Peter Doherty

Top of Their Game — In-Game Learning

Bob: Hello and welcome to Top of Their Game, the show where we speak with the people making communications clearer, fairer, and just plain better. I'm your host, Bob Milstein, a lawyer and plain language trainer, practitioner, and advocate. I'm very excited that our guest today is one of the world's great communicators: Laureate Professor Peter Doherty. Trained initially as a veterinarian, Peter is an Australian immunologist and pathologist who, with Rolf Zinkernagel of Switzerland, received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1996 for discovering how the body's immune system distinguishes virus-infected cells from normal cells. That discovery changed the scientific understanding of the immune system and continues to be used by researchers and doctors worldwide in designing vaccines and understanding autoimmune and other viral diseases, and even cancer. The Nobel award also led to an increasing involvement in public science communication — both in his own field of viral pathogenesis and immunity, and in topics related to environmental sustainability and climate change. After working on infection and immunity for 60 years, he moved to Emeritus status at the University of Melbourne in July 2023, though he remains patron of the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, based in Melbourne. Peter is the author of many books, including The Beginner's Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize: A Life in Science, Sentinel Chickens: What Birds Tell Us About Our Health and the World, Pandemics: What Everyone Needs to Know, The Knowledge Wars, and An Insider's Plague Year. In today's interview, we pick Peter's very big brain on a wide range of communications-related issues, both in science and more broadly. And now, Professor Peter Doherty. Peter, thank you so much for joining us today.

Peter: Pleasure, Bob.

Bob: I wanted to start with some heavy-hitting questions about the Nobel Prize you won in 1996. When you got the phone call, did you think someone was pulling your leg?

Peter: I had always thought someone in the lab could pull my leg on this one, and I had a particular candidate I thought would be likely. But it quickly became apparent it wasn't a hoax, because the caller said, with a very clear Swedish accent, "This is Nils Ringertz from the Nobel Foundation." He also said, "You have ten minutes to tell your family this has happened" — this was 4 o'clock in the morning, because we were in the United States — "and after that you'll start getting calls from all over the world." That reinforced it wasn't a hoax, because when you're being called by Reuters, talkback radio, Bogotá, the Sydney Morning Herald, and you're living in Memphis, Tennessee, you know something has happened.

Bob: Absolutely. And you were invited to the ceremony. I have to say, you don't strike me as a regular wearer of the tuxedo — particularly the white bow tie variety. Was that a purchase or a rental?

Peter: Like most scientists, I'd never worn white tie and tails. Being Australian, I'd worn black tie quite a bit in my younger years, but living in the US that was almost something you didn't do. We rented the tux, and I went back on three separate occasions afterward for pre-Nobel public communication events, and every time I rented. It was just much more convenient.

Bob: Has that experience exposed you to a network of Nobel Prize winners you interact with over the years?

Peter: To a very limited extent. There's no formal network of Nobel Prize winners — we don't have airport lounges dedicated to us or anything of that sort — but we do get to know each other a bit, particularly people in your own field, your own class of whatever year it was. I also got to know some more broadly through public communication work — Joe Stiglitz, for instance. There's an annual event in Lindau, Germany, that brings a lot of Nobel Prize winners together to talk, initially more to high school students, latterly more to university and graduate students. I've stopped going, though — I'm 85 now and not travelling much.

Bob: Last Nobel question: the medal. Do you keep it somewhere special, and do you ever bring it out for show-and-tell?

Peter: The medal itself is in a bank safety deposit. It's worth in excess of 250,000 US dollars — they've sold for more than a million. We have several replicas that the Nobel Foundation sold us, and I sometimes show those, but I think the ones I've got left may be in the bank vault too.

Bob: You mentioned your role in public communications, which will be a big focus of our chat. But I wanted to take you back to the days of young Peter Doherty. What first sparked your interest in science? Was there a mentor who set you on your path?

