To be honest, I am not exactly an impostor. I am just not a scientist. But I do love science. And I often write about it. Is it a crime? I don’t think so. You might as well ask me, given that I am not a scientist, what exactly am I doing here? After all, this is an online publication written for and by young scientists. Well, the answer can be as simple as that: I love the stories on science probably as much as you do.

Science can only exist because of language. The best ideas on Earth would never be understandable, and hence able to influence people, if their authors were not able to put them into words, images, models or any other mean of representation. It takes narratives to propagate knowledge – narratives, good ones.

Usually we do not stop to think about it because we take language for granted. Since we are newborn babies, we effortlessly learn more sophisticated means of communication. Our ability to represent our ideas is so inherently human that it is easy to forget that this treasure – the ability to write and speak – is the very thing that distinguishes us from all other forms of life. Somehow in the evolution process, we acquired language. And possibly the same mutation that gave us the power of speech also paved the way to science itself.

The novelist Simon Mawer wrote that “scientific discovery is often a matter of language”. In his book Gregor Mendel: Planting the Seeds of Genetics (2006), Mawer argues that Mendel was partly a victim of the language of his time. The Austrian friar discovered so much about the mechanisms of inheritance in his garden of peas, his writings clearly imply that he guessed the existence of a unit that we today we call “gene”, but this awesome discovery lacked the proper language to be conveyed. As Simon Mawer puts it:

 “Why did the world not recognize Mendel’s work as we now do? Partly it was simply that the scientific climate of the time was not ready to accommodate his new ideas or the implications behind them. Scientific discovery is often a matter of language. Sometimes – particularly in physics – it is the language of mathematics, but in biology it is usually the language that we employ in everyday communication. (…) You cannot easily talk about a gene unless you have the word for it, and the word corresponds more or less exactly to something that is actually there. On the other hand, it is difficult to discover something that is actually there until you can talk about it. So scientists fumble around with half-expressed ideas and half-formed speculations and often it is only gradually that such ideas and speculations harden around a new concept, like calcium and carbonate ions hardening around an irritant grain of sand in an oyster to deliver up a pearl. (…) Each word expressed an abstract idea, a more-or-less vague concept that lay within the inventor’s mind. The problem lay in grounding the term in reality.” (2006, p. 91) 

People who attended Mendel’s lecture missed its message. Simon Mawer notes that Mendel himself thought his own work was about hybridization between closely related species – otherwise he would not have called his paper Versuche uber Pflanzen-Hybriden (Experiments in Plant Hybridization). Mawer considers that it is hardly surprising that no one in the audience could make the leap, for they were, as Mendel was, children of their time, a time when hybridization was regarded as a possible mechanism for evolution.

This example shows how important language is not only for science communication but also for the practice of science itself. We intuitively know how science is woven into the fabric of our daily lives, but only when we convey this feeling into narratives do we become fully aware of it.