Towards the end of class today, the discussion took for an interesting turn as to whether the results of a clinical study could be properly conveyed back to the participants, or other (interested) individuals.
The class seemed to be split on whether the results could be properly conveyed towards a demographic that is perceived to be uneducated in genetics. Personally, I’m part of the half where I believe that information can be conveyed in a meaningful way towards the recipient who is interested in the results. There are plenty of avenues for this communication. One that popped into my head was the use of metaphors.
Earlier this year, I was enrolled in an English Language course where we studied how figurative language, especially metaphors, was used visually or textually in everyday life to convey meaning. For that course, we had a term paper and I had chosen to write it on a New York Times article, “A Family’s Shared Defect Sheds Light on the Human Genome”. A quick synopsis is researchers were able to trace the syndactyly limb anomaly to mutations in the topologically associated domains of the genome. When they unearthed this finding, the researchers communicated their findings via metaphors to ensure easy understanding and comprehension by the public.
My paper went on to deconstruct and analyze their metaphor by applying the concepts learned in that English class. I remember when I writing the paper that there is always a way to explain something to somebody. What’s important isn’t how detailed you are with the explanation, but whether that explanation, without conjecturing, makes logical sense to the recipient.
Link to the NY Times Article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/09/science/dna-tads.html
English Term Paper: