In the time between a study’s conception and its publication, the issue that motivated the research may have dropped off the agenda, the budget may have been redirected, or the relevant policymaker may have changed. Even if none of that happens and a paper does reach a decision-maker’s desk, it still has to compete for that person’s attention and make it through the political process of implementing evidence-based policies.

The timelines of science and politics may differ, but the aim of policy briefs is to find an intersection between the two. These short documents present clear recommendations about topics of public interest. 

The target audience is not the scientific community, but decision-makers: public managers, legislators, regulators, and leaders of international organizations.

More than just informing, the goal is to persuade and guide action. While scientific articles are written to withstand peer review, policy briefs are designed to be read quickly and to influence a decision.

Jakov Bojovic and Imogen Bayley, founders of the Centre for Policy Writing (CEPOW) in Madrid, Spain, identified three obstacles in the book Policy Communications: How to Write an Effective Policy Brief. The first is when decision-makers are overwhelmed with information; the second is when there is a conflict between research and public opinion, the economic climate, and the interests of certain groups; and finally, when there is a gap between producing rigorous science and knowing how to communicate it.

Based on this diagnosis, they and other experts, including guidance from the Institute for Applied Economic Research (IPEA) in Brazil and international literature on the subject, have offered a set of practical guidelines for those wishing to influence policy with evidence.

How to write an effective policy brief

The case of the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic offered an example of how the format can work in practice. The World Health Organization (WHO) published a series of policy briefs on mask use, viral transmission in enclosed spaces, and vaccination strategies. The documents, ranging from four to eight pages, were targeted at national governments and health authorities, with specific recommendations based on the evidence available at the time.

The WHO policy briefs served as key references for national governments making decisions on lockdowns, school reopenings, and hospital protocols—a rare example of science influencing politics in real time.

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Born in 1955 in Tana (Deatnu), in far northern Norway, Gaski is one of today’s most influential Sami intellectuals, and has played a key role in establishing his people’s literature as a recognized field, both within and beyond academia.

A retired professor of Sami literature, he taught at the Arctic University of Norway (UiT) and the Sami University of Applied Sciences (Sámi allaskuvla). His research has compared Sami writing with that of other Indigenous peoples, and he has translated Sami poetry into Norwegian and English.

The author of landmark works on Sami literature—including studies of epic poetry and collections of proverbs—he has also received the Gollegiella Language Award, the most prestigious Nordic honor for promoting and developing Sami languages.

In 2020, Gaski became editor-in-chief of Sámi dieđalaš áigečála, (The Sami Scientific Journal), an interdisciplinary journal published entirely in Sami languages and maintained by UiT in partnership with Sámi allaskuvla.

On his retirement in 2025, he left behind a historic achievement: the journal’s inclusion in DOAJ (the Directory of Open Access Journals), making it the only publication in the directory penned exclusively in an Indigenous language—underscoring his ambition to position Sami-produced knowledge on the global scientific stage.

In an exclusive video interview with Science Arena, Gaski discusses language preservation, the limits of institutional recognition, and what it means to do science in a language the Western world has long overlooked.

What is DOAJ and why does indexing matter?

Science Arena – When was the Sami Scientific Journal created, and what were its main objectives?

Harald Gaski – It was founded in 1994, at which time the Norwegian government was either pressured into supporting the initiative or chose to do so. From the late 1960s onward, there was a broad revitalization of Indigenous cultures around the world. In the mid-1970s, for example, the World Council of Indigenous Peoples was established.

This period also had a strong cultural dimension, which extended into academia—universities, students, and researchers—much like elsewhere in the world. 

Because language has always been such a central part of Sami culture, it became essential to provide a better learning experience in Sami for students. Authorities were increasingly pressured to support Sami education, with the goal of offering formal instruction from kindergarten through university.

Within this broader process, we recognized the need for an academic journal exclusively in Sami. The Arctic University of Norway (UiT) and the Sami University of Applied Sciences collaborated to make it happen.

Can this initiative also be seen as political?

All Indigenous revitalization processes involve politics, culture, and research—more closely intertwined than in the Western world. That does not mean the research itself is politicized, but political support for cultural and educational initiatives has been crucial. In that sense, it was natural for policymakers to support a journal like this. 

What is the significance of having a publication aimed at a relatively small audience included in a global database like DOAJ?

It may seem like crass foolishness to create a journal in a language spoken by only a few tens of thousands of people and distribute it globally. But the idea is, in fact, political and cultural.

Can the Sami Scientific Journal and its inclusion in DOAJ be seen as a form of decolonization in scientific publishing? 

That is certainly the hope, although I tend to be modest about it—I do not expect a revolution to result from this journal or from its inclusion in DOAJ.

However, indexing increases visibility. People may ask, “Why is this journal part of a global directory? There must be something special about it,” and that curiosity may lead them to explore it further.

It may also have an impact in other countries, encouraging Indigenous communities to say, “Look, this journal is included in DOAJ and publishes in its own language—why can’t we do the same?” Of course, funding remains a major challenge. We need much more support. 

