What Nearly Two Decades in Healthcare Taught Me About Story

For most of two decades, my job was to help people understand things that were hard to understand. Cancer drugs. Rare diseases. A scientist’s life’s work. The science was rarely the hard part.

I learned that in a lot of rooms. Edelman in New York, then Singapore. KYNE in Los Angeles. Then inside AstraZeneca. Different countries, different diseases, the same gap every time: the facts were ready long before anyone could feel why they mattered.

During the pandemic I made a series called Ask a Scientist. No crew, no studio. A scientist at a kitchen table, answering the questions people actually had. The science in it was no simpler than anywhere else. What changed was that you could see whose life’s work it was. It’s still the most-watched series AstraZeneca has produced.

That’s what healthcare teaches you fast, because the stakes aren’t abstract. A clear explanation can change whether someone starts a treatment, joins a trial, or just feels less alone the week after a diagnosis. You don’t reach that with more information. You reach it once it has a face.

For anyone who’s worked in or around healthcare: what’s something people could only understand once it had a face?