Using the old to explain the new
We kicked off the new year with another fantastic workshop, this time with an added bonus: an online art video presented by visiting student Eva Vu-Stern. The piece was inspired by a course at Columbia University, led by one of the world’s most successful living science communicators: theoretical physicist Brian Greene. We enjoyed hearing about Greene's unconventional approach to teaching physics, and hope that this engaging and inspiring model becomes more widely adopted.
How our eating habits have changed—where do we go from here?
Our first text was a reflection on the personal and scientific aspects of how we make decisions around one of the most central aspects of our lives: food. Through the author’s experiences of eating in a variety of cultural contexts, we learned how diverse and personal food choices can be—and how as society has modernized, we have moved from spending significant amounts of time preparing meals from raw foods into a convenience culture. As such, processed foods have become part and parcel of our daily lives—but what exactly are processed foods? Are they as bad as the headlines suggest? Through the author’s journey as a researcher, we learned that the science is not as clear-cut as the media would like us to believe. We tackled questions around how do we communicate nuance and uncertainty, and how do we do so without losing focus on details that serve as the reader’s anchors in reality? How can our writing lead a non-scientist to recognize that ‘a lack of stance’ is often purposeful, and indeed a stance in its own right? Not having all the answers is an integral part of the scientific process, and this text made us reflect on how challenging it is to write scientifically and with nuance about a topic that often comes pre-loaded in people’s minds.
Re-visiting historical debates around a rare disorder and their impact on today’s science
The second piece took us onto a journey into the past, where the author re-imagined the scene of a real historical patient: a woman being examined by a room full of eager medical students, debating the source of the patient’s predicament. We learned that modern science still echoes the debates of that time, as science has uncovered that there are multiple ways of arriving at the same symptom. We discussed how bringing the history to life even further could do the same for contemporary science, and how drawing parallels between the patient and the molecular players of the disease could make the topic more engaging. We felt that the lived experience provided a powerful entry point to the how’s and why’s of a rare condition that is still under active research, and that focusing on the human aspect is what makes the science most relatable.
Image: Siraphol Siricharattakul, Vecteezy