Biology Writes

“It is often said that scientists should do a better job communicating to the public so I felt like I should at least try to see if I could walk the walk, not just talk the talk. The challenge is that when you write a scientific paper, you generally know what the rules are, but there are really no formal guidelines about how to write for non-technical audiences.  You could write in a million different ways!  So it’s exciting but also a little bit terrifying.

I’ve written a couple of articles for Natural History magazine and, there, I assumed my readers had probably gone to college (but not necessarily).  What I wanted to do was paint a picture in their minds about something that would interest them – a wonderment, a mystery, or an appreciation of nature’s beauty — and then try to backfill in the more technical side of things, including bringing some molecular biology to the natural history audience.

My first article was about how the diversity of body plans in animals came about. My hook was that the world is full of all kinds of crazy creatures with an incredible range of morphologies, body sizes, physiologies, behaviors, and reproductive systems. I started by describing echinoderms, which have one of the weirdest body plans.  I introduced the larva, which has a very sensible organization; it has a front and a back end, a left and a right side, a belly and a back, a mouth and a gut.  It looks like a normal animal, it’s just tiny. Then, it undergoes this crazy metamorphosis and comes out pentaradial!  So what is going on there?  That’s the sort of wonderment that I was trying to tap into.”

— Greg Wray, Professor of Biology, Duke University