Thread by @c0nc0rdance

Full confession: 98% of science is boring to read about, even to scientists.
I have spent entire conferences on cancer research not learning anything worth telling anyone about.
It's like reading about someone's business trip to Toledo, OH; or their recent IRS audit.

It must be an eternal struggle for those in #scicomm. How do you reduce the boring bits without losing the integrity of the message?

Cell and gene therapy is amazing stuff, but 98% of the published work on it is about donor sequence optimization, which is not exciting.

My actual work is boring as hell. We alter one variable at a time b/c that's good experimental design. The end result is a test that incrementally improves on what already exists.

The reality of discovery and product development is nothing like the "Eureka" moment.

Every once in a while I get a bucket of deer brains, or we discover a biomarker that predicts glioma outcomes. The daily grind is: budget reports, status updates, project planning. It's never like the movies where a mad scientist gets to irradiate spiders without reporting.

I'm always jealous of the mad scientist types in film or TV. They seem to operate without ROI calculations, budget proposals or project launch windows.

The reality is a series of spreadsheets, WebEx conference calls, and archived documentation. Hence my love of super villains.

The truth is that Spiderman's "The Lizard" villain, aka Dr. Curtis Connors, is someone who has never completed an IRB or IACUC, never completed a program project proposal, and would likely fail a record audit.

That's the real evil, brothers and sisters.