The months leading up to the 24th International C. elegans conference in Glasgow, Scotland had me busy preparing for both the conference itself and my preliminary exam. There was only a month between these events, so there wasn't enough time for conference anticipation to build. Traveling to Italy, Switzerland, and Germany for the two weeks preceding the conference to watch my brother win the gold medal in his shotput division at the Special Olympics World Games also eclipsed any excitement for the conference. I'm glad that I didn't come in with any expectations except that this conference would be bigger than the one I attended last year in Hamilton, Ontario. I'm glad because I will never forget the shock and awe I felt as I gazed out into the auditorium to see over 1400 people in attendance. Until that moment I considered C. elegans research to be a somewhat niche area of research since there are only three or four labs at Duke that use the organism. Seeing so many others involved in similar work gave me a new appreciation for our darling dauer.
Aside from the more popular areas of research surrounding the evolution, ecology, and genomics of the worm, I learned a lot about the C. elegans "connectome", the name given for the entirety of its nervous system. The fact that the C. elegans connectome represents one of the few nervous systems that are completely mapped out fascinates many within the field of neurology. This fact also intimidates people, because even though each neuron has its place, we still cannot predict the behavior of the worm with certainty. Despite this, the field remains full of neurobiologists dedicated to finding the key mechanisms driving neurological diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
The discussion of ideas and concepts that underlie the machinations of life is what originally drew me into academia. Identifying orderly patterns from the random chaos of existence was compelling in and of itself, but using this established order to combat the fears and anxieties of not knowing was and remains attractive. The group of people similarly dedicated to this endeavor also represented a safe space for me. As I have continued in my career as a scientist, it has also challenged me more, and fed into some of those same anxieties, more than I could have imagined.
As a quantitative biologist, I take knowing many of the field's conventions for granted. One particular faculty made me aware of this. His Swiss accent was thick, and as he was an experimental biologist, he did not speak about my project in the kind of jargon that I recognized. He asked a question about my work, and as I failed to adequately answer his question and he struggled to rephrase it for me, I started to get anxious. Luckily my advisor stepped in to explain the whole thing from scratch, but it was another lesson in science communication for me.
Communicating science, whether to a general audience or to a college, is a constant battle of slipping in and out of the diving suit of your own assumptions. When conducting science, you must fit snugly within this outer layer, threaded with jargon and axioms, in order to survive the plunge into the depths of discovery. When presenting science, you have to slowly swim to the surface (to avoid giving yourself and others the bends) and laboriously peel away what feels like a second skin. This process often results in getting hung up on the elbows and joints of the suit where the jargon clings tightest. I know that I will get better at it the more I do it, but while the process gets less difficult each time, it’s never easy or completely natural.
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