"Framing"

This week's Science has an article on "framing" science so that the unwashed masses can understand it and relate to it. The general idea is that when you are talking to someone, they should understand, empathize, and relate to what you are communicating, even if the other person happens not to be a scientist.

Thing is...The entire communications field, as a profession, has been saying all these things since, oh, the Victorian era! There actually exists, in nearly every university with a science department, a whole entire department called "communications," and figuring out how to spread information as effectively as possible is pretty much what they do, all day long, for lots of money. All you have to do is go to your university webpage and click on the "academics" or "departments" link, there it is. It's the equivalent of publishing an article about these new-fangled techniques called Writing, or making a big effing deal about the social significance of this interesting new finance method called "capitalism." It annoys me that such things make it into highfalutin journals like Science, then are treated as if they are some novel idea. It's a sort of demonstration that academics really do live in ivory towers or in distant, crumbling castles with no company but that of burbling green test tubes. Makes me wish I had a dragon handy.

I thought, apparently naively, that speeches and such to various audiences were merely par for the course for all scientists at some point. My undergrad university prepared me to believe so, and gave several intensive classes that involved oral presentations of scientific material to various audiences. As a professional in industry, I had to give presentations of my work to many audiences, including trainees, patients, lawyers and non-scientific clients as well as colleagues. In order to become a better presenter, I took special seminars that taught me to speak clearly and with enthusiasm, in an organized fashion, without PowerPoint. My bosses and project managers were often quite skilled presenters themselves, and could explain their work to a run-of-the-mill news journalist and whomp together a decent press release perfectly well. They had been trained by countless legal and PR departments in the proper ways to present to various audiences. This was just part of the skillset, it went along with buying my first real interview suit.

On the occasions when I felt the message was not getting across clearly, or when my audience was leaping to conclusions or not reacting appropriately, I looked up the advice of communications experts who specialized in communicating on that particular issue. Telling someone about how you sterilized a whole building after an anthrax attack, or explaining a manufacturing failure to stockholders who don't want to hear bad news, those are specialized tasks that you won't get through without a certain structure and wording. Delicate. A joke, a cartoon, a story they can relate to, won't get you through that. I wouldn't attempt to write a patent application without a lawyer's help, I don't communicate important things without advice from a communications pro either.

Now, this seemed fairly obvious to me. My husband is about as far from a science geek as you can get, most of my relatives are not scientists, and so I get plenty of social interaction outside of the wonderful world of nerddom. And at every cocktail party, cookout, or beer-soaked house party I've ever been to, the icebreaker question "what do you do for a living" never worked to break the ice with me. I used to respond, "I'm a scientist." This seemed like a simple enough answer, but the follow-up questions were always along the lines of, "oh, you dissect frogs/play with beakers all day? Doesn't that get boring?" If I tried to explain that no, in fact I did not do anything like that at all, and tried to explain what I did do all day, I got blank stares. Most of these people--college-educated professionals, mind--didn't even know what a cell was, let alone why you'd want to culture one in a big metal tank. They figured all chemicals were inherently dangerous and that most modern things were not made of chemistry anymore for safety reasons. There was no way that I'd ever be able to dumb down my actual job to something they could understand. They'd mumble something about it being nice to meet me and wander off, leaving me to find a quiet corner to be bored in. Eventually I learned that you have to lead with the conclusion:

Normal person: "So, what do you do for a living?"
Me: "I'm trying to cure [horrible disease]."
NP: "Really?"
Me: "Well, I'm working on it. I'm a research scientist."
NP: "Oh how interesting! My cousin's friend's aunt has [horrible disease] and it's so terrible! She's tried [competitor's drug], [other competitor's drug] and woo and magic potions and I don't know what all and it's so awful for her! Blah blah blah...blah blah. Well, good for you! There's so much more work to be done!"

Now, after talking my ear off, they might have one or more other interesting things we can talk about in passing, and they go home feeling good about having met, in real life, someone who cures horrible diseases and who also likes Belgian beer and horror movies and so forth. They may be philosophically opposed to many things I do in the course of my daily work (e.g. mouse experiments, killing OMG human cells in a Petri dish!, or using evolutionary theory to predict cellular behavior), but that's not what they remember. If it was even mentioned--a very big if, as I don't talk about the more technical stuff unless specifically asked--and they ask why I do that, I explain it in simple layman's terms and don't dwell on it, then go right back to the thing they understand, their cousin's friend's aunt's suffering.

Why do I work on fluffy little cute mice? Because I want to be reasonably sure that these new drugs aren't toxic, and I have no other way of knowing. It's hard to tell if a drug is going to be toxic sometimes, when it's brand new. I would hate to give a drug to a patient suffering from [horrible disease] if I wasn't pretty sure that it would work. Aren't human cells alive? They are a type of cancer cell; even cancer tumors are alive. The cells that cause [horrible disease] are alive, although we wish they weren't. Didn't gawd create the world? Maybe, but the evolutionary predictions work in real life when we try them out. In this case, they worked to predict [aspect of horrible disease].

This works great for one-on-one discussions, or for small groups. There's whole other Marketing Departments full of techniques for larger audiences. The goal is to tell the story, in which there should be lots of human interest and pathos. Why are you doing this stuff, anyway? Who cares about it? If it's not dramatically life-changing, is it perhaps funny or amusing? Could you represent it in a case study type of poster child example that people might sympathize with? Is it so trainwrecky that it could make random people stop and take pictures?

Crikey. Get out more. Network outside your field for a change. Take a public speaking course. It's so simple. For more complex stuff, take a more advanced communication seminar or talk to your employer's PR department; even universities have one of those. Who the hell can't do this?