Peter: I didn't have a specific mentor. I had the example of an older cousin, a medical graduate, very bright, who'd gone into public health — Ralph Doherty. His group isolated the Ross River virus and tied it to the disease it causes, so he was well known and prominent in medical circles. I had that example. He was 13 years older than me. I thought I'd like to do something meaningful, but I didn't want to be a medical doctor — I was very young, 16, a year younger than most classmates, and I didn't have much empathy at that stage; I didn't want to spend my life listening to sick people. So I decided instead to study veterinary science and work toward improving food production, since there was a lot of discussion at the time about how we'd get into trouble feeding people. I didn't realize that pets and productive animals also have owners, which can be no less difficult than sick people. So I trained as a veterinarian intending to go into research on diseases of domestic animals — which I did for ten years. I'm actually the only person with veterinary training to have been awarded a Nobel Prize.

Bob: And that prize was awarded jointly to you and Rolf Zinkernagel in 1996.

Peter: Correct. We worked together at the Australian National University in Canberra. After ten years in veterinary research, I decided I needed to learn some basic immunology. I was supposed to come back to Melbourne to join the CSIRO, but decided to spend a couple of years at ANU learning about the new immunology of T cells. While I was there, Rolf Zinkernagel arrived as a recent medical graduate to learn the same thing, and we happened to be put together in the same small lab. We worked together for about two and a half years, and that led to a Nobel Prize more than 20 years later.

Bob: And one year after receiving the Nobel Prize, you were offered Australian of the Year and accepted.

Peter: Yes. Australian of the Year was awarded differently then than now — it wasn't a competition between state candidates; a committee in Sydney chose someone each year. I got a call in Memphis just before Christmas, telling me I'd been named 1997 Australian of the Year. That was a surprise, partly because I didn't know what it was, and I asked, "Can I put it off a year?" because I had an extraordinarily busy year ahead — that's what happens after a Nobel Prize, you're the flavor of the year the year after. They said, "Not if you ever want to come back to Australia." So I took it on, and we went out and spoke in all the capital cities, in town halls and all sorts of venues, on radio and television, and found I was reasonably good in the public space. That started a second career in public science communication, with absolutely no training whatsoever.

Bob: So, as you've indicated, you've worked across several worlds — research, public education, writing. How have those worlds informed one another in your approach to communicating?

Peter: I learned the importance of clarity, and very quickly the absolute importance of never talking down to anybody or humiliating anybody. If you're giving a lecture and someone asks a question that seems quite ridiculous, putting them down in that format will immediately lose your audience. I also learned to talk to people, to look at people during a lecture rather than just turning to a PowerPoint slide, and to use plain language wherever possible.

Bob: We'll talk quite a bit about plain language, but I wanted to ask about the scientist's role as an explainer. Do great scientists also need to be great explainers?

Peter: Some great scientists are great explainers, some are not — those who aren't should walk away from it. A lot of great explanation in science is done by professional science communicators, people like Robin Williams and so forth, who fulfill a very important role. But it's also important for scientists interested in public communication, and who have some flair for it, to be involved. It takes some of your time, and you have to think outside the framework you'd normally use. Speaking to a scientific audience requires care with language — not just specialized terms, which in immunology are really quite horrific for the public, but also assumptions we make in science that aren't general in the community. For instance, the idea of probability and relative risk is central to scientific thinking but not necessarily familiar in the public space — even though people will wear a seatbelt because they think they're safer, which really is just that equation.

Bob: That links to broader challenges of community literacy in general and scientific literacy in particular. Do you see a future where the focus shifts from giving scientists communication skills to helping the community engage more informedly with difficult concepts?

Peter: We've been hoping for that for decades.

Bob: Yeah.

Peter: We assumed greater general education would lead us there, give people understanding, and we'd be living in a more sophisticated, aware world. That hasn't necessarily happened — people haven't become more sophisticated in a general sense, as far as I can see. I learned no biology at school, though I've spoken about biology for years. So I don't think we can rely on general education. There are great science teachers, and many people entering science speak about the role of a good high school or even primary school science teacher, but we can't rely on that alone. We need a better mechanism for engaging people — particularly on the arts side, people can be automatically turned off whenever the word "science" is mentioned. Most bookstores, I'd guess, have a bigger astrology section than a science section.

