Community-Based Science

A couple of years ago, while we still in our first lab space, Thermo profiled me for their "Be The Spark" series. The video is a gem.

I thought a lot about my mission as a scientist in preparation for the recording, and what "impact" means to me. At heart, I'm a storyteller and an explorer - and for me, I'm excited by innovation, and I feel like I'm having an impact when I can feel my work touching an individual's life. For others, their mission as a scientist might be to solve a mystery, and a deeper understanding of a biological pathway might get them most excited. Others might define impact differently. We all carry different motivations, and those differences help make science such a vibrant and interesting field in which to work.

I think that communicating these motivations is particularly important nowadays, as more people distrust science, and as social media pseudoscience increasingly replaces controlled trials, and as political ideology replaces peer review. These are difficult times for those of us who are idealistic about the scientific enterprise. There is pain for us with every misguided political posture, every layoff, and every science-denying social media post.

I wonder if we can find healing, recover some of our idealism, and encourage a shift in attitude with more community-based science. In our case, that meant placing our first lab in the middle of a small town borough, participating in community events, talking to people about what our "crazy" equipment did, chatting up every delivery guy or repairman in our lab about our mission, showing our love for our work with an attitude of wonder and awe.

Maybe, in the face of that, it's harder to believe that "big pharma" is trying to poison you, that vaccines carry microchips, etc. Or maybe not. Maybe sometimes "crazy gonna stay crazy." But even so, maybe talking to our communities a little more about our science will be a salve that keeps us going. Because we need to keep going, disease doesn't wait for rhetoric to simmer down or for disinformation to dissolve away.