Why Bioscientists Make the Best Pharmaceutical Writers

Every bioscientist I know remembers an experiment that took months of troubleshooting to work and p-value that finally meant something significant. These are the best stories full of drama, resilience, grit, and impact – but sometimes they are so difficult to share.

As a pharmaceutical writer, it is my job to understand all the nuances of these complex stories and parse them into formats that make a tangible impact. I write reports that provide support for high caliber research and evidence of compliance with the law. I write protocols to ensure the best practices are preserved and that labs are safe for everyone involved. I write reviews to share all the highlights.

Every bioscientist I know can do the same.

In this article, I am going to give you the evidence that you have already have everything you need to shine as a pharmaceutical writer. And if you genuinely enjoy digging into data, riffing on new ideas, and finding the clearest way to share the best stories, then you can be a pharmaceutical writer too.

Critically precise

Integrity is the bedrock of all good science: the most important things you can share as a scientist are those that are true. In the biosciences, that means reading sentences like “this treatment worked in this tissue type at this specific stage of disease progression” and being able to understand the truth in the conditional. Knowing how to balance hedged findings from many different sources and still find something true to say that you can stand behind makes you precise with your rhetoric and careful when sharing.

That means that every sentence that you have said in a talk or written in a proposal has honed your ability to solve complex logic problems to which there are few answers and many wrong ones. Biologists are critical thinkers by necessity.

Meticulous about the big picture and the nitty-gritty

To be a good science communicator, you have to be able to distill a story down to its essence but know when it is important to keep the details. Every manuscript needs to share its critical findings and enough data to support them beyond reasonable doubt. They also need to do this within the word count and figure limits of the publishing journal. Being able to tell any reader why they should care and why they should believe you are as clearly and succinctly as possible helps ensure their attention. It makes your science memorable.

That means that every paper you have read or written has honed your ability to organize large-scale projects into condensed products that someone can actually consume. If you enjoy breaking down your complex research in a way everyone can understand, then you will be a great technical writer.  Bioscientists are detail-oriented by design.

Unapologetically into acronyms

The skills it takes to be a good regulatory writer are not something to take for granted and are earned throughout your research career. This includes even the most mundane but quirky skills. For example, in order to be a functional biologist, you have to be able to read, remember, and fully understand dozens (if not hundreds) of Three Word Acronyms (henceforth, TWA). If your to-do list has ever listed something like “RT-qPCR for OCT4 RNA from iPSCs post AAV” or “HEK293 and MCF-7 harvest for FACS and ELISA” or “B6C3F1 H2B-eGFP embryo IVF and in vivo transfer to CD-1”, you know exactly what I mean.

That means that being in this field has prepared you to look at a dense wall of legalese without fear. You have already been practicing using abbreviations, jargon, and phrases in Latin with confidence. Bioscientists are unafraid specialists.

Pharmaceutical writers write things that people actually have to read. The things you write as a pharmaceutical writer will (realistically) have many more readers than any of your first author papers by orders of magnitude. Healthcare workers, regulatory bodies, and other scientists will all read your work. So, if you like talking about science and find joy in sharing it with others, then you can do this, and it just might be the career for you.

Raeline Valbuena is a pharmaceutical technical writer with 3 years of experience as a freelancer. She graduated with her PhD in Genetics just under a year ago, where she developed new applications for high-throughput genetic screens at Stanford. There, she helped author over 8 publications and discovered how much she enjoyed building solutions for the whole team. This enthusiasm for people-driven science inspired her to shift into becoming a full-time writer.