Breaking Down the Wall: Lessons in Science Communication
By Amber Amparo, PhD Candidate, Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology
I spent over an hour trying to record a five-minute video. The assignment was simple: Explain a scientific topic to a non-expert audience. Naturally, I wanted to talk about my research on a novel treatment strategy for a pediatric cancer. But every time I started recording, I fell into a rabbit hole of jargon, or tried to squeeze in one more detail. Start. Stop. Restart. At one point, I looked at the clock and realized I was still talking at nine minutes.
Even when I finally had a recording I was happy with, I felt like so much was left unsaid. But that was the point of the assignment: not a perfectly curated talk, but a baseline from which to grow.
Thanks to ASPET, I participated in the ASBMB’s eight-week Art of Science Communication course. Led by Sarah Ellinwood and Vanessa Aitken, the course brought together scientists at different career stages for weekly discussions.
One of the most valuable lessons was also one of the simplest: know your audience.
After our practice talks, the most common critique was excessive jargon, which puts up a wall between you and your audience. We had to break down that wall and meet people where they were. As scientists, we can become so immersed in our research that concepts others need explained feel obvious. Just as you investigate a scientific question, you must also investigate your audience.
I put this lesson into practice when revising my talk. My research takes an unconventional approach: rather than blocking growth signals, we’re exploring whether pushing them further can kill cancer cells.
At first, this sounds backwards. If cancer cells are growing uncontrollably, why would we give them an even stronger signal to grow? Think of growth signaling as a car’s gas pedal. Normal cells press the gas when they need to grow, but can also brake to maintain balance.
Cancer cells have lost that balance. Their foot is already on the gas, while their ability to brake is impaired. By pushing the gas even harder, we may drive cancer cells beyond what they can tolerate, while sparing normal cells with their brakes intact. We call this strategy Therapeutic OVERactivation or TOVER.
The analogy helped me address a common question: Wouldn’t increasing growth signaling make normal cells cancerous? Rather than avoid that concern, I used it to explain what makes cancer cells different and why that may be a therapeutic vulnerability.
The course was especially valuable because of the people in it. Sarah and Vanessa gave thoughtful feedback on our assignments and carried our responses into the following week’s discussions. My peers also brought new perspectives. We approached the same assignments differently, and seeing how they used the same tools to tell their stories made me think differently about my own.
I left with practical skills I’ve already used in recent talks, and an understanding that effective science communication is not about saying less or “dumbing it down.” It’s about meeting people where they are and showing why science matters.
