Science offers our greatest hope against the multiple existential threats we face – be they from disease, climate, or the decaying environment – so it’s crucial that we non-scientists can understand, accept and support what’s going on in the labs.
What follows is a quick look at how two masters of the art, Bill Gates and Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan, use some simple public speaking tricks to explain important, complex topics to those of us who don’t have a scientific background.
Time was, scientific communication depended almost entirely on what was called the Knowledge Deficit Model. In a nutshell, that meant a professorial, top-down delivery: “I know; you don’t. I’ll tell you the facts; you listen.”
Thankfully, things have moved on since then.
Today the likes of Messrs Gates and Narasimhan work hard to engage their audiences, but – most importantly – without dumbing down the science itself.
The three essential principles they follow can be summed up as relevance, clarity, and liveliness.
Here are just some examples of how they do it, taken from a selection of the two men’s regular “science-explainer” videos and posts.
Making it relevant
The first question any science communicator needs to answer up front is: “So what?”.
Knowing how daunting science can be to non-scientists, any communicator looking to hold attention should be quick to establish the broader context and the specific benefit the science might deliver.
In his brief video about a gene-editing tool called CRISPR, Mr Gates spells out the benefits of being able to modify someone’s DNA. “We could save many, many lives and get rid of (some genetic) diseases.”
Mr Narasimhan also spells out the benefits, and goes a step further to engage us in his 60-second vaccine explanation (shot two years ago in the midst of the Covid pandemic) by equating his own case, between his first and second vaccine shots, with what many of us were experiencing at the time.
Making it clear
The apparent complexity of many scientific concepts can quickly cause a lay audience to tune out. People need to be able to visualize what would otherwise remain abstract ideas.
Here the key question for communicators to ask themselves is “What’s it like?”
Mr Narasimhan, in another of his posts explaining a new cancer treatment called radioligand therapy, which targets individual cancer cells very precisely, tells his audience to picture the process as “delivering a package to the right address, rather than to every house in town”.
Mr Gates, for his part, uses a colourful plastic model of the DNA double helix. He then wields a little toy buzz saw, showing in crude but vivid terms how gene editing works.
Making it lively
This is the story-telling part. There has to be some inner tension in your tale to hold your audience’s attention.
Ask yourself, “How does this story unfold?”
There are many narrative techniques one can use here. Here is a selection of the tools Messrs Gates and Narasimhan included:
- recounting the challenges to overcome, as Mr Gates depicts the editing of DNA as “a Holy Grail for scientists”;
- finding a hero for the story, like Mr Gates does in his short CRISPR video by highlighting the role of Nobel physics prize-winning scientist Jennifer Doudna;
- using an extended timeline, in the way Mr Narasimhan starts off by telling us how the very precise micro-approach of radioligand cancer therapy is an imaginative leap beyond what we have known for decades about radiation;
- putting the storyteller at the heart of the story, as Mr Narasmhan does in his vaccine explainer, framed as his response to a challenge from his team at Novartis to “explain the science behind vaccines in 60 seconds or less”. He makes it, just!
Charles Fleming, 8th June 2023
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