What role do different stakeholders play in creating a journal like this?

Ideally, Indigenous peoples themselves would lead these initiatives and have the resources to fund them independently. That would ensure full autonomy. But this is not yet the reality for most Indigenous communities.

We still depend on some kind of external support from whatever source. My hope is that demonstrating the success of the Sami journal—and its compliance with all the standards of an academic publication—will serve as evidence to universities and authorities that this model is viable.

Are there similar initiatives?

Yes, there is AlterNative. I served on its editorial board for a time, and we discussed including at least one article in an Indigenous language in each issue. That is another way of getting it out there.

[Officially, AlterNative states on its website that it “publishes articles in English but also accepts submissions in Indigenous languages, including papers originally published in those languages and later translated into English”.]

That said, this approach can also be questioned.

This could be another way to share knowledge about Indigenous peoples.

Still, I would like to see Indigenous journals, books, and publishers operating on the same level as those in the Western world. That would help overcome reductive and often prejudiced views of Indigenous peoples.

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To address this issue, a group of researchers from Ecuador and the United States organized science communication workshops to help academics develop self-reflection skills, prepare presentations for non-specialist audiences, and produce content for social media. The results were published in the Journal of Science Communication (JCOM) in September 2025.

In total, 12 researchers from the fields of public health, urban planning, education, and communication took part in the initiative. Their challenge was to find ways to improve the design of public spaces in the Andean city of Cuenca, Ecuador, based on an analysis of the physical activity habits of adolescents aged 12 to 17 in parks and public areas in the region. The workshops adopted an action learning methodology, adapted to the teams’ working environment.

Workshop format

Two instructors led the sessions, providing resources and proposing activities aligned with daily challenges arising in the participants’ work, requiring them to put the knowledge and skills developed throughout the training into practice. 

The workshops were held in hybrid format, with both in-person and online sessions, to encourage active learning and provide flexibility. Each session lasted four hours and combined theoretical presentations and guided activities, prepared in advance by one of the initiative’s coordinators.

The first workshop took place during the project’s pre-planning phase, before recruitment of the target audience began. The objective was to enable the researchers to build ethical relationships with participants and other stakeholders. 

One activity aimed to strengthen the bond between the researchers and raise awareness of different layers of privilege. 

The instructors prompted them to reflect on their social, cultural, and personal circumstances in order to develop privilege management strategies that would foster more ethical and equitable relationships when collaborating with colleagues and the public.

The second workshop trained the researchers in presentation techniques and content production for social media, focusing on formats most appealing to broader audiences. The instructors introduced strategies used in business and entrepreneurial environments to present ideas persuasively, supported by narrative techniques. 

Results and conclusions

The results indicate that the initiative was well received: at the end of the workshops, nine of the 12 participants felt that they had achieved an intermediate mastery of the skills covered, and 97% considered the activities useful for developing science communication abilities. 

Social media training was identified as the most beneficial by 11 of the 12 researchers, while eight rated content production and presentation techniques as extremely useful. The self-reflection exercise prior to contact with adolescents also increased the participants’ awareness of their privileges and ways of managing them.

In the end, the researchers went beyond simply outlining strategies to support young people and the Cuenca community in partnership with organizations and local authorities. They also transformed the study’s findings into social media content, highlighting that some of the local population avoid public parks due to safety concerns.

The conclusion is that enhancing these skills—especially among early-career researchers—can increase public engagement and make science communication efforts more effective, especially when researchers strategically incorporate social media.

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A study conducted by researchers in Austria, Norway, and the Netherlands investigated whether, and to what extent, communicating scientific uncertainties influences risk perception and support for policies related to the impacts of microplastics on human health. The findings, published in January in the journal Public Understanding of Science, indicate that revealing uncertainties or the lack of scientific consensus can slightly reduce risk perception and, consequently, support for regulatory measures by reducing the credibility of the message. The effects, however, are marginal.

How to communicate scientific uncertainties

Methodology: three groups, one fictitious article

A total of 1,126 individuals aged 18 or older, all residents of Austria, participated in the study. They first answered questions about their knowledge and prior perceptions of the topic, as well as their beliefs and attitudes toward science. They were then randomly assigned to three groups: consensus uncertainty, deficit uncertainty, and a control group. 

They all read a fictitious article, in the format of an online newspaper, about microplastics in food and beverages. The text explained what microplastics are, their main sources, and how they enter the food chain, as well as mentioning the benefits of using plastics in the food and beverage sector to provide a balanced perspective.

Next, the researchers presented all participants with a scientific study indicating that microplastics could have negative health effects. The difference was in the framing: the control group received no information about limitations or knowledge gaps; the consensus uncertainty group was informed that there were disagreements within the scientific community regarding the possible impacts; and the deficit uncertainty group received information about existing knowledge gaps and the need for further research.

Results: a small but significant effect

In general, communicating uncertainty led to a slightly lower risk perception in the two experimental groups compared with the control group, but the effect was small. The researchers found no statistically significant differences between the two types of uncertainty when compared directly.

