Getting the word out

Mole

Here's an experiment that you can do at home. Take a full deck of cards, including the two jokers, and shuffle it. Now shuffle it again so you get a different order. Keep doing that until you run out of orders for your deck of cards. Wait! Don't, because if you could shuffle a deck in a microsecond it would still take you more than 1050 millennia to finish the job. And that isn't including breaks to have a cup of coffee and maybe a slice of toast.Go


So why do I mention this? Well, it just happens, and this is one of those incredible coincidences we've been hearing so much about, that the number of ways that a deck of 54 cards can be shuffled is almost exactly (as defined by statistics – meaning `give or take a huge amount') a mole of moles of moles. Go ahead; work this out for yourself. For those of you who don't know what the heck I'm talking about because you skipped all of your intro chemistry courses, let me remind you: a mole is not just yours truly, it is also an inconceivably huge number, corresponding, more or less, to the number of molecules in my shoe. This might perhaps be considered another incredible coincidence, but I don't want to push it. But the mole of mole of mole discovery, I mean, wow, this is the sort of thing we could publish!

So, isn't this a cool discovery? Those of you who said, "not really," good. I'll use you as my example. If you could stand up for a moment while I make fun of you, that would be helpful – thank you. Scientists, as a whole, are hugely bored by the `isn't this cool?' approach to discoveries. We want to be enthralled, wowed, and regaled with exciting tales of how unexpected something is and how impossibly important it's all going to be, but we have become completely desensitized to the `cool' thing.

You've got to sell us on what you've found. The simple fact is that we're overwhelmed by the simple mass of the literature. (Here is another thing you can try at home. I entered the first words and phrases I could think of into a literature search: "anteater" gave 1036 publications; "ghost hunter" yielded 12 hits; and "magic nose" found 6 – really. I suspect that a more scientific word would have produced closer to a mole of papers, but I didn't try it; I spent the rest of the time trying to download a magic nose article.) In the face of this megalithic edifice of literature, something has to draw our attention to you and your discoveries. That's right, welcome to Uncle Mole's invaluable guide for young scientists on how to Get the Word Out.

Of course, some of you don't have findings that are ready to bring to the world's attention (yet), and some of you don't want to let anyone know about your results, and some of you do want the world to know but don't know how to get the word out. To each of you I have this to say: (a) keep working – nearly any result is ultimately publishable; (b) the trick is to get anyone to notice; (c) its your job to obtain results that someone will notice; and (d) making lists like this is simple avoidance behavior and does almost nothing to get the word out.

All right, let's Get the Word Out. Let's say we've got a discovery that we (and by "we" I mean "you and all of your co-workers, including the guy from another town who only talked to your boss on the phone for a bit but is somehow going to be a part of this") think is ready to present to the world (and by "world" I mean a tiny group of people, distributed unevenly over the surface of the planet, who happen to share your passion for magic noses or whatever it is you do). The first thing we have to do is get it written and publish it.

Now I'm not going to go into how to write the paper; that's for another time. Let's just assume that you've somehow managed to get all the little disjointed bits into some sort of order so that they tell some sort of story. And let's also assume that you've sent it to the best journal you could think of and then watched your paper slowly sift its way down through the ranks of the publication world until, finally, Fun Things to Do with Your Face Digest has agreed to publish it, providing you can redo all of the experiments in space. And you do, and its published. Great.

And nobody noticed (nobody doesn't include your Mom, who has a reprint on her coffee table); they still had 20197 articles on "space beavers" to look up. You think I'm making this up? Search for space beavers; I'll wait. Okay, welcome back (will you ever doubt me again?). So, getting back to the point, how do you get anyone to pay any attention to your discoveries?

One approach is to go to a meeting. You submit your abstract, you are assigned a poster in the second half of the third session, which happens to coincide with the `swimsuit skiing exhibition' that happens to be taking place at the same resort (probably not as part of the meeting – probably). And you put it up and wait for someone to take an interest, and someone does! Okay, they've got the poster next to yours, but that's fine. There are even some prominent professor types who are slowly looking over all of the posters and one or two are heading in your direction. One stops and carefully looks it over, and you can tell he's interested (quite likely, they're actually thinking this: "Poster. Posterposterposter. POHster. PO-master. Poooostermeister.") Then they ask if you've done any of these experiments in space.

