Gale Scott’s Outstanding Piece of Lay Science and Medical Writing: “Scientists Discover Mechanism Involved in Breast Cancer’s Spread to Bone” — a Model of How It Should Be Done

© 2011 Peter Free

 

04 February 2011

 

 

This is how science writing for a lay audience should be done

 

Gale Scott’s medical science news release assumes no previous knowledge on the part of the reader, yet it doesn’t cut corners on scientific truth.

 

It’s one of the best pieces of writing of this kind that I have read.

 

Scott walks the reader through the researchers’ discovery, simultaneously explaining the necessary underlying human and molecular physiology, the medical pathology the researchers are trying to combat, and why the metastatic mechanics that the research team exposed are important to potential therapeutic interventions.

 

If we had more writers like Scott, American schools might be doing a better job of attracting people to science and retaining them there.

 

Perhaps not surprisingly, Scott is writing for Princeton University.  Making the complicated understandable is a mark of effortful intelligence.

 

 

Citation to Gale Scott’s article

 

Gale Scott, Scientists discover mechanism involved in breast cancer’s spread to bone, Princeton University: News at Princeton (03 February 2011)

 

 

Citation to the research itself

 

Nilay Sethi, Xudong Dai, Christopher G. Winter and Yibin Kang, Tumor-Derived Jagged1 Promotes Osteolytic Bone Metastasis of Breast Cancer by Engaging Notch Signaling in Bone Cells, Cancer Cell, doi: 10.1016/j.ccr.2010.12.022 (03 February 2011)