By comparing each condition with the control group, they observed that only consensus uncertainty led to a statistically significant reduction in risk perception. The authors hypothesize that, unlike other types of uncertainty, consensus uncertainty signals that there are experts or evidence that challenge the original claim, which can create room for dissenting or denialist positions.

The role of public beliefs

In addition to the characteristics of the message, the researchers analyzed how public beliefs and attitudes toward science are associated with the effects of communicating uncertainty. They observed that the participants who view science as a process of debate reported higher risk perception, regardless of the type of information they received.

“Our findings indicate that the characteristics of the public influence the effects of communicating uncertainty, but in a more complex and subtle manner than previously assumed,” the researchers note.

In this sense, the authors argue that promoting the view of science as a process of debate and strengthening trust in scientists can help the public deal in a more constructive way with topics marked by uncertainty, but which require preventive actions, as is the case with microplastic pollution.

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These and other recommendations are brought together in a guide published last December by the Unit for the Advancement of Scientific Communication of the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT). 

The document provides guidance for journalists, researchers, communicators, and institutions on how to communicate scientific integrity in a clear, responsible, and effective manner.

Developed as part of the “Science of Scientific Communication” project, the guide highlights that the key strengths of science, such as self-criticism and self-correction, are rarely communicated to the public at large. 

At the same time, according to FECYT, communication about ethics is almost always framed in negative contexts—linked to crises and cases of misconduct—often exploited by anti-science movements to discredit science.

In this sense, one of the recommendations is to avoid narratives that present research as a linear path with predictable and inevitable results. 

The Spanish foundation also emphasizes the importance of explaining why some research does not achieve the expected results and how this, far from being a failure, contributes to collective learning and the refinement of hypotheses. 

Other recommendations from the FECYT guide include:

• Contextualizing retractions and their different motivations;
• Clearly differentiating between deliberate fraud and honest mistakes;
• Presenting uncertainties as natural stages of knowledge.

Transparency is another key element: not only about potential problems, but also about the measures taken to address them at the individual, institutional, and systemic levels. 

Explaining and contextualizing control and self-correction practices—such as peer review, retractions, and reproducibility tests—helps demonstrate how these mechanisms safeguard the reliability of scientific knowledge.

For example, the term “retraction” is often used both to refer to the voluntary withdrawal of an article by its authors after the discovery of an unintentional error, and to the removal of an article when an investigation identifies scientific misconduct.

Clarifying and contextualizing these differences when communicating a retraction is essential, as indiscriminate use of the same term can cause confusion and discourage honest authors from correcting unintentional errors.

Other terms that are often used interchangeably, or even contradictorily, across different scientific disciplines and institutions, are “reproducibility” and “replicability.” 

The former refers to the ability to obtain results consistent with a previous study using the same data and methods; the latter—replicability—refers to obtaining identical or compatible results using new data or methods. 

These distinctions matter because expectations surrounding replicability are more complex and, in some cases, a lack of replicability may even contribute to the process of scientific discovery.

Fraud versus honest mistake

The FECYT guide also highlights the importance of differentiating between fraud and honest mistake, clarifying how each situation is treated differently and why this distinction is fundamental to preserving the integrity and credibility of science.

Presenting them as a “crisis” in science or in an entire field of knowledge increases mistrust, sensationalism, and politicization.

The authors of the document acknowledge that honest communication about problematic aspects of scientific practice can generate mistrust in the short term. 

However, they argue that transparency is essential to prevent misinformation, stimulate improvements in the scientific system, and promote a more accurate understanding of how knowledge advances—not as an infallible process, but one strengthened by criticism, review, and correction.

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According to him, although examples such as anti-vaccine movements, climate denialism, and conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic may appear to support this diagnosis, the most recent data suggest the exact opposite.

Horton points to the results of two large surveys—conducted in the United States and 68 countries, respectively—that show high and stable levels of public trust in science and in scientists. 

Data that challenges common assumptions

The first piece of evidence presented in The Lancet editorial is a survey conducted in October 2024 by the Pew Research Center with 9,593 adults in the United States. 

The findings are striking:

• 76% of respondents said they had “a great deal of” or “a fair amount of” confidence that scientists act in the best interests of the public. 
• This figure represents a three-point increase over 2023 and signals a recovery after the decline observed during the pandemic.

In 2020, at the height of the health crisis, confidence reached 87%, before declining in the following years. However, as Horton points out, the trend is now upward, and the rebound is especially strong among Republicans, the group that experienced the steepest drop in trust during that period. 

Scientists also continue to outperform other professional categories, such as journalists, politicians, business leaders, and religious leaders. 

In terms of individual attributes, researchers are viewed as:

• Intelligent (89%);
• Honest (65%);
• Committed to solving real problems (65%).

The editorial underscores that this pattern is not unique to the United States. Horton cites another study—coordinated by Victoria Cologna and colleagues, published in Nature Human Behavior in January 2025—which surveyed attitudes in 68 countries (including Brazil), with more than 71,000 respondents. 

