SciComm

Harnessing the Power of Science Communication

Fellow researchers, let’s start with an uncomfortable confession: we have been lousy storytellers. While we debated p‑values in seminar rooms, public confidence in scientists who “act in the public’s best interests” plunged from 39 percent to 23 percent in only three years(Pew Research Center). The result is now visible in policy. The White House has asked Congress to chop nearly half of NASA’s science budget, a 47 percent slice that would ground dozens of missions(The Guardian). Across the Atlantic, the United Kingdom’s 2025 Spending Review promises the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology less than one percent real‑terms growth through 2029, essentially a funding freeze that shrinks once inflation is counted([GOV.UK][3]). These numbers are not misfortune hurled at us from the cosmos; they are backlash triggered in part by our own communication gap.

Picture an ordinary citizen scrolling through a news feed where conspiracy memes come wrapped in punchy slogans while our latest preprint arrives as 40 pages of algebra. Who wins that attention contest? Not us. Carl Sagan warned that society leans heavily on science yet knows little about it, and the data show his warning coming true. If we want resources, trust and legislative backing, we must translate our work into language that survives outside peer review.

The fix begins with clarity. Swap “transcriptomic heterogeneity” for “differences in gene activity” when outside the lab. Drop the five‑minute methodology detour unless someone asks for it. If a finding matters, show its human stakes: glacier melt becomes fewer drinkable‑water days in Mumbai; CRISPR off‑targets become the ethical equivalent of a typo in the genetic code.

Next comes curiosity. A good talk leaves the audience with a better question than the one you started with. Invite readers to play along, the way Marie Curie invited the world to imagine unseen rays or Einstein asked us to picture chasing a beam of light. Curiosity is infectious; once people catch it, they start defending the institutions that feed it.

Then cultivate trust through radical transparency. Publish negative results. Admit error bars out loud. When the public sees that we police our own mistakes, the accusation that we hide inconvenient data loses its charm. Trust is slow to win and quick to burn, so treat every interaction as another layer of varnish on the laboratory door.

Finally, connect the dots from abstract insight to daily life. Explain how the same statistical model that predicts protein structure can also spot credit‑card fraud or optimise crop yields. Neil deGrasse Tyson is right that science remains true whether people believe it, but funding and regulation depend on belief, so make that truth relatable.

The good news is that attention is renewable. Each clear analogy, each honest slide of uncertainty and each invitation to ask “what if” recharges the cultural battery that keeps our work alive. The garden of science is still full of wonders. Let’s stop whispering among the roses and start calling to everyone beyond the hedge.

[3]: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/spending-review-2025-document/spending-review-2025-html “ Spending Review 2025 (HTML) - GOV.UK “

Author: Shafqat Ehsan (@ScientificEhsan)