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Commun Biol
Commun Biol
Communications Biology
2399-3642
Nature Publishing Group UK London

39215201
6744
10.1038/s42003-024-06744-y
Q&A
Levelling the playing field of scientific knowledge using social media: a conversation with Brianna Bibel
30 8 2024
30 8 2024
2024
7 1066© Springer Nature Limited 2024
2024
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
In this Q&A, Brianna Bibel, also known as the Bumbling Biochemist, talks to the journal about how social media can be harnessed to relay scientific information to other researchers, while making it fun and accessible.

issue-copyright-statement© Springer Nature Limited 2024
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pmc Brianna Bibel

1) Tell us a bit about yourself and what you do.

I am a visiting Professor of Biochemistry at Saint Mary’s College of California, but I am perhaps better known as The Bumbling Biochemist, which is my alter ego for my blog, YouTube channel, and social media accounts where I try to make biochemistry fun and accessible for all. I don’t do it for monetisation. I just want to help people learn - I am fortunate to have had many educational opportunities and privileges, and I want to do my part to pay it forward and help other people learn biochemistry.

2) What made you start your social media platforms to teach different biochemistry techniques and concepts?

It all started in the summer after my undergraduate degree, in the lab of Jeffrey Sigman. I was mentoring a summer research student and, as a joke, I put a lab coat on as a cape and that was how the idea of the Bumbling Biochemist began. At the time, I was also trying to talk to my friends and family about biochemistry and what I was doing. I was very excited to let them know about my day-to-day work in the lab, but, without the science background, it was difficult for them to understand what I did and why I found it so exciting.

As a result, I started thinking about how I could make biochemistry seem fun to outsiders such as my parents, and get them to appreciate the field, using different analogies to get them to grasp the basic concepts. But at the same time, I also wanted to reach undergraduate students and researchers interested in the detail, and who might have been missing important information to fully understand certain biochemistry papers or lab techniques. So, in the end, my target audience are people with a science background, as I do give a certain amount of detail, but I give those details in a simple language, so you don’t need a complex background knowledge to understand.

3) How do you plan your content and how much time does it take?

Usually, my content is based on what I am doing in the lab at the time. There are moments when I get stuck on certain lab techniques and spend hours searching for details and information about how they work, so I can find out where things are going wrong. I want to relay that information I learn to other scientists to make it easier for them, so they do not need to spend all that time looking for that information.

The amount of time that goes into it really depends on the type of content. Often, I update and refine core content that I have built over the years. I included more general, longer content while I was in graduate school, as I had more time. Since then, content has moved on to shorter formats, and it is mostly about what I am doing in the lab at the moment. Now that I am teaching, I usually make pre-recorded videos for my students which I share with the world as well.

4) What do you think is the biggest barrier right now to access scientific knowledge for graduate students? And for the general public?

For graduate students, the biggest barrier is the luck of the draw. During your career, you learn the most from the people around you in the lab, the resources you have, the mentoring you receive, and that can be quite different from lab to lab. I consider that by providing these resources online, I help levelling the playing field a bit more for people that might not otherwise have easy access to essential information they need. For undergraduate students, the biggest barrier is the terminology, as they might not know the jargon yet. Therefore, I try to balance my content - simplifying the language but maintaining the details and concepts.

For the general public, while this might be a bit controversial, I feel the scientific content they obtain is often watered down and oversimplified. Moreover, oversimplifications can sometimes be used to sell products to the public. The second option to very watered-down information are textbooks or scientific papers, which are much more technical and difficult to understand. While simplified versions can be useful sometimes, it is difficult to find scientific information with an extra layer of detail but also without all the jargon.

5) What do you think institutions can do to facilitate accessibility to knowledge?

Science communication and science writing should be more present in the curriculum, to give scientists more training on how to get their ideas across to different audiences. In an ideal world, there would also be a network of “on call” scientists from different areas that you could contact to get help on specific details in order to save hours of time.

6) Do you think social media platforms can be employed to break down some of those barriers?

Social media is just a different way of communicating and getting your ideas across. I think there is some stigma around having lots of followers, and I used to have the fear it could look a bit unprofessional, but many people have reached out to me saying I have helped them out.

In the end, any way through which you can reach people is great, and social media has the advantage that people know you are a real person and see you along your journey, and your ups and downs. I want people to see that, too, as it is the reality of this career. I want to show them that they can also be a scientist and that it can be a really exciting life path.