The result is unequivocal: global trust in scientists was rated as “moderately high,” with an average score of 3.62 on a scale of 1 to 5. No country recorded a “very low” level of trust.

In addition, 75% of participants agreed that the scientific method is the best way to test hypotheses—a clear indication of broad support for the foundations of scientific reasoning.

On the contrary, the data indicate a predominantly favorable attitude, with cultural, social, and political nuances that merit attention but do not support a diagnosis of a “crisis.”

The real weak point: science communication

If trust in scientists remains high, why does the sense of distance between science and society persist? Horton identifies a critical point revealed in the Pew Research Center study: only 45% of Americans consider scientists to be good communicators—a significant decrease from 2019.

At this point, Horton’s editorial shifts tone and begins to address the urgency of rethinking how science communicates. Drawing inspiration from the book In a Flight of Starlings (Penguin Press, 2023), written by Italian physicist and Nobel laureate Giorgio Parisi, Horton argues that simply communicating results is not enough. 

Key aspects of communication addressed in The Lancet editorial

• Transparency in the scientific process: Parisi argues that scientists should not only present their conclusions but also explain how they arrived at them—and Horton endorses this view.
• Valuing the unexpected: Parisi’s book shows that scientific progress is often driven by unforeseen discoveries; reporting them brings the public closer to the real dynamics of science.
• Acknowledging limitations: Scientists can appear arrogant when they convey absolute certainty; acknowledging uncertainty strengthens credibility.
• Science as culture, not merely technique: Parisi insists that science should be defended not only for its practical benefits but also for its cultural role as a way of seeing and interpreting the world.
• Risk of “science as magic”: When science is presented as something inaccessible, the public tends to seek alternative—and often irrational—explanations.
• Personal experience as narrative: Parisi uses episodes from his own career to explain complex concepts; Horton suggests that more scientists adopt similar strategies to reduce the distance between themselves and the public.

Why does this discussion matter?

Horton’s editorial is both a critique of the “crisis of confidence” narrative and a warning about a real problem: science communication to the general public remains insufficient to keep pace with expectations and information-consumption habits in the 21st century.

By drawing on robust research and contemporary intellectual references, Horton argues that trust does exist—but what is lacking is approachability, clarity, epistemological humility, and the ability to build bridges between science and society.

Studies cited in The Lancet editorial

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This broad intersection was addressed in the Science Communication for Communicators and Journalists course, delivered from September 1 to November 3 at the University of São Paulo (USP) by the School of Communications and Arts (ECA), the Department of Social Communication (SCS), and the Institute of Advanced Studies (IEA). 

As a participant in this course, which included various classes and areas of expertise, I decided to analyze five classes given by guest professors. 

It was a narrative choice guided by the central idea of the opening lecture, delivered by linguist Carlos Vogt: The Spiral of Scientific Culture. When science circulates and becomes a part of the culture, it saves lives. 

Thus, discussing this spiral with a focus on science communication, artificial intelligence (AI), healthy eating, genetics, and mental health also means discussing what sustains or weakens the health of a population.

Vogt, a professor emeritus at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), explained that science only fulfills its true potential when it can represent its own social communication processes, and when it becomes a “much stronger form of social and cultural presence.”

Scientific culture

According to Vogt, “one of the fundamental traits of the society we live in is the constant, strong, and persistent presence of science.” That presence, however, only translates into well-being when it becomes part of the culture; when the population understands its meaning. 

Without communication, Vogt reminds us, there is no science. After all, communication is the foundation for the development of a scientific culture. 

He explains that the spiral of scientific culture—which allows us to understand its trajectory—arose from efforts to organize, systematize, and visualize science communication from various perspectives, incorporating a vision in which communication becomes a structural element of the contemporary world, “capturing the transformations that the whole world has undergone, with scientific knowledge playing a fundamental role.”

This understanding is even more urgent in light of the technological acceleration explored by Glauco Arbix, a professor at the USP Department of Sociology, in his class: Challenges of Artificial Intelligence in the Twenty-First Century. 

He emphasized that artificial intelligence is here to stay, for better or for worse. “The most reasonable thing to do is embrace AI and leave our own mark on it,” argues the professor, noting that nowhere is free of the technology, not even digital media platforms or banking systems.

In healthcare, where “people’s lives may be at stake,” the technological integration struggles against the opaqueness of the systems. Arbix highlighted this very problem, commenting that the computational mechanisms behind diagnoses and medical decisions are not understandable to those who depend on them. 

Contemporary challenges 

Carlos Monteiro, from USP’s Center for Epidemiological Research in Nutrition and Health (NUPENS), addressed a more mundane—yet equally essential—aspect of day-to-day public health: the revolution of ultra-processed foods as a battle for information, in a class entitled Nutritional Information, Food Choices, and Public Health.

For Monteiro, what defines health is dietary habits, because “we do not eat nutrients or isolated ingredients. We eat meals, and combinations of foods.” 

The problem, according to his research, is that modern life has eroded the autonomy of our decision making. “Until recently, choosing the right foods was not a major problem. That changed with modernity and ultra-processed products,” says the professor.

