Capturing Curious Minds: communicating complex science

this is ask a biologist a program about the living world and I'm Dr biology on the show we spend most of our time talking with biologists and other scientists about their work but there is a part of Science in fact part of what we call the scientific method that we also need to talk about in case you're Rusty remembering the parts of the scientific method they are observation question hypothesis is prediction testing conclusion and finally communication now in science communication usually involves writing a scientific paper that is submitted to a science journal for review and possible publication this helps others learn from your work now the problem with this is that papers are generally written for other scientists and even a particular group of scientists who do research in a very specific area so they use really technical terms and things that a lot of us may not understand this often results in a very technical paper that a limited number of people would or could read and understand there are people science communicators who do specialize in communicating science beyond the science Community they have the role of taking that highly technical paper and communicating it in an accessible way maybe even more important a good science Communicator can tell a story about the research in a way that is fun and exciting to learn my guest today I think will be perfect for diving into this topic of science communication James Gorman is a science reporter he was on the New York Times staff for 28 years working as an editor reporter and host of the video series science take which I hope we get to talk a little bit about in this podcast he is also the author of seven books that cover a wide range of topics from dinosaurs to Penguins to name just a few today we'll explore the challenges and rewards of telling a good story a good science story welcome Jim and thank you for taking time out to join me on ascob biologist oh thank you for having me so first of all I have one big question in three parts okay I'm ready so I'll tell you what it is it's how should we communicate science okay that's the big question and we're going to break it down the first one is how do we communicate science if we're the science writer or Communicator how should we communicate science if we're the scientist right and then finally how should someone consume science content today so let's start off with how should we communicate science if you're a science Communicator accurately as a science Communicator or as a science reporter science journalist I mean the people cover many different aspects of science some are more on the politics and funding and how scientists act the ethics of it my career has always been on uh how cool is that sort of science explaining the actual scientific investigation and what scientists have found out so the most important thing is that you have to be accurate when you're talking to people who don't have a scientific background you've got to find a way to make it interesting and appealing but it always has to be accurate and I would say that's the the first thing that you have to do right and when you say interesting and appealing can you give me an example of something you've done in the past where you took something that probably wasn't going to get consumed by the public public you the general public and with a Twist you actually can tell a really cool story sure I mean that's sort of the definition of the job I can think offand of a video that I did we did this series of videos science take at the times and it involved fruit flies and aggression and looking at genes and how genes were affecting the expressions of aggression so this is a really complicated and it was the work was done with a high level of sophistication and it's the sort of thing that writing about it is going to be really tough you could and you can paint any picture in words but we did it as part of a series called science take and we had video from the scientists so we could see the process of their research and one of the things that they did the way they gathered the data about how the fruit flies were behaving was they looked at male fruit flies fighting and they're great to watch it's like watching a little boxing match with fruit flies so that immediately catches the attention of the viewer and then you can go into some of the detail you can show pictures of the neurons you can show some of the things that they found out in terms of the genetics but you've got that immediate hook so that was one way to make it interesting right that visual picture yeah so now let's turn our attention to the scientists because anybody who listen to this show I have a tendency to pick on scientist I say they're they're great at doing science but they aren't necessarily great writers right which is not a good thing because I still say it's good for their science colleagues and it's certainly going to be helpful for the rest of the world to understand what they're actually doing and quite frankly why it's cool because most of the scientists really love what they're doing it's important to be able to communicate it so what's the advice for our scientists well scientists I think they have a responsibility to talk to the public about their work and actually most of the scientists that I've encountered are really anxious to talk about their work they enjoy it the thing is that they've been trained to speak to their colleagues that's what your whole career depends on you have to present your findings in a very precise way and you have a shorthand a scientific jargon which is incredibly useful because