At this point, you should resist the temptation to `take them through your poster.' For some reason, many young scientists think that old, crotchety scientists want to be methodically told what each line on each graph means, how difficult it was to get that experiment to work, and that you really have a much nicer blot but didn't have time to put it on the posterboard, etc. The professor type is thinking, "Poster Pest, posterpest, posterpest," and searching for someone across the room that they just have to talk to right now – "thank you very much, it was very interesting, but I just have to talk to someone about a Space Beaver project. I'm sure you understand."

So, next, you stand up after someone else's talk and take advantage of the temporary attention to attract interest in your work. Perhaps something like this: "Thank you for that very interesting talk. I just wanted to point that we've also done some experiments. We isolated some blah cells and we blah blahhed, and we observed blah without any blah." (Note: you aren't actually saying "blah," but this is what most of the audience actually hears.) You finish, realizing that this was supposed to be a question, "So, um, ah, perhaps you would like to comment?" Yikes. This sort of thing does attract attention, but not the sort I think you want. More a sort of attention to what you're wearing – as in "You see that guy? In the I-heart-Taq Polymerase shirt? Avoid him."

So you take another approach. You pester some friends to get you an invite to a university to give a presentation on your work so that someone will find out about it and take an interest. And after a few tries you manage to get the invite. Okay, you're going to have to scrounge your own plane ticket and probably stay with a distant cousin who lives in the general vicinity, but you're in. Once they hear the Word, they are going to be really excited.

And of course you already know the outcome. Your talk happens to be the same day as the talk by this year's Laureate, and the four people who make it to your talk came for the free cookies (and then one of them leaves, and takes the cookies with him). So, to make the long story short, this isn't going to work – giving a talk at a friend's university isn't going to make everyone stop what they're doing and focus on your contribution.

There are ways that scientists or their institutions focus attention on a piece of work, ranging from press releases to television interviews to projecting the title of the paper onto the moon's surface with giant lasers (okay, that hardly ever happens). But you might not have the resources to do this and, if you did, would it serve your purpose here?

Maybe, just maybe, you're going about this all wrong. Maybe the point isn't to try to get people to notice your work. Maybe (just maybe) the point is to go do some more. Science isn't about promotion – there aren't any waiters who tell you between courses that what they really want to do is research into the molecular pathways of earwax secretion but they are doing this restaurant job until they can get someone to read their paper. As you continue to ask interesting questions about your discovery and explore your chosen area of investigation, you will hopefully begin to fill in bits and pieces of a story. And the story will grow as you publish each new chapter. It is the work that becomes interesting, because (and here's the punchline) you're actually interested in it enough to stay with it.

I don't think that there are any examples of famous scientists who haven't at one time or another told an ongoing, well-developed and thereby interesting story (of course, famous is relative; even the most famous scientist is essentially a complete unknown compared with, say, the guy who washes Tom Cruise's hair). They stuck with it because they knew it was interesting, and eventually everyone else knew it too.

The message here is simple. When you are frustrated that nobody seems to be paying attention to your hard-won findings, back up a little. Is the work interesting to the single most important person who should be interested in it? Yes, (you got it) you. If it's still interesting and exciting, then stick with it. Because who should be more interested and excited about your work than you are? And eventually some of the others will come around.

Oh, one last thing. I know what you're thinking, "Did I fire six shots or only five?" No! Not that. You're thinking, "Sure, but what about those people who come into a `famous' lab, pick up a project that is essentially handed to them, and get a huge attention-getting publication, complete with kudos, parades, free ice cream, and their names across the moon in laser light?" Well, on the one hand, good for them, they pulled it off – most of the hard-working scientists in those labs don't publish anything. But the sad thing is, once the next issue of High Impact Weekly comes out, they may find that they are pretty much old news, and all of the credit goes to the `famous' lab anyway.

No, the secret of success is the same old boring one we already know. Find an interesting story and find out more and more and more about it. Most any story has the potential (if you know how to dig) to bore a hole all the way into one of the fundamental mysteries, the things that lots of people want to know about and will sit up and notice when you get another bit of the answer. You won't get there by chipping away at just anything that happens to pop up, and you won't get there by just making something work once, and you won't get there by complaining that nobody is paying any attention. But you will get there if you keep asking hard questions about your work and what it can eventually mean.

If not, there are 127 papers on "toast" that I haven't read – yet.


Related articles in JCS:

Sticky Wicket – spreading the word

JCS 2003 116: 1305. [Full Text]  




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