Science in three sentences

Big Billy Shakes (a.k.a. William Shakespeare) wrote, “Brevity is the soul of wit”.

He may not have known that “wit” could be replaced with “a successful grant application”. The act of reducing content can be a clarifying concept; as we hone the message, the extraneous is lost, and the remaining can often be combined, reduced and purified down to an easily-understood text. This is key when communicating with scientists outside your field, the general public, and scientists within your field.

Everyone appreciates brevity.

The less you can write, the more space you leave for images that are going to explain (often) better than you can.

During a job interview, I was asked to answer scientific questions in three sentences. A challenge to be sure, but not impossible. In many ways, this is an editing challenge - here’s the first draft of a script to answer the question, “What would an exosome isolation kit be used for?”:

”My Brother’s a teacher, and he told me that during parent-teacher interviews he is rarely surprised. You can make a pretty good guess about what the parents are like from the student: After all, the apple doesn’t fall from the tree or in other words, like father, like son. The same principle can be applied to cells and exosomes. Exosomes are small vesicles secreted by a variety of cells that enable cell-cell communication, and have been implicated in cell processes like proliferation, differentiation, senescence, and others. Crucially, by extracting and analyzing exosomes, we can assess what’s going on in the cell that secreted it. That’s where an exosome isolation kit comes in. Exosomes are prevalent in minimally-invasive bodily fluids like blood, urine, or cerebrospinal fluid, therefore an Exosome isolation kit would allow the researcher, or clinician to isolate the exosomes from the bulk matrix without perturbing the contents of the exosomes. Once extracted, the contents of the exosomes can be fingerprinted; for example, one could characterize proteome by Mass Spec, or the transcriptome by Next-gen sequencing. Alternatively, you could probe for specific interactions by immunoblotting. It’s likely not surprising that Exosome characterization has become a powerful tool for the identification and prognosis of cancers and other human diseases as it can provide a quantitative snapshot of what a cell is doing when used appropriately.”

Not terrible, but here’s the final three-sentence version:

“Let’s say we’re on a walk - If you’re woodsy, you might be able to tell me the type of trees around by the leaves on the ground, and the same principle can be used to determine the identity or health of a cell by looking at its exosomes. Exosomes are small vesicles secreted by a variety of cells involved in cell-cell communication, and are prevalent in bodily fluids like blood, urine, or cerebrospinal fluid. If we wanted to characterize exosomes from these samples, we would need a tool for eliminating everything else without changing the exosome composition and that is exactly what we use an exosome extraction kit for.”

I don’t know if it lives up to the standard of Mr. Shakespeare, but everyone would rather read less than more.