Bob: As part of my due diligence, I looked at previous interviews, including one for the Oxford Vaccines Group earlier this year, where you talked about young, pale-skinned Peter Doherty in the Northern Australian sun having to spend a lot of time indoors. You said one upside was exposure to some fairly heavy-hitting writing early on, which your peers and junior scientists tend not to get. Can you say more?

Peter: Yes. I'm driven by curiosity, still am — a bit unusual at my age. One of my senior colleagues once remarked, "All good scientists remain perpetual adolescents," and I think that's true to some extent. I lived indoors more than I'd have liked because I got sunburned so easily — there were no sunscreens or modern sunblocks, only zinc cream, which made you look like Marcel Marceau in white. So I spent more time inside. I was also very embedded in classical music, because my mother was a classical pianist, and I read a lot — crime novels my dad brought home from his workplace library, and paperbacks I bought myself: Camus, Sartre, Aldous Huxley, alongside Ernest Hemingway at the same time. Very different types of writing and cultures. I was also learning French, the only foreign language I've had real contact with, which was important for interesting me in a different culture and actually got me to use English grammar better. I value greatly that we studied some Shakespeare and some great books at school too.

Bob: Do you think that early reading equipped you with communication skills others in your field might lack?

Peter: That's possible. I think I'm a bit unusual having read so widely, though many great scientists read a lot and diversely — at least of our generation, and your generation, which is well behind mine; a generation in science is about ten years. One of the predictors of excellence in the biological sciences is more a facility with language than just passing science courses.

Bob: You mentioned curiosity has driven you and continues to. How do you keep that spark alive today?

Peter: Basically by writing. I'm a writer, I've always been a writer. I briefly considered journalism as a high school student — I would have applied for a scholarship at the Brisbane Courier Mail, which became a Murdoch newspaper. I think by now I'd be retired, or dead, and probably an alcoholic if I'd gone that road. Instead I decided not to follow my natural instinct toward literature and tried to do something practical — a bit of a Hemingway model: get out there and actually do something. That's why I chose veterinary science.

Bob: I mentioned that Oxford Vaccines Group talk — you also recommended that young scientists write early and often. What did you have in mind?

Peter: I tell any trainees or young scientists that it's extremely important to engage very much with the data you're generating as you do experiments. With biology, because it's so complex — having evolved rather than been designed — you often get unexpected results, so you need to pull that data together as you work and start writing about it, because the process of writing forces you to confront what's in front of you. I'm not unique in saying this — the other Australian Nobel laureate in immunology, Sir Macfarlane Burnet, back in 1960, said the same thing: that he thought things through properly once he started writing. So my advice is to develop a facility with English if you can, and write early and often — and be prepared to discard it. That's more difficult for people who don't have English as a home language, though some of the best writers of scientific English weren't brought up speaking it — they learned it later, and as a consequence, learned grammar properly.

Bob: Quite apart from its value to the work itself, I imagine writing and communication skills matter for other reasons too — attracting funding, gaining interest from agencies, politicians, or the general public.

Peter: Yes. The institutions I worked in early on were government laboratories, then the Australian National University, which was "hard-money funded" — we didn't have to write grants. But then I went to the US, to the Wistar Institute and the University of Pennsylvania, where I had to write research grants. Very good advice I was given early is: when writing a research grant, imagine it's being read by someone who's a scientist but not in your field, sitting in a warm bath sipping a martini — unlikely now, since they'd be reading on a computer. The point is it needs to be accessible, generally accessible language, not highly specialized, and it needs a theme running through it. So you need to think systematically about how you write. It's not necessarily the best scientists who are good at getting research funding — it's the people who think things through and write well.