In Advances in Genetics and their Impact on Contemporary Society, Mayana Zatz, a professor of genetics and evolutionary biology at USP, highlighted a study she conducted involving over 100,000 people from families with genetic diseases. The project, she explained, enabled prevention, diagnosis, and genetic counseling. “These patients are the protagonists of knowledge. They give rise to new discoveries, and these new discoveries help them and other patients,” she says.

Zatz also highlighted key moments in the timeline of genetics, including recent revolutions such as the cloning of Dolly the sheep, the Human Genome Project, stem cell reprogramming, and Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR), which enables precision DNA editing.

Looking to the future, the geneticist anticipates that “precision medicine will lead to healthy aging, cell therapy, tissue bioengineering, and new ethical challenges related to AI.” 

The final class in my analysis was Psychological Crisis in Contemporary Society, given by Christian Dunker, of USP’s Institute of Psychology. Dunker argued that “we live in an anti-grief society that does not like death or collectively processing loss.” 

When discomfort is missing from language and relationships, he explains, our suffering itself becomes an illness. “When our narratives of suffering are poor or we cannot articulate our pain, the banal becomes a clinical symptom,” says the psychoanalyst. 

Dunker also notes that “we have abandoned practices of psychic recomposition, such as collective mourning and forms of education that embrace subjectivity.” 

Five classes, each with their own theme, share a common message: communication is an integral part of good science and a healthy life. 

Informing is not about simply transmitting data. It is enabling conscious food choices. It is explaining the risks and benefits of technologies that are already deciding lives. It is democratizing genetic advances that are reshaping the future. It is protecting people who suffer in silence, giving their pain a name and a meaning. 

In a world where misinformation spreads faster than any medication, communicating science with rigor, empathy, and responsibility is like a cultural vaccine against manipulation and injustice.

The USP course provides a link between journalism, science, and health by promoting education. The health of the future, whether physical, emotional, or genetic, will be shaped not only in laboratories, but in spaces where knowledge transforms into culture. 

To achieve that, we have to go beyond the university walls with commitment and intention, to truly break through the elitist bubble. We have to enter newsrooms, schools, social media, community gatherings, and everyone’s daily lives. 

Communicating science is a social commitment.

Moura Leite Netto is a journalist who earned his bachelor’s degree from UNIFIEO, a postgraduate diploma from Faculdade Cásper Líbero, and a master’s and PhD in sciences with an emphasis in oncology from A. C. Camargo Cancer Center. He is currently doing postdoctoral research at the School of Dentistry of the University of São Paulo (FOUSP), where he is also a visiting professor. He is the director/founder of SENSU Comunicação and former president of the Brazilian Network of Science Journalists and Communicators (RedeComCiência).

Opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of Science Arena or Einstein Hospital Israelita.

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The event is organized by the Brazilian community of students at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to debate the past, present, and future of Brazil.

Last year the conference celebrated 10 years, and Huck was invited to recount the stories of Brazilians he’d met in the US.

The researcher that impressed the presenter, and was cited during his talk in the Harvard auditorium, is Dr. Daniel Dahis.

“I came across Luciano Huck walking around the Harvard business school, filming a piece for his TV program, and executives from a pharmaceutical corporation that were accompanying me suggested he visit my laboratory,” recalls Dahis.

“He took out his cell phone, made a video with me for his stories, and posted it for 21 million people.”

Until then, Dahis didn’t have an open profile on Instagram—his posts were the same as any other normal user of the platform: travel, images of his birth city Rio de Janeiro, birthdays, friends, family, and his girlfriend (now his wife).

However, after the visibility generated by the video on Luciano Huck’s profile, Dahis rolled the dice and started to post short videos on the life and routine of a Brazilian researcher overseas.

Science with a Carioca accent

Speaking in his characteristic Carioca (Rio) accent, the 33-year-old biomedical engineer began by showcasing the laboratory where he works. He went on to talk about general interest themes such as health, science, and scientific research with the potential of improving life for the population.

In little more than a year he has garnered hundreds of thousands of followers—by June 2025, some 214,000 were following his profile.

More than 200 people signed up for the three-hour workshop.

As well as talking about science for a large audience on Instagram, the biomedical engineer is lead scientist at the startup Biodevek, formerly an incubated company in the Harvard ecosystem, which develops solutions to prevent internal bleeding.

“We are working with a biomaterial to treat internal injuries,” the researcher enthuses in the same way as he described to Huck and entrepreneurs last year.

In other words: “It’s like a sticking plaster to prevent internal bleeding.”

When the research process is concluded, the invention may help patients with ulcers, for example, or other conditions that can generate internal complications, and will also be used for minimally invasive procedures performed by colonoscopy or endoscopy, for example for the removal of a polyp or tumor, which can create the risk of internal bleeding.

Medicine without the white jacket

For a little more than three years, Dahis has been part of the Biodevek team, but his interest in the healthcare area was aroused way before. “Graduated” in medicine by watching the series House and Grey’s Anatomy, the teenage Daniel Dahis aspired to be a doctor like the characters he saw on TV.