you don't have to use a paragraph to describe something you can use one word to the average reader you have to say what a genome is or uh what proteinase is or something like that but as far as I know there's not enough emphasis in Science Education for researchers in communicating to the public and learning that you have to meet your audience where they are you have to tell them a story you have to use the language that they use and you have to leave out some of the details now you don't want to mislead anybody and you don't want to be incorrect but the things that are very important to you the exact percentages or the particular computer program that you use to analyze the data are not going to be of interest and they're just going to make the reader or the viewer sort of their eyes glaze over it's easy to say very hard to execute you speak in simple language directly use the active voice say what actually happened I mean scientists tend to talk abstractly about the grand Concepts and the import of what they're finding and they need to also say well in the lab we poured this red viscous liquid from one container into another and then watched as it transformed itself into a gremlin or whatever I mean the point is you're telling a story you're grounding the viewer or the reader in a specific concrete example of what you do and how you find out what you're looking for right painting that picture putting them in that place right yeah absolutely we just did a workshop with you earlier today and I was thinking the scientists out there could actually do it for themselves by recording themselves yeah you want to talk a little bit about what we did for an exercise and all I'm saying is why don't you do this record it and listen to it because they'll immediately start hearing these words that are a problem sure this is an exercise that I stole from another writing teacher and I can't remember who that writing teacher is so wherever you are thank you but you write down the 15 or so words that are most important to your field for instance uh genome proteome whatever field you're in the the sort of the terms of art that you use to talk to your colleagues write them all down on a piece of paper then you try to tell someone about a recent finding and its importance and why they should be interested in it without using any of those words now you can do this in a fun way I've done it in class where we have little buzzers and every time somebody uses a word that's too technical or you can just keep an eye on it yourself but you see time and again it's remarkably difficult not to use the words that you're used to because that's how you think of your work so to change it into a story it's very hard to switch to that way of speaking so sometimes when I'm interviewing scientists I ask them to explain it as if they were talking to their niece or nephew or a smart eighth grader and if you do that you realize that actually you do have the vocabulary and the way of talking about these things to people that don't know the terms of art so if you imagine yourself sitting across from your favored nephew and explaining how you figured out the biological basis of aggression in fruit flies you're going to talk in a completely different way and you'll find that it comes very naturally if you can switch yourself to that frame of mind right so scientist go get a recorder do the exercise listen to yourself and I think you will find that you need to do some practice now the last part of that three-part question what advice do you have for someone who's consuming science these days consuming science articles that are not written by scientists well that's the hardest question of all it's a lot easier to say how you're going to deliver good information how are you going to tell whether you're getting good information one thing is that you can and this is less and less true of how people consume news but you can rely on a particular publication that you trust where you think the writers and reporters are doing their due diligence they're talking to to the scientists they're asking the right questions and they're giving you information that is reliable that's a little bit of a shortcut if you're coming upon an article somewhere and you have to decide well is this something legitimate is this reliable or not there are different things you can look for one is what is the source of the information is a scientific journal quoted can you look it up do they give you a link so that you can see what kind of a journal it is there are journals with very fancy names that are not real but if you have the opportunity to go to it the reporter has at least provided you that background so you know okay that's a good thing I can go to the original research if I want to another thing is to look for sweeping generalizations and kind of avoid them and particularly when you're consuming Health news you know there's not really a huge issue like in the evolution of how crickets jump if you get that wrong and you read something and you thinkoh my God I know how crickets jump and it turns out you don't you got it wrong there's not a lot at stake unless you're a cricket researcher but one of the biggest problems in health reporting is when people say three times as many people died from whatever the cause was if they were coffee Drinkers and you go oh my God three times as many people but really it was one in a billion people who died if they didn't drink coffee and three in a billion who died if they did drink coffee if you look at it that way you think okay what do I care three in a billion one in a billion so I'm exaggerating to make an effect but it's one of the