Bob: There are a lot of very smart people who aren't clear writers — who subscribe to a writing voice that impedes accessibility. Is that something scientists are tempted toward because they think that's how they need to sound?

Peter: It can be the case. At institutions I've worked in, we've had different lecture series — some where specialists talk to specialists, but also, for instance, a weekly prestigious lecture where we ask the lecturer to be general enough that people trained in clinical medicine, psychology, or nursing can understand. It's disappointing how often lecturers give a talk directed strictly at their peers. Some scientists find it very hard to step into that space of general communication.

Bob: A little while ago you touched on plain language communication. I wanted to chat about an international initiative of potentially immense value: the International Organization for Standardization released part 1 of the International Plain Language Standard some years ago. It's multi-part — part 2 covers legal communications, and part 3, not yet released, will deal with science communication. Do you see value in disseminating that kind of resource to today's and tomorrow's scientists, and what limitations might apply?

Peter: Of course it's good to put these general pointers out there. The problem is getting scientists to actually engage — unless you require formal coursework in science communication, which may be difficult. Though most science training now, even in cultures like ours that don't require coursework for PhD trainees, will require candidates to learn how to write a research grant, so it could be useful for that. But having guidelines is only useful when you actually start to write — that's when you learn anything.

Bob: Yes.

Peter: I think you have to do it, and it needs to be introduced by supervisors, with examples — though not all supervisors are good at it either. Still, it's good to have those standards out there, and to emphasize that the first question is always: what am I trying to communicate, why, and who am I trying to communicate with? That's absolutely central. I'm often asked to give a lecture without being told who the audience is, and I have to ask — specialists, general public, children? Because the audience determines how you communicate.

Bob: Reflecting that audience focus, the science writing standard is split — it distinguishes "science writing" from "scientific writing," the latter being peer-to-peer communication rather than public-facing.

Peter: Yes. A good example is the journal Nature — one of the most prestigious and oldest journals in the world. Its scientific articles can be very complex and quite opaque, even to other scientists. But it also has "News and Views," where an editor or science communicator takes the key message from a piece of science and puts it in plain language any well-educated person can read. So yes, we very much need that second part.

Bob: I got excited seeing that Nature's author guidelines suggest defaulting to active voice.

Peter: Yes, and that's kind of unusual for scientists — they don't necessarily think that way. Nature's scientific articles are so over-reviewed that what may start as nice, clear writing ends up very garbled by the time it's published. I have a bit of a quarrel with that — they're partly responsible for the inaccessibility of a lot of science writing, as far as I'm concerned.

Bob: You mentioned the opacity of some writing. Is that sometimes necessary and unavoidable, or are there ways to maintain precision while making the reading more engaging?

Peter: When I started in science, papers often had one, two, or three authors. Now, because of the complexity of modern science, a serious piece of work may have 20 or 30 authors, because different people command different technologies and approaches needed to solve the problem. So you get a multi-author paper that can read as though written by committee. Even if you get it clear, with a logical thought line, these papers, for the so-called prestigious journals, are often so over-reviewed they become garbled. Part of the problem is editors being unwilling to let scientists say clearly what they want to say — editors need to be able to say, "What this reviewer wants is fine, but we don't need it for this publication." I think there are real problems in professional scientific writing and publication. Another is that many journals, particularly online ones, aren't respectable in any sense.

Bob: Are there other significant barriers to clarity in modern scientific writing?

Peter: The complexity is always a barrier. You don't write a modern science paper for a general readership, even if it's open access. I actually wrote a book about that, The Knowledge Wars, partly to explain how a scientific paper works and how to read it. It has a very formal structure in our field: abstract, introduction, results, materials and methods, and discussion. In the discussion, ideally you should be able to speculate — "what if?" — but an inexperienced reader may take a speculative point from the discussion as gospel. Not many people read that book, and not many are all that interested. In the general public, people accessing science can do it exactly the wrong way — trying to find science that supports what they already believe, cherry-picking papers to make their case. That's exactly backward, and it's toxic. What you're trying to do in science is find out what's right — let the data instruct you.

