagged atoms, you’d expect an inaccuracy of plus or minus 1000 atoms, or 0.1%.
You can probably see a pattern here. The larger the number of atoms we expect to count, the more accurate our measurements will be! Hence, for any system to operate with fairly accurate laws, it must contain a fairly large number of atoms. And that’s where the answer to our initial question starts to take shape.
You’re being bombarded — all the time.
If you stop to think for a second, since everything is made of atoms, you’re a clump of atoms flowing in a big soup of atoms. Many carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrogen, and oxygen molecules are constantly entering and exiting your lungs. Yet, it doesn’t feel like thousands of molecules made of 2-3 atoms each are hitting the walls of your airways.
What would life be like if we could sense every atom interacting with our bodies? It would be hell on earth! Such a person would never be able to form any complex thoughts (if any thoughts at all) as they would be overwhelmed by the constant noise that hits their skin without a break.
Thankfully, we do not sense every atom that surrounds us. That’s because our bodies interact with the world around us in an extremely complex way. The main point here is that such levels of complexity in an intrinsically disordered universe can only arise with an excessive number of disordered elements. As we saw in the previous section, the precision of physical laws depends heavily on the number of atoms intervening. All atoms behave in a highly disordered way. Atoms move around vigorously, following random patterns with speeds varying depending on the temperature4. However, many things in nature follow some very precise rules despite everything being made of particles that move at random (the human body being an extreme example of this). Let’s look at a simple model that most of us are familiar with to try and illustrate how many particles can give rise to new, more organized properties.
Drunk molecules in a rave
Or why food colourant spreads in a glass of water.
Atoms move very much like a blindfolded person walking in a room without any sense of direction. Try this at home: take a glass of water and add one or two droplets of red food colouring5. Do not steer the glass. If you leave it on the table long enough, all the water will eventually become red. What happened? We’ll usually say that dye diffused through the water, going from a region with a lot of dye to an area with little dye until everything is equal.
But how? Do the colourant molecules have some sort of intelligence helping them find directions towards smaller dye concentrations? Is there a “concentration field” pulling the molecules toward locations with less dye? No. It’s all about numbers. If you stare at the water, it looks like the food colourant constantly moves toward colourless spaces. But that’s an illusion caused by the enormous number of molecules that make the dye front. If, instead, you could look at a single molecule, you would be surprised to see that it’s not moving in any specific direction. It’s moving randomly, leftwards, upwards, downwards, then upwards again. It doesn’t care where it goes. It just goes.
Every dye molecule moves quite independently from each other, and they rarely meet. Instead, each one is constantly being pushed around by the water molecules, gradually moving in unpredictable directions. Sometimes they go towards where there is more colour, and sometimes towards where there is less.
Take a look at the drawing below. Here, we’re assuming that we can separate the glass of water into tiny slices with close to constant concentrations of food colouring. If you consider a single slice, you’d expect to see as many molecules exiting the cut toward the right as you expect toward the left, since the molecules move randomly.
Now, consider two slices separated by a plane, where the slice on the left has twice as many molecules as the slice on the right. You would see molecules crossing the plane in both directions. There are molecules going toward the right, and there are molecules going toward the left. But, because the slice on the right has twice as many molecules than the slice on the left, there will be twice as many molecules crossing toward the right than toward the left.
Of course, these molecules are not atoms, but they’re small and light enough to be influenced by the impacts of the water molecules. Like these molecules, atoms constantly vibrate and move because of the universe’s heat. Yet, despite continually moving and interacting at random, at high enough numbers, a new, more organized property emerges from these atoms, much like how the diffusion of molecules appears to be organized.
It just takes that many atoms to reach the level of complexity of a human body
Or “Too long; I didn’t read.”
If someone asked me why humans are made of so many atoms, I’d answer that it is “because you just need that many atoms to reach the level of complexity that a human body has.” But now I see how that is a terrible answer. That answer barely rephrases the initial question. If someone asked me, “Why do monkeys like bananas,” they would be pretty disappointed if I said that it is because they think bananas taste good. Schrödinger, of course, did a way better job answering the question.
It does not take a brilliant mind to observe that our bodies are incredibly complex machines. However, despite being marvellous machines that can accomplish wonders, they are only made of mindless disordered atoms. Each atom is “drunk” with the heat of the universe. They move around without any real sense of direction. Their “legs” cross occasionally, changing the direction where they go whenever another atom bumps into them. They can’t make out the “music,” but the compassed beat of the base, synchronized with the movements of every other atom, creates a collective euphoria to the point where there’s no more atom. The atoms are you, and you are the atoms.
1 For this exercise, I am assuming that our scaled-up cell has a diameter of 1.70m, which is the height of an average male in North America.
2 With some quick Google search, you’ll find that atoms have an average radius of 0.1nm, while cells have an average radius of 100µm. In other words, an atom is 106 times smaller than a cell. Your average grain of sand has a radius between 0.0625 and 2mm. So, it’s not crazy to think of a grain of sand with a 0.125mm radius. Since a soccer field is 125 meters in length, a grain of sand with a size of 0.125mm would be 106 times smaller than that soccer field.
3 Yes, yes. That OG scientist to whom the temperature unit is named after.
4 Temperature, after all, is nothing more than a measure of how fast atoms are moving.
5 Yes, it has to be red. Everyone knows that red water is way more tasty than blue, green, or – ugh – yellow water.
The doubt of scientific expertise is dangerous, especially during the weird times we live in now. In 2020, when vaccines were still being produced, we saw rising anti-vaccination views on the internet. Anti-vax groups discussed safety concerns, conspiracy theories, and alternative medicine, including false causes and cures of the COVID-19 virus. Some people went as far as claiming that the new 5G technology was the cause of the virus.