When it came to decision time, however, he realized that he wanted to study medicine but not be a practicing physician. He saw his vocation as less in providing direct care to patients with a presence in the consulting room, and more backstage in health research.

It was a cousin of his that advised him to pursue the engineering area, and Dahis came into contact with the world of medical engineering at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).

He studied imaging technology for the detection of breast cancer and, during his master’s in biomedical engineering at the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion), researched ultrasound methods for measuring brain temperature.

At that time aged 24, it was a crucial period for Dahis to develop his communication skills. “It was a lot of changes at the same time that prepared me on a cultural level,” says the researcher.

“I learned to master another language, I had Hebrew classes, so now I speak four languages,” he goes on.

A member of the Jewish community, Dahis says that his origins and participation in the Jewish youth movement during his life have influenced his career. “I always liked to take part, and being in a community requires you to interact with other people and be communicative; to care about others,” he reflects.

“A very present element of the Jewish culture is debate; it’s in our literature, our philosophy, so I think that my curiosity, my wanting to know, seeking answers, comes from that.”

From a master’s in Israel to a PhD at Harvard

Dahis left Israel for the US in 2020. His master’s at Technion was coming to an end when he watched a talk by a Harvard professor about cancer. “I put my phone down and started to pay attention; by the end of the talk I was asking if I could do my doctorate with her,” Dahis recalls.

Between 2019 and 2022 he researched imaging methods for the treatment and monitoring of tumors, most specifically the glioblastoma, a type of brain tumor. “It’s the most common and most aggressive in adults, and the prognosis is very bad,” says Dahis.

“Patients normally succumb within 20 months, even with more radical treatments,” he adds. “Immunotherapy doesn’t work yet, and 98% of medications don’t cross the blood-brain barrier, which protects the tumor from medications in the bloodstream—it’s a very difficult illness,” he says. The idea of his project was to use the (noninvasive) ultrasound method and nanotechnology to temporarily open this barrier around the tumor for localized treatment.

“Cancer was the reason it all started; I lost an uncle to lung cancer, my father had colorectal cancer, and there are estimates that one in every two men will have cancer at some stage in their lives. For women, the figure is one in three,” says Dahis.

“But it’s no longer a diagnosis with a death sentence as it used to be; it’s a serious illness, but with some treatment possibilities,” he confirms.

Cancer is also a recurring theme in his Instagram videos. “It’s a subject that has always scared and fascinated me at the same time.”

“My followers range from people with postdoctorates to teenagers, academics, and people interested in science and health, so I feel a certain responsibility for communicating science.”

As well as his Instagram activity, Dahis is currently writing a children’s book on cancer.

“I dealt with that situation in our family when I was 18, and my siblings were much younger,” Dahis recalls. “So I think communication is essential for any child to deal with that. Cancer is no longer the death sentence it used to be—and that’s good news. Removing stigmas and setting realistic perspectives on treatment can make a difference to a child’s life. We can’t avoid death, but we can learn to deal better with it.”

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Popularized by biologist David Mech in his book The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species (1970), the concept that wolves live in a rigid structure of domination, where a male and female fight to lead the pack, became a widely known belief. The problem? It was wrong.

Decades later, after more in-depth studies of wolves in the wild, Mech saw that the hierarchical, dominance-based model was born of research conducted on animals in captivity. In nature, packs are made up of families, and in fact the “leaders” are the parents of the young.

“When I wrote my book in 1970, everything we knew came from observations of wolves that were not related, but confined together. After years of field research, it became clear that the concept of ‘alpha wolf’ was wrong,” explains Mech, a senior scientist at the United States Geological Survey and adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota.

In 1999, to correct this equivocal view, Mech published the article “Alpha Status, Dominance, and Division of Labor in Wolf Packs,” in which he argues that the term “alpha wolf” does not apply to wolves in the wild, as they do not dispute leadership—they just form families.

However, changing a concept rooted deep in popular culture is not a simple task. Even after the article was published, the idea persisted in the collective imaginary and was widely used by the media and in public speeches on human behavior.

More than twenty years on, this correction recently began to reach a wider audience, motivated by new media articles, such as one in the journal The New Yorker, and by the continued efforts of Mech and other researchers.

In an interview for Science Arena, Mech talks about the challenge of communicating scientific discoveries to the public, and how the media frequently takes its time to update obsolete concepts. He also draws attention to a recurring problem in science: the facility with which correlations are interpreted as causation.

“Science uses correlations because they help us gain a hypothesis, but we need to be cautious before treating them as absolute truths,” he warns.

Science Arena – When you realized that the “alpha wolf” concept was mistaken, how did you deal with this change?

My outlook changed in 1986 when I went to Ellesmere Island in the far north of Canada, where wolves are tolerant of people. I got the opportunity to live with wolf packs and observe them first hand, and that was when I realized that these groups were just families. The breeding pair were the parents of the offspring, rather than wolves who had fought to “get to the top.”

