Could “Serial” be a model for science journalism?

In my last post, I wrote about how scientific ideas should be celebrated in the same way that art is celebrated — for their power to inspire us and make us think more deeply about our world, rather than for their practical value. But this notion of science rests on the assumption that people, regardless of whether they attend university or actually study a scientific discipline, are introduced to the reasons why ruminating on the nature of scientific truth can be so wonder-inspiring.

I don’t think that happens very often.

Outside of the classroom, the way in which scientific knowledge is disseminated almost never captures the underlying energy and complexity of the scientific process. To be fair, there are a lot of great science journalists, but even feature-length articles, books and movies that don’t boil findings down into single sentences usually fail to transfer the persistent, obsessive curiosity of the researcher to the reader—though of course there are exceptions.

Scientists don’t really help this cause either. Researchers publish papers that usually try to hide the exhilerating messiness of the process of discovery from the public eye. And I know that when people ask me how I stay motivated to research small questions in the lab for months at a time, there’s a part of my answer that implies that I’m simply a different type of human from them. I know I’ve told people, “I think that succeeding in grad school is a lot about just being able to persistently work on one problem without getting bored,” without effectively conveying why it is that I don’t get bored. I’m telling people I’m excited without letting them share in that excitement, and I think that’s a problem.

But the other day, as I was listening to an episode from Serial’s second season and thinking about its slightly more gripping first go, I realized that Sarah Koenig and her team of podcast producers had managed to create a model of journalism that could revolutionize the way in which we think about science storytelling.

In that season, Koenig and her team took a tiny story that no one really cared about, and exploded it into a real-time, thrilling meditation on the nature of truth and evidence, launching the tiniest details of particular circumstances into the arena of heated public debate. If you haven’t listened, you should, mainly because it’s great, but also because you won’t understand any of the comparisons I’m about to draw in this post.

At its best moments, that is what research feels like. Koenig’s personal conversations with Adnan — those direct phone calls in which she got to design her conversation to try to get answers to the specific question that puzzled her the most — to me, are akin to examining my own data, to analyzing subjects’ reaction times and accuracy on the tasks of attention and memory I’ve designed to try to figure out a specific puzzle. There are moments in which a clear picture begins to emerge, and then a new and perhaps inconsistent sentence is spoken or the pattern suddenly becomes less clear, and you want to stop and desperately scream, “Just tell me the truth!”

But of course, the most direct pieces of evidence cannot be interpreted on their own. Koenig drove around Baltimore looking for clues that would guide her hypotheses about Adnan’s tale; his story had to be seen through the lens of other, related narratives, in the same way that scanning relevant literature simultaneously clarifies and confuses interpretations of new scientific data sets. And then there’s the question of trust — should Jay’s explanations actually cause Koenig to question Adnan’s? How dramatically should I revise my thoughts about my own data in response to a paper in which the methods seem sketchy?

And how strongly are my own preconceived notions about the underlying “truth” influencing my judgments of trustworthiness? And when should I start to question well-established facts? How do I know when something that intially seems so solid — like idea that cell-tower data can track the locations of phone calls, or perhaps the idea that eye movements are a good measure of the focus of visual attention — should be picked apart? And whose judgment should I rely on to figure that out?

What do I do when I just don’t have the methods to answer the questions that I know would dramatically shape my main inquiry, when I need a clearer understanding of certain neural mechanisms to determine if my explanation of my behavioral data is physiologically plausible, but I just don’t have that information available? It’s as mysterious and hard to deal with as the potential existence of that f***ing payphone at Best Buy.

I could go on with these analogies for a long time. The other day, I read two papers that suggested conflicting hypotheses for the question I’m currently trying to answer and I thought of them as my “Asia letters” and “Nisha call.”

Perhaps though, the tightest link between Koenig’s exploration of Adnan’s murder trial and my own scientific endeavors is the pressure to translate gray evidence into a black and white verdict. That pressure is what makes the whole process so intense and exciting, but as Koenig ruminates on, the nature of truth is such that it can’t always be discovered, and the consequences of its assumed clarity can be terrible.

But back to where I started: given the analogies between Koenig’s investigation of Adnan’s case and every scientist’s journey as they attempt to answer a specific question, could a Serial-like podcast focused on a particular researcher grappling with a very tiny question grip a broad audience of listeners and spread to them the same obsessive persistence with a single line of inquiry? I think so. I think much in the same way Koenig painstakingly reexamined every piece of evidence in Adnan’s trial, she could rely on a team of experts to reconsider every piece of newly collected data and to call and interview researchers within a specific field to trace the discovery process of a team of scientists working on any small, unsolved question. And I think it could powerfully change the ways people think about how science progresses forward, and why expanding knowledge in part solely for the sake of expanding knowledge is such a compelling vocation.

Adnan’s story may have been centered around a sexier topic: murder. But few people cared about his trial until Serial hit the scene. And some might argue that Serial producers hit the jackpot with his case because all the players were so interesting, and difficult to interpret. But I think good storytellers would find that probing the thoughts and motivations of scientists with contradictory explanations of particular phenomena would lead listeners to grapple with the same fundamentally interesting questions: Why do people believe what they believe, and what are their reasons for expressing (or not expressing) their beliefs in particular ways?

Serial was so powerful because not only did Koenig seem to want to shake Adnan and scream, “Just tell me what’s real!!!”, but also because she was able to pass on that same intense frustration to her listeners. I have had that feeling while examining data, but I’ve never been able to describe my work, or even others’ much more exciting scientific journeys, in a way that effectively captures that emotion for individuals outside my discipline.

So to Sarah Koenig and all the world’s future Sarah Koenig’s, if you’re reading this, I think science needs you.