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qdeev

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注册: 2010-04-07
专业: 病原细菌与放线菌生物学

[交流] 【转帖】美知名科学家撰文阐述如何描述科学问题（转）已有2人参与

美国西北太平洋国家实验室知名生物学家H. Steven Wiley近日在《科学家》杂志发表文章——《保持简洁》（Keep it Simple），称最容易赢得经费的方式是简洁地描述实验，但与此同时，这也是最难做到的一件事。以下为文章主要内容：

对于年轻科学家，我经常给出的建议是要就手中的数据讲述一个故事，并且是基金评审委员及期刊编委乐于听到的故事，因为这有利于将研究思路组织并呈现出来，增大经费申请和投稿的成功几率。

但这并非易事，对于包括科学家和作家在内的许多人来说，针对特定观众讲述一个故事都是一件很难学会的事。讲述一个好的故事需要技巧，而讲述一个受欢迎的故事则需要化繁为简，讲究脉络简单。

我曾注意到最受欢迎的故事都是将复杂问题最后归为黑与白、正义与邪恶，故事越简单越能吸引更多人，而那些情节迂回微妙的故事受欢迎度则大打折扣。比如，在癌症形成的假说上，相比于复杂信号通路的调控失衡，将癌症形成归于某些基因的突变更受欢迎，这些基因突变导致癌症发生的故事也更多地出现在论文或学术研讨会中。同样，化繁为简的黄金法则也适用于图书和电影的发行。以票房大获成功的电影《阿凡达》为例，其简单的故事情节围绕善与恶的斗争呈现，深受全球观众喜爱，而获奥斯卡最佳影片奖的电影《拆弹部队》，虽然在艺术表现形式上大受赞誉，但因其情节较复杂，票房成绩惨淡。

简单法则十分适用于描述科学问题，重要而简单的科学故事更容易获得经费支持，吸引到顶尖的科研家，而那些复杂的故事则经常隐没于专业期刊中。于我个人而言，年轻时我也时常被位于期刊显著位置的简单故事所吸引，正是它们使我相信科研中能获得问题绝对的答案。当然，实验数据的现实性很快也打破了我的错觉。

现在，虽然我的研究思路和得到的实验数据日趋复杂，但我仍尽力坚持相对简单地讲述科学故事。因为我相信，一方面，简单的故事更能赢得经费及获得同行认可；另一方面，我所研究的领域刚兴起，还有许多未知答案，当你没有充分了解具体机制时，故事的要点即是保持简单。但令人伤心的是，我发现当下讲一个简单受欢迎的故事已越来越难，而且，随着我个人研究兴趣的转变，故事的卖点也越来越少。

作为一名独立的科研人员，很多方面与独立电影制片人很相似，要想在没有很多经费的情况下收获成功，你必须具有出色的讲故事的能力。可是，大多数真实的境遇是，你必须找到一个观众以生存下来。（科学网谢文兵/编译）
One common piece of advice I frequently give to young scientists is to always tell a story with their data, because it’s a useful way of organizing and presenting research ideas. An equally important piece of advice I give is to pick a story that an audience—namely, the reviewers of grants and papers—wants to hear.

It’s no easy task. Creating a story for a particular audience is one of the most difficult tasks for anyone to learn. This is true for scientists and writers as well as any creative artist who tries to understand the complexity of the world and explain it to other people. Telling a good story always takes skill. Telling a popular story, however, requires simplification.

I have noticed that the most popular stories tend to cast complex matters in terms of black and white or good and evil. And the simpler the story, the broader the audience it can attract. Stories that have more nuance and eschew simple outcomes or explanations seem to be decidedly less popular.

For example, it has been easier to sell the simple concept that cancers are caused by specifically mutated genes rather than by the complex deregulation of signaling networks. The former might be true in certain cases, but the latter also appears to be very common, if not more so. Yet, the gene mutation story is far more likely to appear in papers or presented to a seminar audience.

The most popular books and movies almost always boil down the complexity of the world into simple terms. The enormously successful movie Avatar was a simple tale of greedy industrialists destroying the idyllic lifestyle of a primitive society. All of the subtle issues of the relative costs and benefits of advanced civilization were swept aside in favor of a moralistic tale of good versus evil. Audiences everywhere loved it. Contrast the success of Avatar with the fate of the far more sophisticated film The Hurt Locker, which presented the much more complex issues of war and the human response to danger. Artistically, it was a great success, winning numerous awards and accolades. Unfortunately, almost no one watched it, making it the lowest grossing film to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

So it goes with scientific stories. The big and simple stories attract ample funding and top scientific talent, whereas the complex stories remain mostly ignored in specialty journals.

When I was a young scientist, I too was attracted to the simple stories that were prominently featured in the trendy journals. After all, much of the science I learned came from these journals and the simplicity of their stories made me believe in the possibility of absolute answers. Of course, the reality of experimental data soon crumbled that illusion.

Despite the growing complexity of my own research ideas and data, I still managed to keep most of my stories relatively simple and pitched at a clearly identified target audience. For example, we demonstrated that removing the part of the EGF receptor required for endocytosis caused cells to grow uncontrollably, thus showing the cancer community that receptor internalization attenuates signaling. Focusing on simple stories was motivated by my desire for funding and peer acceptance, of course, but was also due to the newness of the field of cell signaling. When you don’t know much about how receptors are regulated, the first things you find tend to be simple.

Sadly, I have found that it gets more difficult to tell simple and popular stories as time goes on, unless you are willing to change fields. Mechanisms turn out to be complex and pathways are redundant. I also find that I have become less interested in what other people think is important and want to follow my own instincts instead. This might be more personally fulfilling, but definitely makes it more difficult to sell my stories. I might be fascinated by the architecture of a complex signaling pathway, but unless I can show that it demonstrates some fundamental biological feature, it is unlikely to interest other scientists.

Being an independent scientist is similar in many ways to being an independent film maker. To be successful without a big budget, you need to have outstanding storytelling skills. However, you always have to find an audience to survive.

H. Steven Wiley is Lead Biologist for the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

[ Last edited by qdeev on 2010-6-5 at 15:39 ]

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