Scientific communication doesn't just report science. It mirrors it.

How to introduce students to the culture of scientific communication?

When introducing students to scientific communication, I believe it is important to begin with understanding how science operates as a field and as a profession. Here are four papers — each a snapshot of how science was practiced, communicated, and shared in its time.

1858. London. Linnean Society. Two men — Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace — never stood in the same room that evening. Their joint paper On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties was read aloud on their behalf to an audience of curious, educated amateurs. Gentlemen hobbyists. No institutional affiliation, no grant number, no ethics board. Just 14 pages of careful thought and a lifetime of observation. The paper that underpins all of modern biology was essentially a letter from two passionate naturalists.

1980. A Nobel prize in the making. Klaus von Klitzing, along with Gerhard Dorda and Michael Pepper, discovered the quantum Hall effect — a finding so precise and so fundamental that it redefined how we measure electrical resistance. Three authors. A proper laboratory. Peer review. Science had become professional, institutionalized, and exact. The lone natural philosopher had been replaced by the trained physicist with access to a cryostat.

2004. Scotch tape and a Nobel prize. Konstantin Novoselov and Andre Geim, along with six collaborators, described how to isolate graphene — a single atomic layer of carbon — using the kind of tape you'd find in any office drawer. Eight authors spanning multiple institutions. A beautifully elegant experiment hiding inside an era of growing complexity. Science had gone global.

2019. The authorship disappears entirely. Elon Musk and colleagues at Neuralink published a white paper describing a fully integrated brain-machine interface platform — flexible electrode threads thinner than a human hair, robotic implantation, real-time neural decoding. Dozens of engineers, neuroscientists, surgeons, and material scientists contributed. And the author line? Neuralink.

Four papers. Four different answers to the same question: How science operates, and how does it speak?

Each form of writing made sense for its moment. The discursive natural history essay suited a world of independent scholars. The structured journal article suited a world of university departments and peer review. The multi-authored collaborative paper suited a world of international funding and shared infrastructure. The corporate white paper suits a world where research, engineering, and commercialization happen simultaneously under one roof.

What I find valuable in teaching this is not the nostalgia for simpler forms, nor the uncritical celebration of scale. It's the recognition that writing conventions are not arbitrary — they are deeply coupled to how science is organized, funded, and valued at any given moment.

As the profession continues to evolve, so will the forms we use to communicate it. Understanding that relationship seems to me an essential part of what it means to be a scientist today.