SeeMyScience: Explaining Our Published Papers

"You do what now?"

As a scientist, the most frequent comment I get when I tell people what I do is some variation of “I have no idea what that means, but it sounds important”. This was perfectly illustrated recently, in response to a link I posted on Facebook about a paper we published (Pictured Left).

Let’s be honest, many scientists suck at talking about their work in a way that people who are not scientists can understand. Part of this is the way we are trained to write: technical papers for science journal publication. However, as I said in a recent blog post, we need to do better. We need to talk about our science in a way everyone can understand. And it’s about time I put my money where my mouth is.

In the coming weeks, I will be posting a series that looks at the paper our lab group recently published about our work developing a treatment for Cancer Cachexia. In this series, I will be combing through the article, explaining what we do, why we do it, what we learn from the results, and how we decide what to do in the future.

EPA and Oxypurinol Treatment of Cancer Cachexia

• On the Topic of Animal Testing
• What is Cancer Cachexia?
• Why is the Muscle Gone? Altered Pathways in Cancer Cachexia
• Fighting Back - Why EPA & Oxypurinol?
• Growing Cachexia-Causing Cancer Cells
• Explaining treatment groups and ‘interventions
• Weight-loss and Muscle Mass
• What happened with Oxidative Stress?
• Was muscle mass being controlled?
• Putting it All Together
• Where to now?

“See My Science” aims to explain the science done by our group in a manner accessible to the public. The current series focuses on Vaughan VC et al (2012) Eicosapentaenoic Acid and Oxypurinol in the Treatment of Muscle Wasting in a Mouse Model of Cancer Cachexia. PLoS ONE 7(9): e45900. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0045900