Perhaps you are reading this thinking, “But that’s not my job. I generate research; it’s up to someone else to translate that research and communicate it to the public.” Fair. That was my position for the last 20 years. Somewhere in all of my papers and all of my NIH grants was a sentence along the lines of “Understanding how genetic influences impact alcohol use outcomes across development and in conjunction with the environment, will be critical to develop more effective prevention and intervention programming.” And I truly believe that. But I assumed it was someone else’s responsibility to actually be doing that translation from basic science to prevention/intervention. But here’s the problem: no one is. Faculty and staff who work in prevention/intervention have their own conferences and their own journals. They aren’t reading the journal of Behavior Genetics. Even at the Research Society on Alcoholism meeting, where researchers from multiple backgrounds come together, we often attend our own parallel symposium sessions. No one understands our research findings, or is better equipped to explain what our results mean (and don’t mean), than those of us who generate them.