Bob: During the pandemic you were one of the most trusted scientific voices in Australia. Looking back, what communications lessons did that leave you with?

Peter: One thing is the importance of saying we're scientists — not priests, popes, or gods. We're trying to tell people our best understanding of what's happening, and that understanding can change quickly with new results. It's hard for people to realize someone prestigious in a field isn't necessarily an authority figure telling them what to think — I'm trying to explain or show what we know. That's a difficult message, especially for politicians who want absolute answers to act on. Otherwise it's the usual message: talk to people with respect, engage at a level you think they'll understand, and engage with the particular community. I did an enormous amount of Zoom, radio, and talkback radio — heavy-metal radio and all sorts — and had some pretty good experiences. You don't make assumptions about any community — you listen and react to what they're asking. We have to avoid assumptions: don't assume that because someone listens to talkback radio, they're anti-science or not smart. They may be very smart.

Bob: I know you went into your pandemic social-media engagements with a lot of good will and good faith, but I'm conscious that wasn't always a two-way street — you got some vigorous opposition, to put it lightly.

Peter: I was very active on Twitter, which was terrific during the early phases of the pandemic — scientists used it to talk to each other, and you got respectful dialogue with people on the whole. Then I think Elon Musk bought it and damaged it irrevocably, and after that I started getting an enormous amount of abuse — from people or bots, you don't know which. That's one reason I've gone off social media; I can no longer spend the time. That's bad, because people like me should be on social media, but it can drain your whole life away, and I've got limited time left and better things to do — namely writing. So I've gone off it and I'm simply writing long-form books now, which is much more satisfying and worthwhile. But we need young people active on social media — I think YouTube is a very good way of communicating, and we need a lot of good animations, because scientific concepts are hard to explain in words but can be explained easily with good animation.

Bob: Gets back to the definition of plain language communication — it's not just words —

Peter: Yeah.

Bob: — it's not just structure, it's design.

Peter: Visual is extremely important, and a lot of us work through a visual world, increasingly so with modern communication and entertainment. So the more we can make things visual, the better we do getting the message across to the general community.

Bob: I'm not sure I should mention this, Peter, but I can't let our social-media discussion pass without reminding you of the challenges of distinguishing a Twitter feed from a Google search.

Peter: Yes — one reason I ended up with a large number of followers is that I mistakenly tweeted, "What are the opening hours for Dan Murphy?", the local liquor store — I thought I was putting it into Google. That was actually good, because it made people realize that this "Prof" guy — the handle my publisher had set up, with "Prof" at the beginning, which was a mistake — is just like everybody else and makes mistakes.

Bob: Yeah, if the Australian public wasn't already in love with you, that sealed the deal in my view. Huge boost for everyone.

Peter: Yes.

Bob: Okay, let's talk about your career as a writer — for both research journals and general readers. What changes in your mindset when you switch audiences?

Peter: You decide who you're writing for, what you want to write about, and how best to put it out there and why. You try to write in as plain language as possible. Even so, I was still on a learning curve writing books about science — even my attempts at the most accessible language were still very difficult. Good science writing is extremely hard to do, and good scientist communicators should be greatly valued. David Attenborough, for instance, is extraordinary, but he's not a writer — he works visually with a big production team. I do think these people have to be highly valued.

Bob: Do you have a particular writing process?

Peter: I just sit down and write. You don't have to have it all clear in your mind before you start — it clarifies as you write, and then you edit. Don't put hedges around it — don't say, "I have to have a proper writing room, my office isn't set up properly." You can write in an airport departure lounge, on a plane, just about anywhere. Don't hedge — start to write.

Bob: When you've done your own editing, I assume you also hand the manuscript to an external professional editor.

Peter: Yes, my wife.

Bob: Oh.

Peter: Penny. Extremely critical editor. And once you submit a book, the publisher will either have someone look closely at it, or send it to a professional in the field to comment. That happened more early on; latterly I found people pretty much accepting of what I've written.

