Explaining Research

Over at my favorite linguistics blog, The Language Log, Arnold Zwicky tipped me off to this t-shirt that is, sadly, no longer being sold by the AAAS (the American Association for the Advancement of Science):

They left out the old "pretend to be choking on a mini-hot dog" trick.

It hits on a serious problem in practical science education. Sure, there are a number of great science educators out there, like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Sir David Attenborough, that manage to make science accessible and exciting to non-scientists. But as scientists we all have a responsibility to help educate people in our everyday lives. I want to make people understand why I'm so obsessed with the way the world works, in  hopes that they'll appreciate it too.

When it comes to individual research, that can be tricky. The first step is to find the right level of techno-babble to use. It can be really difficult to talk fast and loose about your research in plain English, because most sciences are very nit-picky about the terms which can and cannot be used. Yet the language of scientific papers can sound stuck-up and indecipherable to a layperson.

To give an example, this past summer I worked at the Field Museum, looking at the litter sizes of a group of rats and mice from the Philippines. If I'm talking to someone in the Mammals department there, I could say "I'm performing reproductive autopsies on 5 genera of Philippine murid rodents to estimate whether the overall trend in litter size in relation to body mass fits the normal mammalian pattern, using embryo and uterine scars as a proxy for litter size." But when I'm talking to an English major friend here at school, I'd say something like "I cut up rats and mice from the Philippines to see if they have as many kids per litter as other mammals of similar size." Much more digestible.

Then comes the second challenge: making your research seem worthwhile. Many people you'll talk to may have pre-formed ideas about your particular field, your discipline, or science in general. They may think a particular field is pointless. This creates a lot of pressure to impress upon your listeners the importance of the work. Often, the questions we answer in fundamental research are only interesting to people within the field. Yet there's usually some kind of silver lining to be found around your research cloud. For instance, my adviser, who studies the biogeography of small mammals on the other side of the world, has had an integral role in describing and protecting the biodiversity of Philippine forests.

This, of course, ignores that fundamental research in seemingly esoteric fields have yielded some of the most important technological and medical breakthroughs in history. Pointing this out may help convince a party-goer that you're not just a crank in a lab toiling at nothing. It's good to have a few examples ready for this purpose.

Admittedly I don't have all the answers to this problem, but I'd imagine that the more time I spend explaining my research, the better I'll get. Here's to hoping that your scientific conversations go well at your next party: they may decide if you get invited back.