biggest problems reporting on health when that sort of information and that perspective and context is left out another thing is the difference between and this is uh correlation and causation you know you have many studies where you show that well people who live longer exercise okay but is that because they're already healthier and that's why they're exercising where's the cause and effect and how did they figure that out so really I think you have to question you have to look at their credentials of the publication whether it's online or in print and see if you know if you're familiar with them if you know who's reporting and then you look at the kind of information that's presented you have to develop a kind of detector for I guess I can't say what you're supposed to detect but you know nonsense a nonsense detector that's it yes oh I like that a nonsense detector in essence this is back to digging deeper yeah take a little bit of time to make sure you get all the facts and information you mentioned a little bit about science take mhm this is a collection of short videos let's talk a little about science take first of all why' you start it well that's really interesting it wasn't my idea it was actually the idea of one of our photo editors who was very involved in the visual aspect of things and we all knew at the time when we started it that there was a lot of video out there available from researchers for instance the Science Tech that I mentioned that was called Fight Club for flies so as part of their experiment they were videotaping and then analyzing the videotape of the fruit flies in combat and there many other scientists do it for a lot of different reasons so there's a lot of video out there and as reporters we would look at a new paper that was published we would see okay here's the results here's how we can tell the story but look they have a clip of the new Caledonian Crow bending a wire and we can actually see it happening and we can see how smart the bird is we can also see how the experiment is being done so there was this availability of a lot of really cool looking video that was really useful I think to explain how science works and there was also at this time the Publications like the times and everybody else was looking for ways to get more people to click on their stories that's also a big part of it and cool video you know if you're looking at your phone or you're on your computer you're going to go to cool video that's always going to pull you in and we found that over time how appealing the video was how interesting it was to look at was really significant in terms of how many people watched it which may seem like the dumbest you know a duh of course but you know we tend to think as science reporters and as scientists that it's how important is the conclusion how important is the actual science is being done and those are all parts of it but the visual impact was really important so how did we use that visual impact that was something that in the end really surprised me because I thought since we were doing these things I would narrate do like a little news item of a discovery that scientists had made talk over the videos and you could see what the Flies were doing or the salamanders or the frogs or the parrots and I was worried that because the visuals were so important and the time was so short that scientists would not appreciate this kind of dumbing down of their work and that we wouldn't be able to convey enough of the essence of the science to make it you know valid really good reporting instead of just entertaining because if you look on YouTube or Tik Tok or whatever platform you're looking on now you can see a million cool cat videos and lots of different things some stuff that says it's science some stuff that is science some stuff that's not so how are we going to make it so that it was really useful and we found out two things first of all scientist I checked everything with them so we would go back and say is this right is this right is that right so we were very careful to get it correct but scientists were very happy to see it presented in a way that essentially a middle school student would enjoy I would say that was our target audience you know Smart Middle School student so we loved creepy crawly stuff you know bugs ticks stuff like that cockroaches doing Karate kicks to fend off wasps the other thing we learned was that you tell a short story and you can get maybe one idea in one scientific idea but that's good enough I mean if you're getting somebody and you're giving them one sort of interesting scientific idea in a minute that's fun and it's useful and the other thing that we figured out which I think was even more important was that and this is going to be obvious to anybody who's a filmmaker or photographer who's not a text person like me was that the images carry a huge huge amount of information so we're delivering a view of how science works of what's actually going on in the lab you are seeing an experiment going on instead of just the dry words that describe why flies are aggressive you are actually watching the Flies fight and that video contains so much information about what the behavior was how they were looking at it how they were categorizing it at the beginning I was fixated on the idea this should do exactly what a news item does which is it should deliver what the finding was and how they found it out and by the end it seemed to me that the more important thing was it was showing the process it was giving you a window people who watch these things could see science at work so by being careful not to get anything wrong and knowing what