Bob: Are there science writers you admire, or even seek to emulate?

Peter: Not really — I haven't spent a lot of time reading other people, because I don't want to write like them or copy someone. Macfarlane Burnet, from a much earlier era when people read science books more commonly, was a wonderful writer. Sir Peter Medawar, who shared the Nobel Prize with Burnet, was also wonderful, wrote with great clarity. So I've read them a bit, but basically I've just done my own thing.

Bob: What's the hardest part of translating complex scientific ideas for non-specialist audiences in your books?

Peter: It's not so much the books, since I assume the reader is reasonably well-educated and capable of handling complex ideas — that is, in fact, the readership. But I did a weekly blog for our institute's website, called Setting It Straight, through COVID — I wrote 120 pieces week after week, then ran out of steam, and the science wasn't moving fast enough to sustain it. There I tried some fanciful examples, had a bit of fun, wrote things a bit outrageous — which normal scientists wouldn't normally do.

Bob: When you mention a bit of fun — anyone who's seen you present will notice you use humor freely. Is that deliberate, or just how your brain is wired?

Peter: That's who I am. A lot of good communicators have some humor to them — some don't; I don't know if David Attenborough's all that humorous, quite frankly, but he's a great communicator. It's a bit my background — I'm a quarter Irish and think I've got a bit of that Irish blarney. I was also raised Methodist, an evangelical religion at that stage with a lot of lay preachers, so I'm a bit of a lay preacher too.

Bob: You've said you assume whoever picks up one of your books is reasonably intelligent and motivated. But when writing, do you have a particular reader in mind — a curious teenager, a policymaker, someone who thinks they don't get science but would like to?

Peter: Not necessarily — I try to write for people who don't necessarily engage with science but have some clarity in mind, without targeting it specifically. One colleague has suggested we write a book for children together; I'm not sure I'd be good at that, though some people I know are — an Irish colleague, a very good and much younger scientist, has written wonderful science books, including some for children.

Bob: You've mentioned that getting the right person to do science communication often means going to someone substantially younger than you or me.

Peter: Absolutely. Particularly in visual media, we need to get away from the aging male figure and toward a much more diverse group of enthusiastic, often young presenters — and you are seeing more of this. Most young people aren't watching television now; they're on TikTok, YouTube, and so forth. I think all institutions should have an office set up specifically to do social media. It's just so important.

Bob: One other thing that may be important is the role of generative AI in communications. Do you have a view on its desirability and utility for scientific communication, peer-to-peer and lay-facing?

Peter: Bob, I really haven't thought about or engaged with it. I'm not using it — that's for the next generation, as far as I'm concerned. When I do a Google search now, the first thing that comes up is an AI summary. That can be useful, but I've found times where I know something exists and want to find it, and the AI summary won't acknowledge it — the search seems constrained to support what's in the summary. I'm very suspicious of it. I'm afraid AI is going to narrow our thinking substantially, and that would be very bad for science.

Bob: Why do you think that?

Peter: Because it's taking what's out there, and what's out there depends on what's put in. How does it gauge quality? We have a lot of people putting out sheer disinformation in areas like climate science.

Bob: What's one thing people often get wrong about scientists?

Peter: People tend to think of scientists as cold, hard, intellectual types, isolated, with some sort of god complex. Scientists are just like anybody else, except they obey a certain set of rules requiring them to try to tell the truth. A good laboratory of people who like each other is actually a very nice social environment — they party, they climb mountains, they do dangerous things, they go surfing. Jim Allison, a Nobel laureate in my sort of area, has his own rock band. Scientists are just people — not weird, not isolated. It's intense and hard-working at times, but a very satisfying life. Discovering something nobody has ever known before, in human history, is pretty satisfying. In literature, almost anything you say has been said before — Shakespeare, Homer, Jane Austen said it. But in science you can say things nobody's ever said, because nobody knew. That may only be of interest to a few people, but sometimes it's actually quite important. That's why we get Nobel Prizes.

