In which we tell a story: on metaphors in science and life

There is such a stark divide between those who understand scientific complexity and those who urgently need or want to. The onus falls on the former to translate their messages in a comprehensible way. Perhaps it’s a radical claim, but even though communication is a two-way dialogue, I believe that the blame for anything lost in translation lies squarely and one hundred per cent with the communicator. There is, in short, no excuse.

As my teaching winds down for the academic year, I’ve just given my last undergraduate science writing workshop – a sort of gun-for-hire side hustle that, via word-of-mouth, has gradually spread across multiple modules offered by the Faculty. These interactive sessions are not so much about technical science writing, although I do cover those aspects, but rather the strategy needed to engage readers of any level of understanding.

While I cover a lot of the basics, such as the importance of clarity, balance, brevity and understanding the needs of the audience to whom you are pitching, I think my most important lessons lie in two areas: strong story-telling, and creative techniques for achieving that in the most engaging way.

My own personal way of understanding the world involves a lot of imagery. I am forever making little sketches in my notebook, when I plan experiments or try to understand a particularly complicated paper. There is nothing that brings me more joy than a clean whiteboard, multiple colours of pen and a conducive group of colleagues happy to brainstorm. The paper just accepted for formal publication from one of my postdocs started out life as an ink drawing on a cocktail napkin in a restaurant. Pictures and mind maps allow me to boil down complexities into visual constructs, herding the elusively abstract into something tangible and, therefore, knowable. Just as you cannot teach something you don’t know inside-out, you do not truly understand a concept if you cannot draw it.*

(*Exceptions may apply to disciplines such as cosmology or quantum physics! Fortunately, most biology is reassuringly tangible.)

How, then, do we draw pictures with the written word? The MVP on the bench is clearly the metaphor. In my workshops, I show them examples from the popular press – for example, pieces by Tom Whipple of the Times (a master craftsman), or from the Guardian science desk – where metaphors are such common workhorses that they appear in every single piece. I invite my students to magic up metaphors for biological phenomena. Some are easy: the infiltration of immune cells during an inflammatory response, for example, being readily likened to the fire service being called in to quench a blaze. Others are hopelessly abstract and require more thought.

I encourage my students to avoid metaphors that are so overused that they have become clichés. Prime example? The powerhouse of the cell. (Pity the poor mitochondrion, eternally type-cast and never given a fresh take!) Or those cursed building blocks of life. I present lists of metaphorical scientific terms that are so ancient and established as proper scientific nomenclature that we have forgotten that they were ever metaphors in the first place: transcription; translation; proof-reading; editing. Funny, isn’t it, and pleasingly circular, that so many of our scientific terms are derived from writing itself?

Metaphors are so useful that I put them to work to help understand my everyday life and the interactions I have with people, institutions and the demons of self-doubt that crawl out of my brain at 3 AM. My journal is full of them: tiny narrative universes of possibility. I cannot imagine my world without them.

So this is why I want my students to understand the power of metaphors, and to deploy them liberally whenever they are struggling to get across their own scientific stories. The battle for truth may be lost, but in some ways, we have no choice but to keep fighting.