to leave out telling a simple story we could deliver something that was entertaining really fun to look at gave you a glimpse that you didn't even know you were absorbing of how science works and had one central idea one scientific idea so I think we managed and judging from the feedback from scientists and middle school science teachers who are my favorite people in the entire world I have to say they're the best judging from the feedback we succeeded in not misleading anybody and having correct information but finding a way to simplify it so that you're delivering only one piece of the information and you mentioned that part about the process of science how important that was we had an earlier podcast with Joel paa same thing talking about this and part of the reason why we started ask a biologist and in particular the podcast is scientists don't do this because it's boring they don't do it because it's hard they do it because it's really cool and fun to them right and Karate kicks by a cockroach to another insect I'm sure they're just as excited about seeing that as the viewers that when they watch the science take absolutely and the other thing that it captures I think and all science writing should capture and should focus in on is that what's exciting about science is asking the questions it's not just the answers it's not a body of knowledge that we found out as you say what makes scientists why are they doing it because it's really interesting they want to find out well how do cockroaches defend themselves against why s how do fruit flies fight what genes come into play when they're fighting they have all these questions they want answered and it's a process of asking the questions and figuring out how to ask the questions that make science interesting also if you see that and you're a middle school student or anyone for that matter when I read something about science I know that somebody was actually working they didn't just come up with this answer there was a process that they went through it's it's a way of asking questions science is a way of asking questions and getting answers and you get a good glimpse of that with video you can do that in writing as well of course I mean that's my job I was the writer and I had to learn to not describe what was already on the screen but to write in a different way but I I think that was the best thing about science take really was the way that it emphasized the process yeah you talk about the process what are some of your rules or best practices that you follow when you're writing your stories or preparing for a video well I guess the first thing is you do as much homework as you can you have to read the paper you don't want to have to ask questions that you could have answered by reading because that's a waste of the scientist time on the other hand you have to not be afraid to ask dumb questions in two ways one if there's something you don't understand you have to be really clear about it when you're interviewing you don't pretend that you're the expert and I made this mistake a lot as a beginning science reporter I would try to talk the talk so we're talking about the evolution of spiral galaxies boy I want to be in there and I listen to my interview afterwards and I didn't get any of the questions answered that I wanted and the scientists didn't say anything in comprehensible language so I had to learn to ask dumb questions and not be afraid to ask dumb questions but also even when I knew the answer if I wanted to see if the scientist could say it in a way that people would understand because it's always appealing to have the actual researcher talk to you and not just the science reporter to learn to ask questions and say well but can you explain this in again we're talking about talking to your nephew or something like that so the two preparations doing all your homework but then not pretending that you've learned the subject you know knowing how to ask dumb questions and elicit responses in the normal you know colloquial speech it's interesting because it doesn't take much for me to be outside of my comfort zone even though I'm in the world of biology there are so many areas of biology so it is important to ask those questions because it doesn't serve anybody any good if you don't get the answer because you're not going to be able to convey it in any way exactly right so I have written a lot about the evolution of dogs and wolves and ancient DNA and I would often find myself saying okay I get the idea that you've figured out by comparing DNA You' sort of figured out how close wolves are to dogs but you get into this section where you describe the statistics and what you actually did I'm lost please can you explain that to me so I don't have to give all the details but I have to give people some idea of what you did and why should we believe this I mean because we can just say fancy statistical analysis showed boom and we can't go into all the detail of it because nobody's going to get that but I want to get some understanding and I have to sort to be clear about my ignorance and my ignorance is a valuable thing in many ways because I'm the representative of the reader what I shouldn't have is ignorance that I could have remedied by doing my homework beforehand I don't want to have that kind of lazy ignorance but basic representing the point of view of the person that is valuable ignorance now we've talked about articles we've talked about science takes you're also an author of books to name a few there's how to build a dinosaur extinction doesn't have to be forever right ocean enough and time discovering the waters around Antarctica and the total