Some years ago, finding myself in a terrible snit about some prolonged and joyless experimentation, I thought that perhaps a career change might be in order. I was in my early twenties and had somehow strayed from my intended course of becoming Dustin Hoffman in Outbreak and chasing angry, Ebola-riddled febrile monkeys through the African jungle with a butterfly net. Instead of taking orders from Morgan Freeman and saving people from hypovolemic shock, I instead found myself hunched over a computer debating the intricacies of signaling peptides while escaped mutant fruit flies from the genetics lab down the hall circled my coffee mug and the beefy wet-dog stench of agar filled the air.

Realizing that I liked talking about science just as much - if not more - than I liked actually doing it, I talked to my supervisor about getting more involved in science communication. She was tremendously supportive and that discussion ultimately led to what has been a rather fruitful spare-time career in science media. "Spare-time" because, as you can see from my affiliation, I finally ended up with a job doing what I originally intended, provided you replace "chasing angry fever-monkeys through the African jungle" with "sitting in an office chair monitoring surveillance reports and watching H1N1 spread all over B.C."

Anyway, six or seven years, a few hundred newspaper and magazine articles and outreach talks, one CBC documentary series, one blog and a few radio interviews after that chat, I have finally reached the pinnacle of Canadian science communication - I have summited Mount Suzuki and have a one-off gig hosting The Nature of Things.  Do check it out, since it's a tremendously interesting episode about the exploits of forensic science researchers at Simon Fraser University. There's crime-fighting pollen, tiny bee detectives, and an underwater pig carcass that's revealing how bodies decay in aquatic environments (the phrase "crab bites" will never bring to mind a tasty party appetizer ever again).

Creating science television, be it the TNoT episode or an earlier series I did for CBC called Project X, is quite possibly one of the most entertaining jobs in the world. I've been stuffed in a human centrifuge and spun around at 5Gs, floated weightless in a parabolic flight, swallowed a radio thermometer pill and put on a treadmill in a heat chamber, done parkour on the banks of the Thames, trapped gators in Louisiana, and watched a pig be butchered for sale in rural Mexico.

It's also one of the strangest jobs in the world for a scientist to step into. In television, the audience's perception of your program's scientific authenticity depends not so much on your story, host or interview subjects, but rather whether or not you've lit the set in a convincingly CSI-esque fashion and whether you've got enough beakers filled with coloured liquids around the set.

Unlike the lab (which, by the way, features jaundice-worthy fluorescent lights and no coloured liquids whatsoever), in TVLand your lab coat is altered to fit perfectly, someone is constantly trailing you around brushing your hair and giving you a thorough once-over with the lint roller, and you get to do things over if you screw up.

This latter point is particularly helpful, as TVLand science requires all sorts of scripted actions that necessitate you doing exactly the right thing at exactly the right time under exactly the right light, and even the brightest of Nobel prizewinners would have a hard time getting some of these scenes straight.

By way of example, I once had to retrieve an Actual Live Baby from a crib, walk with it from out behind a plastic sheet without getting tangled, cross the studio floor, hit the correct mark, and finally deposit the Actual Live Baby into a kiddie pool filled with dirt, all in 4-inch heels, without breaking my eyeline to camera, and without so much as a peep from my neonatal co-star. This is not something you learn to do in grad school.

Now, while teaching future scientists how to deliver a line convincingly, catch the light nicely, and not drop one's infant co-star aren't likely ever going to be taught in a fifth-year seminar course, there are some lessons to be learned from the world of television about how scientists can communicate effectively.

First, TV is all about the soundbite. If you're going to be interviewed about your work, be it for TV, print, or new media, it pays to have a few soundbites already prepared. Be ready to explain your work, why you're doing it, and what its relevance and impact are, all in two or three sentences or less.

Next, TV writing is a shining example of simplicity. If you transcribed the evening news from radio or television and offered it up in written form, it would look as if it had been scripted by a breviloquent Neanderthal. "Stock market crash. Ugg no like. Ugg lose money." You don't have to aim for quite this level of simplicity, but a good rule is that when explaining a scientific concept, pretend as if you were explaining it to someone at a bar. Use functional descriptions instead of specialized terminology (for example it's beer, not a malted Hordeum vulgare fermentation end-product), use real-world analogies and metaphors where possible, and avoid symbols or acronyms.

Another bit of television wisdom was passed on to me many years ago by a producer friend, who said that in TV, if you say a duck, you'd better show a duck.  What he meant by this was that if you find yourself in the kitchen peeling potatoes and listening to the 6:00 news when the newscaster suddenly stops and declares that an angry fever-monkey is wielding a butterfly net and chasing Dustin Hoffman through the streets of downtown Los Angeles, odds are you're going to drop the potato and rush to the other room because you want to see the footage. No footage, no happy. This is why even if the angry monkey grabbed the news guy's camera and flung it at Dustin, destroying the footage in the process, the producer of that newscast is still going to dig up at least something to show, even if it's a quickly-crayonned picture of an angry monkey-teddy-dog-thing drawn by the anchorwoman's tot. 

This applies to science too. If you're giving a presentation or writing an article and you're talking about something that has a visual component or is best explained graphically, give your audience the visual instead of just talking about it.  

I firmly believe that if every scientist were to follow those three simple pieces of advice, we'd quite likely be rid of 80-90% of the egregiously bad PowerPoints of the world and indeed this has become my personal mission in science communication.  So after you've watched my Nature of Things episode, stay tuned for my fundraising telethon and call in your pledge to be a good science communicator. I'll send you a T-shirt with the angry monkey chasing Dustin Hoffman if you do.