Today, with so much information available to us, it is tough to distinguish the truth from all the fake news on the internet seeking clicks and easy money. Without a proper STEM education, someone can easily be fooled by any fraudulent speech as long as it sounds “sciency” enough. This lack of education is certainly not due to the lack of science being done.
Each year, more than 1 million scientific articles describing new technologies and discoveries are published. And that’s only in the field of medicine! Why, then, do people still believe that radio waves can cause a virus infection?
That’s because the information that scientists are publishing is not available to the general public! And there are two reasons for that:
1. Scientific papers are published in closed journals.
The first reason is very straightforward. Most of the academic articles are published in journals that demand a high fee for access. Even scientists sometimes have trouble accessing articles that are relevant to their field of research. To access such papers, one would either have to pay, get access through a university VPN, or look for an alternative supplier, such as the shadow library Sci-Hub.
This, of course, makes access to scientific information much harder. Without an actual need, someone outside of STEM is unlikely to go out of their way to access academic papers. Suppose the information is not accessible on the first page of a Google search. In that case, someone who’s simply curious will probably not find the most up-to-date information on the subject.
2. Scientific papers are not written for the general public.
Let’s say that people had good access to scientific articles. Even if this was the case, people would still have a hard time understanding what is written. Whatever scientists write is complete gibberish to the general public! Hell, sometimes it’s gibberish for me who reads scientific articles daily!
How can we expect the general public to be informed about science when what scientists write is unreadable without background knowledge? A traditional scientific paper is full of jargon and acronyms that make the text-heavy and hard to follow.
I’m not proposing that we change the way scientists report their findings. After all, all the technical terms are essential to fully describe the subject that is being discussed. Instead, I’m revisiting the old idea that more streams of reliable scientific information that is tailored for the general public should be available. Today most of the published science is seen only by scientists to produce more science to be seen by scientists. It rarely exists towards the ‘real world.’
The consequence is that the public develops a mistrust towards scientists because they have no idea what scientists do! Today’s science is almost a black box that outputs something every once in a while when the new discovery is exciting or sensational enough to be shown on mainstream media.
For this reason, more scientists should get involved in social media to report their daily findings and to make science more familiar to the general public. Scientists showing their faces on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, or Tiktok can make science more friendly, more human, and more relatable. That way, trust can be restored.
What if scientists start showcasing their science?
What does the public win?
As more and more scientists start presenting the science they make, the public will have access to more information. They will certainly begin to learn new things. The increased presence of scientific content on the internet will ignite people’s curiosity and stimulate their critical thinking. The best part is that all the new curiosity will be fed with legitimate content presented by people who understand it. Plus, the content will hopefully be presented in a more relatable and familiar way, making learning science much more enjoyable!
Overall, we’d expect people to become better citizens as they learn more about different subjects while having fun with relatable content produced by scientists.
What do scientists win?
A scientist getting involved in science communication will have the chance to better understand “the big picture” of their research. Science communication forces scientists to think differently and look at their research from new angles.
Also, scientists would make their voices heard. As the general public learns more about their work and as their audience increases, they get more leverage to advocate for social justice supported by their research. Plus, they gain greater trust with the public.
The greater trust increases their reputation, which can certainly come with many more advantages, including new funding sources for their research!
Additionally, by getting involved in science communication, scientists can develop and refine many new skills such as public speaking, teamwork, project management, writing, etc.
What does everyone win?
As mentioned previously, an increased scientific presence in social media may lead to a more educated public who trusts scientists more. People would be more likely to believe scientists and follow instructions proposed by them based on scientific evidence. This will undoubtedly lead to better cooperativity when we fight global warming, try to contain a pandemic, or when we have to deal with any new challenge.
In other words, we don’t lose our planet to global warming, and fewer people will die because of new viruses and preventable diseases.
Seems like a pretty good deal to me.
The COVID 19 Pandemic seems to have restored some of the trust in the scientific community.
Every year, the company 3M performs an international survey trying to quantify how society feels about science. They have been conducting the survey for the past 3 years now. Every year, they saw an increasing mistrust in science from the general public.
This past year, they decided to perform the survey a second time to see if the global pandemic impacted the view that people had of science. For the first time since they started conducting the study, they reported a decrease in people saying that they are skeptical of science! The pandemic didn’t only cause a decline in this number but brought it down to its all-time low at 28%! Before the pandemic, 35% of people reported being skeptical of science. That’s more than 1 in 3 people!
The mistrust in science has decreased during the pandemic partly because scientists were forced to be more involved in science communication, as governments had to maintain the population informed. During this past year, we saw plenty of scientists on television. Dr. Anthony Fauci in the United States and Dr. Theresa Tam in Canada are great examples of new familiar faces from science.
Plus, many scientists using platforms such as Tiktok and Youtube increased their audience since the beginning of the pandemic. Some of my favourite examples are Darrion Nguyen (@lab_shenanigans on Tiktok) and Hank Green (@hankgreen1 on Tiktok).
This is great motivation for new scientists to get out there and start reporting their latest findings in ways that people can understand and relate to.
If you read all the way down here, thank you! You’re a legend! I’d love to hear your opinion on the subject and discuss it a bit more! Let me know if you’re a scientist yourself. If you’re interested in getting involved in Sci-Comm, but you’re not quite sure where to start, send me a message, and we can exchange some ideas! I’m trying to get started on that myself!
