Suggestions for Science Communications

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Hyped-up science erodes trust. Here’s how researchers can fight back.

Science is often poorly communicated. Researchers can fight back.

By Brian Resnick, Vox

In 2018, psychology PhD student William McAuliffe co-published a paper in the prestigious journal Nature Human Behavior. The study’s conclusion — that people become less generous over time when they make decisions in an environment where they don’t know or interact with other people — was fairly nuanced.

But the university’s press department, perhaps in an attempt to make the study more attractive to news outlets, amped up the finding. The headline of the press release heralding the publication of the study read “Is big-city living eroding our nice instinct?”

From there, the study took on a new life as stories in the press appeared with headlines like “City life makes humans less kind to strangers.”

This interpretation wasn’t correct: The study was conducted in a lab, not a city. And it measured investing money, not overall kindness.


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The Limits of What DNA Can Predict

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Want remarkably clear insights into genetics and public health with a bare minimum of reading? Well, some corners of Twitter have recently become an incredible resource if you’re interested in learning something about predictive statistics, epidemiology, genomics, and population genetics. There are no better examples of this than the tweetorials that Dr. Cecile Janssen posts. Dr. Janssen is a professor of translational epidemiology in the department of Epidemiology of the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, and her website, like her posts, contains insightful guides for thinking critically about DNA sequence data, heritability and health.

If you would like some key insights into predicting complex traits from DNA in a handful of tweets, follow this link: Why it is so hard to predict complex diseases and traits from DNA?

For a slightly longer read, here’s her article from WIRED on how DNA is best applied: DNA tells great stories -- about the past, not future

And a more advanced read, still aimed at a fairly general audience: Designing babies through gene editing: science or science fiction?