penguin ah the total penguin was one of my favorites well that's exactly what I wanted to ask you about is the total penguin yeah talk a little bit about that book oh the total penguin I had some of the most fun ever at the time I was freelance I was not on staff I was looking for work and I had an agent who had been involved in a previous book that i' had done and I said you know I'm looking for work and she said well so and so they're going to do a coffee table book on penguins and uh would you be interested in that and I yeah absolutely so we go to meet with the editor at the publishing company and this is the only time in my life I think I've ever thought well on my feet in this kind of circumstance but she said well would you need to see them in the wild and I immediately said oh absolutely oh you would have to you got to go to Antarctica how much would that cost oh well I I'll check it out and so I went on this 3-week cruise to Antarctica and that gave me a lot of the physical detail and the sort of emotional appreciation of the Penguins then contributed to the research that did on all the different species and so on so it was a lot of fun the one drawback was that uh I thought and this has nothing to do with being a good science writer but with human Frailty I'm going to be on this cruise and I'm going to be the guy who's writing the book on Penguins this is going to be cool I'm going to be like a mini celebrity so also on the cruise was a writer named Diane aurman who was writing story on Penguins for the New Yorker and so so I was the other writer on the cruise anyway it turned out to be a great experience and I really fell in love with certain kinds of penguins and part of the fun was looking through the old accounts of explorers where they gave everything including recipes for how to cook penguins and you know how tasty they were which is a strange thing but not so strange if you look at like aon's work I mean he sometimes includes recipes speaking of penguins what is your favorite Rockhopper Rockhopper the Rockhopper if you see them they have these toughs of hair coming out of them and they look as if they had dyed Punk kind of haird and they're very vociferous vorous I mean you know incredibly noisy and rockus and they're aggressive in defending their nests and one of the previous explorers talked about walking through a Rockhopper colony and them attaching themselves to him like Terriers clamping their jaws in this case their bills on his sleeves and that he could swing them around and they wouldn't let go as I said some of these early explorers had great descriptions one of them talked about how they had landed and they saw many many large penguins and they could knock down as many as they wanted with a stick they really gives you a glimpse into another world so now Jim on askab ologist I always ask three questions and it's typically of my scientists so we're going to modify this just a little bit so you're ready I'm ready okay these are the same three at the end I stole this from James Lipton okay they're not his questions though right right when did you first know you wanted to be a journalist and were you always interested in science I have to say that I was always interested in science to a certain extent I mean I was a kid who was always interested in the natural world but I didn't have a plan to be a journalist I planned to be a famous novelist as many of us do but it turned out after I got out of college and started work on I was science fiction novelist turned out I was sitting there typing away at my typewriter and my funds were disappearing and I thought you know I better get a job what am I going to do what am I going to do for a living so I had been editor of my high school paper and I was interested in writing of course so so I thought all right well I'll get a job on a newspaper this was in the days when the only kind of mail was snail mail so I sent out many letters and applications went to a few interviews but the only really positive response I got was from a tiny weekly newspaper in mwasa main that there are two bumps on the top of the main map and it's on one of the bumps it's h way up there that was my first job I was there for about 6 months and it was 24 below zero and the snow dfts were 6 F feet high and I thought maybe I can go move to a bigger paper and from then on I went to the Hartford Kent and a variety of other papers you know I liked journalism in the sense I liked being the position of asking people questions and having being able to call them up I didn't there was a kind of combative aspect to sort of daily journalism reporting on the police and the school board and things people didn't always want to tell you what you wanted to know and I was fascinated with science at the time I was taking extra courses in science and I got the idea that I wanted to really write about science I'd read people like in the old days this name won't mean anything to most people but there was a science writer at the Times named Walter Sullivan who was a real major figure and these people were describing how scientists are understanding the natural world which I liked ideas I liked the strange things that you could discover and I found out as I'd hoped when I got into it that scientists like talking about their work so it's not to say that there aren't scientists who fudge the data or do things that are incorrect or that you don't have controversies you can't get involved in an adversarial relationship and Reporting but in most of what I did I was on the side of or in the area of writing where you're looking at the awe Factor the how cool is that and when you talk to scientists