The Art of Asking Dumb Questions

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This will come as a surprise to absolutely no one: scientists are often terrible at explaining their science to people who aren’t scientists.

I remember the sheer panic that struck when I attended my first lecture at the Meyer Cancer Center and was bombarded with gene abbreviations and acronyms. I recognised BRCA, but TP53? EGFR? APC? TCGA?

You pretty much needed a PhD to enter the room, or so it seemed.

I nearly didn’t get hired as the cancer center’s first communications specialist (and ultimately its communications director) because I lacked that esteemed credential. But I managed to convince them that they already had smart cookies by the bucketload. What they didn’t have was someone who wasn’t afraid to ask the dumb questions and explain the research in a way the rest of the world could understand and appreciate.

They needed an outsider who could recognise what was exciting to the casual observer and share that enthusiasm using channels many of the scientists themselves knew little about.

When people asked what I did for a living, I used to joke that I took complex concepts, dumbed them down for the masses, and packaged them in sexy ways.

But that’s not really fair. I’ve come to appreciate that complex science does not need to be dumbed down. It needs to be understood well enough to be made clear.

So how does that happen?

First, get out of the weeds

Often it starts with tackling the jargon.

Technical language is useful when everyone in the conversation shares the same vocabulary. Outside that context, it can become camouflage.

Left to their own devices, scientists can spend 20 minutes deep in the weeds explaining a research question or result, complete with all the caveats and footnotes they feel are fundamental to accuracy. It can take some work to dismantle that scaffolding and get to the heart of the matter.

To cut to the chase, I’ll often ask them to explain it as if I’m their eight-year-old niece, their gran or some guy they’ve just met at the bar.

They’re more likely to start with the highlights — the juicy, gossipy bits — and then fill in the explanatory detail if their audience shows further interest. They also instinctively adjust their vocabulary and analogies to the person in front of them.

Once I get the gist — and, importantly, relay it back in my own words to make sure I’ve understood correctly — then we can dive deeper.

Then show them you’ve done your homework

This is the moment I pull out the more thoughtful, considered questions I’ve developed after plenty of careful reading and research ahead of the interview. Because, yes, I have prepared.

Scientists don’t always expect me to have spent time trying to understand their work. When they realise I have, it changes the conversation. Even if I get muddled, they’re usually much more willing to help me unravel the complexity. It’s not entirely dissimilar to my attempts to order gyros using questionable Greek: effort counts for quite a lot.

So now we’re getting into it. We’re talking methods, variables, results… But we don’t have to do it in that order.

Scientists are accustomed to presenting their work in a very structured way, after years of writing academic papers, preparing posters and giving talks to their peers.

Journalists tend to flip the script. And I often do the same when interviewing researchers.

My ultimate goal is to find what motivated them, what surprised them, what sent them on a side quest. 

That’s the enthusiasm I want to capture, because it’s much more likely to capture the audience too.

Clear and correct are not opposites

Scientists are understandably nervous about oversimplification. Accuracy matters. Caveats matter. Precision matters.

And that’s where scientists and journalists can actually be aligned.

Accuracy matters to me too. So do caveats.

Working in a cancer center, every research breakthrough was exciting. But I was acutely aware that each one was one piece of a much larger puzzle — and often years away from reaching the clinic.

Balance and restraint were essential. Not just to avoid overhyping the work, but to maintain credibility and respect within the scientific community.

Punchy and correct are not enemies.It doesn’t have to be a choice between accurate but incomprehensible and catchy but wrong. Those are just the two easy options.

The hard one — accurate and clear — takes actual work.

It means figuring out which complexity is load-bearing and which is just professional habit; knowing which analogy illuminates and which one quietly lies; understanding the person in front of you well enough to know what they probably already know and what they need to know next.

A comment I read recently really stuck with me:

“Assume the reader knows nothing. Never assume they’re stupid.”

That’s a pretty good rule.

A lot of my work ultimately comes down to respect: Respecting the science enough to understand it properly. Respecting the scientist enough not to distort what they’ve done. And respecting the reader enough to believe they can understand something difficult when it’s explained well.

That’s where decades’ worth of interviewing and writing experience come in: Asking the supposedly dumb questions, finding the part that matters, and building a bridge between the people who know the science inside out and everyone else who deserves the chance to understand why it’s exciting.