When explaining the importance of my thyroid cancer research to people outside my field, I often reference general cancer statistics to hook the listeners’ attentions and provide context for the more specific information I will soon share. Additionally, starting your discussion from a broad perspective makes it easier for the listener to relate to what you’re saying.
It’s a lot more understandable and attention-grabbing to hear things like “approximately 1/3 of all people will get cancer, and about half of them will die from it” or “thyroid cancer is the most common malignancy of the endocrine system” than it is to hear that “TG-NTRK1 is capable of ligand-independent dimerization.” When describing one’s field of research, one must start broad and essentially educate listeners to a point where they can understand the terms and concepts that are thrown around in one’s explanations.
My role as a scientific communicator is to teach. Even when speaking with highly educated, experienced scientists, much of the language relevant to my lab work is unknown to the audience, and it helps to break down specific terms to overcome this obstacle. For example, TG-NTRK1 is a cancer-causing protein I am studying, and ligand-independent dimerization refers to when a protein can link to and activate another protein without the signal that it would normally need to do so. Ligand-independent dimerization is quite significant in the study of cancerous proteins, because it means that proteins can be chronically activated, since they do not depend on biological signals (ligands) to be activated. Chronic activation of some proteins can cause chronic, unregulated replication of a cell, which is more or less the basis of cancer.
As a physician, I expect to communicate with people with wide-ranging variability in their understanding of biology. My doctor colleagues will have a strong background in science and will be able to comfortably discuss advanced concepts. On the other end of the spectrum, patients for whom I will be responsible will need me to dilute the scientific concepts down into bite size pieces that can actually be of use to them.
My thyroid cancer research is soon to culminate in a paper, and something I learned recently is that the level of language complexity in publications varies between journals. For example, my work would need to be more accessible to a general audience if I wanted to publish in a widely read journal like PNAS. However, if I were to write a paper for the journal Thyroid, I would be free to use terms describing thyroid physiology because the typical readers of this journal are in thyroid-related fields.
