Science Advocacy: Answers to the Key Questions
Why should I care about science advocacy? As scientists, we find questions that make us passionate and we meticulously seek answers. We communicate our science to other scientists, carefully describing our data in a way that provides new insights but does not over conclude. It is easy to get entirely consumed by this academic cycle of ask, answer, share, and repeat. We identify funding to support our work by describing its importance to groups of our peers, who then evaluate the quality of our experimental plans. It becomes easy to forget what comes before the funding and after the discovery. It is easy to forget that there are government officials, many of which have little scientific background, who decide how much money there is to be distributed and to which scientific areas. And once our discoveries are public, it takes various companies, healthcare systems, government agencies, and so-on to get those discoveries from our benchtop to real world impact. The Merriam-Webster diction