Bob: Another feature the public assumed, very prevalent during the pandemic, is that scientists are the font of truth — and as soon as that truth changes, because the data leads to a new insight, people lose faith in science, when actually that's what science does.

Peter: That's what science does — we're constantly reinventing, constantly probing. One way you make a reputation in science is by disproving something everyone's always believed. So I always try to present things as "our best understanding is." But people don't like that — they want certainty from experts. I never use the term "expert," never use the term "truth." We're not presenting absolute truth. If you want absolute truth, go to religion.

Bob: So how do you describe yourself? Not a hobbyist.

Peter: I'm an investigator. An experimentalist.

Bob: When you read for pleasure, does it influence how you write or think about science, or are they mutually exclusive?

Peter: Not mutually exclusive. Some of the best crime fiction writers, to my mind, write some of the clearest, most readable stuff you can get.

Bob: Anyone in mind?

Peter: Ian Rankin, the Rebus character — Scottish fiction writer. There's a whole lot. I read a lot of crime fiction for relaxation — they're investigators, pick up great plots, often very well written. Literary writing can be rather inaccessible at times. I'm at the moment struggling a little with maybe the most inaccessible writer in human history: James Joyce.

Bob: James Joyce.

Peter: Ulysses. You need a companion to even get into it. People love his writing, particularly graduates of American EngLit programs, I think because it's revolutionary — nobody's tried to write like it since. It's basically a kind of poetry, a stream of thought that hasn't been edited to translate into language or communication.

Bob: How are you finding it?

Peter: Kind of intriguing. I'm reading it because I'm writing a book about being on the Celtic fringe, given my name, which is very old Irish. I've had a lot of interaction with Ireland since the Nobel Prize, simply because of my name — and if I walk into a pub in Dublin, I look Irish. As long as I don't open my mouth, I can pass for Irish — I've got that washed-out pink-and-grey look that's very classic. And a certain unreliability of character as well.

Bob: Putting aside any Joycean linguistic idiosyncrasies, do you have any language pet hates, or words you love?

Peter: One word I absolutely loathe in science — and scientists use it all the time — is "revealed." We're not about revealed truth; that's for priests. Don't reveal — we find, we discover maybe. We're not into revealed truth. I loathe it. I've got irrational loathings in English.

Bob: Don't we all?

Peter: I think we probably do.

Bob: Peter, if you had to write a one-sentence manifesto for science comms, what would it be?

Peter: Know who you're talking to. Be clear and be concise.

Bob: Audience and purpose — always comes back to that. Across your global career, spent in large chunks in Memphis and Australia, have you noticed differences in how scientists from different countries communicate, or how audiences respond?

Peter: Not really. I think science is a universal culture and a universal language. If you look at the recommendations of scientists — even the people who set off the nuclear bomb, many of them later horrified, some going into biology — the message is always: we must work together across the planet. That's science. We're dealing with global and universal realities, so isolationism isn't for us. You can get a bit of different flavor, but basically we're all playing by the same rules, no matter the culture or language.

Bob: What do you think are the biggest challenges for science communicators in the next decade — misinformation, reader attention span?

Peter: We're living in a world with active, virulent, evil disinformation — put out for years, for instance, by fossil fuel companies, doing enormous damage. That's when science and money go to cross-purposes — think of climate science. Science has generally made things better for people, healthier — Australians live 14 years longer on average than in 1939, which is due to modern medical science. But with climate change, people are being told they have to change the way they do things — some of their toys may have to be taken away, and we don't like that.

Bob: What toys did you have in mind?

Peter: Gas-guzzling four-wheel drives taking kids to preschool, for instance. Why do we need these things? Because we feel we have the right to. But we're doing a lot of damage. There are places in Australia where you need a big diesel four-wheel-drive truck, but you don't need it around the city of Melbourne.