But we didn’t know that in 1970. It was only after many years studying wolves and analyzing their social patterns that it became clear that the concept of “alpha” was inappropriate. In 1999, I wrote an article proposing that we stop using this term, and instead call dominant wolves “breeding males and females,” or simply “pack parents.”

It took almost 30 years for this concept to be corrected.

Changing such a widespread concept takes time. The scientific community quickly accepted this change, and most academic articles ceased to use the term “alpha” in the 2000s. The media, however, took much longer to update its language.

In recent years, I have finally seen this correction reach a wider public, largely because certain key publications began to cover the matter.

When one or two popular publications started to talk about it, others followed, and the idea finally began to change in popular culture.

Why did it take so long for this idea to be reviewed?

Studying wolves up close in nature has always been difficult. In the beginning, most of the research was done by aerial tracking and radio collars, which allowed us to map their movements, but not to observe their social interactions in detail.

Only when I had the opportunity to live among wolves on Ellesmere Island did I really understand their social structure, but at that time the idea of “alpha wolf” was already deeply rooted in popular culture.

Even after I published my article in 1999, it would take more than 20 years for the media and the public to stop using the term “alpha,” and that’s not uncommon.

Science Arena – What was it that interested you in wolves? What made you decide to study them?

David Mech – Well, I started my interest in wildlife as a fur trapper, catching muskrats and mink and that type of thing. And I found that the carnivores, such as mink and foxes, were more challenging and interesting to me, and I decided that I would like to spend a career studying those kinds of animals.

As an undergraduate, I had an opportunity to be a research assistant on a black bear project. We captured the bears alive, then anesthetized and ear-tagged them to monitor their movements.

In that way, if a bear was hit by a car or hunted, we were able to learn more about their movements. I kept fur-trapping during the winters, but this time in nature, studying larger carnivores, such as the fisher [a large, weasel-like animal]. I spent several winters tracking them in the snow in the Adirondack Mountains [New York State].

Is that when you acquired experience in studying large carnivores in nature?

That’s right. So when a professor from another university needed a student to study wolves, he heard about me and selected me for the project, which became my PhD research. The study involved following wolves around through the snow using a small aircraft.

Our main objective was to determine how many wolves lived on a large island in Lake Superior, of some 210 square miles, roughly 500 square kilometers. The island also had moose, which were the main prey for the wolves. As well as counting the wolves, we needed to find out how many moose there were, and observe the interactions between the two—how the wolves caught the moose and how many they captured, things like that.

In 1970, you published the book that helped to popularize the idea of the “alpha wolf.” How did this concept emerge and spread culturally?

That was started in the 1940s by the German behaviorist Rudolf Schenkel, who wanted to study wolves. At the time he could only do that with animals in captivity, so he got wolves from different zoos and put them together, thinking that was a real pack. We later learned that a wolf pack in nature is really a family, but Schenkel didn’t know this.

When he studied them in captivity, he saw that they formed a rank order [dominance hierarchy], like the hierarchy of chickens. The top-ranking wolves were called “alphas.”

In that artificial environment, in which the wolves were not related, it made sense that there would be power struggles, and that the top-ranking individuals should be labeled as alphas.

Did things change when the research shifted to the natural environment?

When I started studying wolves in nature, I realized that the packs were in fact family groups. This changed my outlook on how we should describe the dominance hierarchy in the pack. But in 1970, I didn’t know that yet. In those days, the only basis we had for our knowledge on the social behavior of wolves was the work of Schenkel, so I wrote about that in my book.

The book became a bestseller and stayed in print until 2022—for 52 years. All that time, people carried on using the term “alpha” to refer to the top-ranking members of a wolf pack.

How did you realize that the established view was wrong? Did that bother you?

I clearly remember the moment I realized that on Ellesmere Island. My first thought was: “Wow.” Then I realized that my own book had helped to spread this mistaken idea.

It was somewhat uncomfortable, because I knew that I would have to work hard to explain the shift. But science is a self-correction process, and I saw that it was my responsibility to clarify the issue.

This is something that can happen to any researcher: new discoveries can change what was previously accepted as the truth. What advice would you give to other scientists that could come across this in their careers?

I think that the more we can explain to the media that there are different ways of obtaining knowledge, the better public understanding will be about how science works. The most common way to do science, including in medical literature, is to do correlations.

However, each time we use a correlation we need to make it clear that correlation doesn’t necessarily mean conclusion, and much less, causation.

It’s very easy to jump to a conclusion from a correlation—this is a common fallacy that all humans have. Science uses correlations because, for certain types of study, they are more accessible and quicker to obtain. As a result, we see a lot of research based on this type of analysis.

Nevertheless, whenever we find a correlation we need to emphasize that other types of study are required, such as controlled experiments, to determine whether there is in fact a cause-and-effect relationship.

What is the importance of correlations in science?

The reason we use correlations is that they help to generate hypotheses. If we find a correlation, it makes sense to propose the hypothesis that it may reflect a causal relationship. But we can confirm that with other types of study.

