Storytelling makes a successful scientist

Tell molecular virologist Ann Palmenberg you want to write a profile of her, and she’ll say, “About every year somebody comes in to do the same thing.” Ask her why, and she’ll say, “Because they like my stories.”

Stories, she explains, are essential to communicating science. “You want to make people aware of the relevance of what you’re doing. You want them to go, ‘Oh wow!'” To do this, she says, researchers need to distill their science down to terms a particular audience can understand; they must make it memorable. “So many students come in thinking they’ll succeed if they master the science,” she says. “But to be successful, you also have to communicate your science with people on their terms, not yours.”

Palmenberg excels at this type of communication. In fact, she says, “My single valuable talent in terms of teaching is that I can take a lot of seemingly unrelated pieces of information and bring them all together.” Basically, she draws comparisons between her research — disease-causing RNA viruses — and everyday experiences.

The viruses Palmenberg works with have RNA instead of DNA as their genetic make-up. “They’re fast and dirty and quickly cause disease,” she says. “They turn out to be the bad nasties in the universe of viruses.” These viruses can cause HIV, polio, Hepatitis A and the common cold. Despite their nastiness, Palmenberg says RNA viruses are easy to study.

“RNA viruses are packaged into very small particles,” Palmenberg says as she pulls a grapefruit-sized ball from her desk. Tugging on a three-foot long chain of beads inside the model, she says, “A strand of RNA fits snugly into this package.” Her point — there’s not a whole lot of room for extra genetic information. “When you go hiking in the wilderness, you don’t pack your featherbed and hair dryer. You strip down to the core of essentials,” she says. “That’s what the RNA virus brings with it.”

Because these viruses pack only necessary genetic items, Palmenberg says they’re much easier to study than DNA viruses, which tend to pack more amenities (i.e., genetic junk). Holding the RNA ball in the air, “There’s nothing in here that doesn’t do something biologically. So, if you want to know how genetic information encodes itself, this is the place to look.”

To put it another way, Palmenberg compares RNA and DNA to an office. “If you look in someone’s office and want to know what’s the most important thing he’s doing, you don’t look in the file cabinets; you look at the papers on the desk,” she says. “To find out how genetic information is encoded, you look at the active folders — RNA.”

Once Palmenberg has read all those “papers,” she rewrites them so that the virus no longer infects a cell. “I cut and paste genetic information to make mutations,” she explains.

By comparing her RNA virus research to hiking, office organization and word processing, a lay audience gets the gist. But, as you’d expect, the gist often excludes finer points. “There’s a huge level of biological subtlety in virology,” Palmenberg says. She admits that breaking down the science to make it understandable “is like somebody coming over here from China, eating at McDonald’s and thinking he’s had the American experience. Yes, he’s had some of it but he doesn’t get the whole texture of it.”