to ask them about their research they usually love to talk to you well you had a wonderful career still continu use but I'm going to cut it off I'm going to take it all away now this is a thought question because some of my scientists freak out about now because I take it all away and I'm going to do the same thing for you as I do for them they like to teach almost all of them love to teach so I'm going to take your teaching away if you couldn't do what you've been doing and again it's going to be I'm going to say writing in general if you couldn't do it what would you do or be I'd be a field biologist that's what I would have loved to have been I mean if I had it to do all over again I would have been some kind of field biologist Birds marine biologists whatever out in the field watching animals observing their behavior so in a way it's kind of cheating because you say I can't do what I've done but why can't I do what I always wrote about people doing oh I think it's perfect so you're going to become a biologist in your career as a science journalist have you had any Adventures there that would lead you down down that path I think my favorite field trip was I got a chance to scuba dive in bise with these vast spawning aggregations of drum certain kind of fish and it was one of the most spectacular events that you could see in nature we were down about 70 100 ft and there are thousands of fish in the sort of ice cream cone spiral and at one moment they all release the sperm and eggs at once and that's what attracts whale sharks whale sharks are sharks but they look more like balen whales and they swim just sort of hoovering in all the sperm and eggs that are in the water what I've always loved about being a science writer is that I'm a sort of professional undergraduate I constantly get to ask people well explain how did you do that how did you do this but there's also and the reason that I said I'd like to be a field biologist just there's also this chance to be in situations you'd never ever be in otherwise unless you were a scientist that's truly one of the things that's amazing about being a scientist yeah now the last question what advice would you have for a future science Communicator I guess read read is the most important thing I mean you have to just read constantly how people do the things you admire so if you want to be a science commun Communicator presumably you've seen movies or videos or you've read articles and you you've watched it and you you've thought you know boy I'd really like to do that so you have to absorb as much of that as you can and figure out how they do it you can go to school you can get a degree you know a journalism degree and there are programs in science writing and getting a job these days is tougher when I started out you went to a small newspaper and then you went to a bigger newspaper and then you went to a magazine or something because there were millions of newspapers everybody that's all they did was read newspapers and that's not true anymore so now I'm a little befuddled about what you should do if you're a young person and you want to get into this field because it seems to me there's more opportunity than ever to write about science but maybe less opportunity to get paid for writing about science so you can have your own blog you can post things you can write about this you can do Tik Tock the platforms are there but how are you going to make a living at it that's a question I don't really have the answer to I mean I think you need to make contacts you need to find some people who do what you're interested in doing and try and get them to introduce you to other people see if somebody there can get you a job doing the sort of cold calling sending in your resume that's tough although I did get my job through the New York Times my first science job there used to be these ads on the subway I got my job through the New York Times this was in an ancient era when the way people found jobs was through classified advertisements in newspapers so that would be a subject of a whole other podcast but I actually answered an ad and got a job my first science writing job was on a little magazine called The Sciences I don't think it exists anymore it was a wonderful job and don't be discouraged by editors who aren't that happy with what you're doing when I got my first job as a science writer the editor said well you're not very good but you're the best of the applicants so if you want the job you can have it well Jim with that final thought I want to thank you for sitting down and being on asob biologist thank you for having me I've really enjoyed it you have been listening to askabiologist and my guest has been James Gorman a science reporter and an editor for the New York Times he's also the host of the video series science take which we talked about and is really a great series to go check out we'll be sure to include a link in the episode notes so you can get there Jim is also an author of seven different books of which his favorite is the total penguin so we'll be sure to include that link in the show notes as well the asab biologist podcast is produced on the campus of Arizona State University and is recorded in the Grassroots Studio housed in the School of Life Sciences which is an academic unit of the College of liberal arts and sciences and remember even though our program is not broadcast live you can still send us your questions about biology using our companion website the address is askab biologist. asu.edu or you can just use your favorite Search tool and enter the words ask a biologist as always I'm Dr biology and I hope you're staying safe and healthy