The incorrect “alpha wolf” concept persisted for decades, until about two years ago, when certain popular publications started to correct it. This caused a chain reaction—one media outlet influenced the other.

Do you think that we are better prepared today to deal with shifts in scientific knowledge than 30 years ago?

Yes, I think we’re in better shape now. The COVID-19 pandemic helped the media and the public, in equal measure, to better understand how science works.

When research needs to be done quickly, as happened during the pandemic, it’s inevitable that recommendations change as new information emerges. This process showed people that science is dynamic. I think that, generally speaking, this has helped to improve science communication.

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“It was cool to watch the lecture,” says Pamplona, who has a PhD in pharmacology from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC). “But the slides were very ugly,” he recalls frankly.

At the time, Pamplona had just founded his first company, Mind The Graph, which offers visual communication services for researchers working in various fields of knowledge.

Nicolelis’s slides made Pamplona reflect and reach a conclusion: “The crisis is aesthetics,” he jokes. “Even a guy of that level, a world-famous researcher… His slides were ugly.”

Inspired not only by unappealing presentations like the neuroscientist’s, but also by the possibility of developing new products, accessing more resources, and disseminating science, Pamplona abandoned an important research position in the private sector, which he had taken after completing his doctorate at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Germany.

In an interview with Science Arena, Pamplona (who has founded four startups, sold two, and now works as a consultant and mentor for other founders, particularly in pharmacology and at companies developing go-to-market strategies for health products) talks about entrepreneurship and the role of visual communication in science communication.

Science Arena – What was the turning point in your life that pushed you toward entrepreneurship?

Fabrício Pamplona – Firstly, I felt a certain discomfort with the path of an academic career, especially in Brazil, where right from the start, you are already very close to the highest position you can reach. I also had a wide range of interests and I did not feel that university would be the right environment to develop them.

While I was doing my sandwich PhD at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in around 2007, a startup was created at one of the laboratories. I was impressed. For me it was a different professional approach for scientists, through which they can do cutting-edge research, develop products, and impact society. I came back to Brazil feeling like it was a career path with greater potential for return, and where I could have more freedom.

How did your scientific background help you in your journey to found a company in the field of visual communication?

I always liked communication—in fact, I almost applied to study journalism. The design thinking methodology for creating businesses and products was just emerging while I was still in the academic world. It got me interested in design and I was super curious about this new approach.

Infographics are something that have attracted me since I was a child, I read Superinteressante and Mundo Estranho [news magazines], and they influenced me a lot. Creating businesses has a lot to do with design thinking and lean startup, two methodologies for creating products and building businesses.

What do these methodologies involve?

They use ideas as hypotheses and test them with the target audience. You draw a conclusion from that test, refine the hypothesis, and develop the product based on the opinions of others. When I saw that, I thought, “that’s the scientific method!” If this is how a startup can be created, then I know how to create one.

I always suspected that a good scientist could be a good entrepreneur, but I decided to transition and go through this journey myself, because the logic was the same as scientific thinking.

Exemplos de templates, infográficos e slides desenvolvidos pela Mind the Graph | Imagens: mindthegraph.com

What are the main obstacles faced by researchers trying to visually communicate their work?

It is difficult to find creative ways to communicate abstract elements, such as molecules, or intangible concepts and thoughts. And even when you have an idea of how to do it, there is often a lack of resources. There is a shortage of skills in this area, so scientists typically seek out pre-produced options, such as existing templates and illustrations.

Mind The Graph took advantage of this, knowing that in the absence of skills, researchers will look for resources. We provide the resources so that they can put together a presentation and be able to communicate.

What I noticed, working with potential clients, scientists, and in my own experience, is that the available resources were not reliable. Google images are not necessarily correct, and most of the time you cannot use them due to copyright issues. When you find something you can use, every image is of a different style. When you combine them all together in one document, it looks ugly, it looks amateurish.

Why is it important for scientists to develop visual communication skills?

One thing is the question of personal branding, of recognition. But mainly it is because images speak louder than words, as the saying goes.

In science, where there is so much technical jargon and so many barriers to written communication, images are a way of summarizing things very quickly in a visually appealing and attractive way, so that the information can reach more people. It is a matter of commitment to the impact of research, especially outside academia.

Images created using artificial intelligence have taken over social media and AI tools are increasingly being used in the process of writing academic papers. What role do you believe AI will play in the visual communication of science?

Artificial intelligence can help scientists communicate visually, but it is being misused. The thing is that it is only intelligent to the extent that we give it intelligence.

I am a big believer in AI as a tool to get things done, but the instructions we give these tools need to be carefully crafted.

At Mind The Graph, we want to create images from text (prompts). The client will be able to create an image in our style, but which does not yet exist in the company’s library.

Humans are still needed to double-check the content. Robots do not yet do this in a way that can be considered scientifically reliable.

I believe that collaboration between intelligences is the best way to increase the scale of what we produce while maintaining a reliable standard.

Could this be the way to achieve my biggest dream, that people consume science as if they were reading a comic book?

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