Bob: Peter, scientists wanting to engage with the public often do it through journalists. How can scientists and journalists work together more effectively, in your view?

Peter: I don't normally work with journalists. We have very few professional science journalists in Australia now, and fewer across the planet — the New York Times still has a good panel. I was part of an initiative called The Conversation, which started at the University of Melbourne and has gone global. The model is that people write about their own field, 800 to 1,000 words for general readership, and it goes through an editorial process with professional journalists who put it in plain language if needed, add good illustrations, and so on. The content is made available free to any newspaper or publication as long as they don't change it. I think it's a great initiative and we need more of it. Working with a science journalist is fine, but there are so few, and even then a subeditor may cut the content in a way that makes it nonsense, or put an inappropriate title on it. So I'm very wary of communication through conventional media other than straight to air.

Bob: And I know from your own experience you've had engagements with journalists some distance off being science journalists.

Peter: The greatest number of journalists in Australia are footy journalists. They can be fine people, but they want to put everything in terms of competition and winning, because that's how they're constrained to think, and that's not particularly useful. Not that all sporting journalists are terrible — I've had a lot of contact with Gideon Haigh, a wonderful sports writer —

Bob: Great writer.

Peter: — and he thinks very broadly. Gideon's terrific.

Bob: Peter, we're almost at the end of our time, but I wanted to conclude with a couple of quick questions. If you could give one piece of advice to a young researcher about writing and speaking clearly, what would it be?

Peter: Write often and early. I used to say, "Try to think you're explaining it to your grandmother," until one young person said, "My grandmother's a nuclear physicist." That's the main piece of advice I'd give.

Bob: Could you give one word that describes your writing style?

Peter: I don't know — I think I should leave that to someone else.

Bob: All right. If you weren't a scientist or a vet, what would you be doing?

Peter: I have no idea. Going into university, because my family didn't have money, I was in for two scholarships — one to become a veterinarian at the state Department of Primary Industries, the other to be an engineer in the Postmaster-General's Department. I did a very bad math paper, so I became a vet. If I'd done a good math paper, I probably would have been an engineer.

Bob: If you could have dinner with any writer, living or dead, who would it be?

Peter: I've thought about that — two authors I'd love to have dinner with, and I knew one of them: Seamus Heaney. The other is Les Murray. Both poets. You could add Jane Austen and Shakespeare and a few others.

Bob: Yes. Coffee, tea, or, in light of your Dan Murphy Google search, something stronger when you're writing?

Peter: I gave up drinking about two or three years ago because I wasn't sleeping well, and I need my sleep at this age. Can have the occasional glass of bubbly. I have one strong coffee a day, a couple of cups of tea. You need to stay away from stimulants as much as you can, but I do need my daily coffee.

Bob: Final question. If one word could define your legacy as a communicator, what would it be?

Peter: One word might be difficult. Interesting!

Bob: Well, we are living in interesting times, are we not?

Peter: Yes, yes, I like that. I'd like my epitaph to be "buy my books" — but every author's like that.

Bob: Well, Peter, it's been an absolute pleasure and a privilege to spend this time talking with you about your career, your insights, your experience, your stories. I'm so grateful to you. Thank you very much.

Peter: Pleasure, Bob.

Bob: For those hearing Peter for the first time in this interview, I think you'll understand why he's globally celebrated as a spectacular communicator. It was a little surprising to learn his first passion was writing — something he's now returned to in earnest over recent years. And, of course, he reminds us that the process of writing is, for scientists and others, the process through which we start to think and sort out our ideas. To learn more about Peter's work, be sure to check out our show notes. Top of Their Game has been brought to you by In-Game Learning: the most fun you'll ever learn. Visit ingamelearning.com and see just how much fun online plain language training can be. If you enjoyed today's episode, share it with a colleague, leave us a review, or — better yet — rewrite something terrible and send it to us. We'll love you forever, and so might your target readers. I'm Bob Milstein, and until next time, go forth and clarify.

Peter Doherty

Episode 3: Peter Doherty