About
About Plain Language Science
You don't have to be a scientist to understand the value of understanding.
I have always felt that my training and experience in biology granted me a particular view of the world, a set of figurative science-tinted glasses. Plain Language Science exists to hand that view to anyone who wants it. It is focused on biology for now, but down the road, who knows. Maybe I can talk some of my other talented scientist friends into dropping some niche knowledge of their own. They have been bought with pizza and beer before. I am sure they would be down to help me out again.
My name is Nate. This is where I would list the achievements that qualify me to be your sherpa on this expedition. My ivy-league pedigree, my prestigious publication history, my high-impact biotech job.
I have none of those things. What I have is an obsession with this stuff and a long-standing need to share it.
What this is trying to be
A dream of mine is to teach an upper-division interdisciplinary course on introductory biology. A room of non-scientists who were curious but had no idea where to start. It would open with the basics, the central dogma of molecular biology, and then we would spend a session building the rest of the curriculum out of whatever they actually wanted to know. You can imagine the kinds of questions you would get.
What is cancer?
If I am 60% identical to a banana, what does DNA even do?
What is the COVID vaccine, my mom says it's bad?
Why am I so hung over right now?
Then I would sit down with the literature, inform myself, and write the lesson. Tailored to what they wanted to understand, emphasizing informing over teaching, embracing the ambiguity when it showed up. One pass/fail final presentation later, you have a group of informed people carrying knowledge that is relevant to them, ready to pass it on.
That class does not exist. This blog is its surrogate.
What to expect
Sharing these topics with friends and family over coffee and drinks is what pushed me to start writing. That is the register I am going for here: someone casually chatting about something that interests him. My early obsession with Osmosis Jones still defines how my brain pictures biology, so expect a lot of animated representations, metaphor and analogy. I lean on those crutches constantly. Apologies in advance.
Why it matters that this is free
Research in the United States is heavily funded by American taxpayers. Nearly all of my own education, scholar training and academic research was paid for, at least in part, by taxpayer dollars. That same research usually ends up behind a journal paywall, wrapped in language built to keep most people out.
This site is a small bridge across that. At least until we live in a world where research articles are not published without plain language summaries, and work bought and paid for by the taxpayer is available to the taxpayer free of charge.
What we do is cool, and if you're curious, you should know about it.
Who is writing this
I'm a Seattle-based scientist. Ten years of stem-cell biology and analytical assay development across academic and biotech labs, seven peer-reviewed publications, and a persistent habit of being the person in the room who translates between the specialists and everyone else.
You can find me on LinkedIn or Google Scholar, or just email me.