Purity Tests and Pennies

Science communication has a funding problem. Here's what's actually going on inside it.

There’s a ritual at nearly every event I’ve been part of in the last six years. Someone gets up at the podium and says that science communication has never been more important, that the information environment is broken, that trust in institutions is cratering, and that we desperately need communicators who can meet people where they are. I believe they mean it.

Then everyone claps or nods, and goes back to a system that does not fund this work, does not count it toward promotion, does not train people to do it well, and treats anyone who does it full-time as a kind of charming eccentric operating outside the “real” work of science. To be clear, I am not writing about scientists or clinicians who communicate publicly alongside their day jobs — that work matters and faces its own challenges. I am writing about the people who do this full-time, as a discipline, and help those same scientists, clinicians, and leaders communicate better with the people they serve. The ones whose entire job is the public-facing translation work, and who currently have no reliable way to fund it.

What follows is a map of what I see from inside that funding gap. Science communication, as a field, is struggling with three interlocking problems:

1. It is not treated as a discipline.

2. It is not funded like one, and we have treated funding it as something that cheapens or discredits the work.

3. We are making its funding dependent on metrics that don’t measure what success actually looks like.

Problem one: Science Communication is not treated as a discipline

Most people, including most scientists, think of science communication as a soft skill — something you pick up because you are personable, because you are a good public speaker, or because you got an A in your college writing courses. It gets treated as a style layered over real content rather than as its own body of knowledge with methods, failure modes, and an actual evidence base.

But communicating scientific evidence well — to a skeptical parent, a policymaker, or a clinician who needs clear, actionable information to bring back to patients — is not the same as slapping some science on a slide or making a Canva infographic. It requires knowing why certain framings backfire, why corrections sometimes entrench the beliefs you’re trying to correct, how trust actually builds over time, and how the platforms we work on reshape our messages in ways we don’t control. Science communication is a discipline.

The consequence of the soft-skill framing is that too many institutions don’t staff for this work, don’t budget for it, and don’t build career ladders around it. They assume it will get done by someone, somewhere, on the side. So, when they do spend real money on public-facing science and health communication, they tend to route it to large general-purpose marketing and PR agencies — firms staffed by skilled communicators, most of whom have no scientific or public health background. They can produce a beautiful campaign. What they often cannot do is catch the nuance that matters: the shortcut that slides into something technically wrong, the oversimplification that papers over tradeoffs the audience deserved to weigh (which, by the way, sets us up for a credibility hit later), the punchy headline that lands fine with the general public and detonates with clinicians.

When institutions pour budgets into firms with the comms expertise but not the science literacy, they shouldn’t be surprised when the message gets lost in translation — or worse, when it quietly erodes the trust they were trying to build.

Problem two: Nobody wants to fund it

Before getting into who pays, the premise: being compensated for science communication does not cheapen it, compromise it, or make it less rigorous. The opposite is closer to true— sustainable funding is what makes this work possible at all. Until we accept that, every funding conversation starts from a defensive crouch. So, who should pay?

There is a strong case for a range of potential funders from across the health ecosystem. Insurance companies and health systems have a direct financial stake; every patient who falls for a supplement scam or skips a vaccine becomes a downstream cost. Foundations and medical societies have a mission stake; their target communities are the same audiences being misled, and effective communication amplifies the work they are already doing. Public health agencies have a public-interest stake; accurate and actionable information is, in theory, the entire point of their existence.

Yet very little of this is being funded at scale, and the investment opportunity remains largely untapped. Foundations could move beyond one-off project grants to fund the communications infrastructure that makes all their other health investments more effective. Health systems and medical societies are laden with trusted platforms and credentialed voices - resources that rarely get deployed at the scale or with the strategy the moment demands. Insurers, with perhaps the most direct financial stake in whether people make good health decisions, have the potential to lead here in novel ways. And then there is industry (gasp!), the loudest and most contested option, which I will come back to.

This problem is even worse for those of us who are science communication generalists. A cancer foundation might fund a communicator who only covers cancer. A vaccine group might fund one who only covers vaccines. But public health funding tends to flow vertically, by disease, by population, by issue area, while misinformation moves horizontally. The patterns are the same whether the topic is cancer, vaccines, microplastics, or supplements: the same logical fallacies, the same rhetorical traps, the same predatory marketing tactics. A generalist communicator who has built audience trust can deploy that trust across topics as new misinformation emerges. A topic-specific campaign cannot. If we want public health dollars to stretch further, funding science communication as a discipline rather than as a series of one-off campaigns is one of the highest-leverage moves available. Yet the funding ecosystem is built around silos, and generalists fall between them.

In the absence of reliable and flexible funding, many science communicators turn to sponsored campaigns, where a foundation or company pays us to independently review the available research on a specific topic and then skillfully present the best available evidence to an audience that needs it. But disclosed sponsorship is treated as more suspect than the undisclosed alignments and unstated incentives that quietly shape every other voice in the space.

So, given all of that, here is what searching for funding has actually looked like for me over the last six or so years. I have explored every available avenue, and yet the infrastructure to sustain this work for experts like me in the long term just isn’t there. Grants? We submit multiple proposals a month, knowing that the pool of grants actually designed for science communication is tiny, and most of what we apply for is research funding with a communication line item bolted on. Federal funding? We had CDC money for vaccine communication work, but lost it last year because “vaccine equity” was in the title. Philanthropy? Getting a reply to an email can feel like pulling teeth (and also makes me feel a bit like Oliver Twist- “Please, sir…”). Public support through a Substack paid tier? Yes, and I’m grateful for every single subscriber, but it barely covers overhead. Back in 2020, when I launched Unbiased Science, I chose Instagram as my primary outlet. It was where the audiences were, and where misinformation was spreading fastest. Years and several hundred thousand followers later, that platform pays a couple of hundred dollars a month. It isn’t built to sustain the people doing the work.

So now, as a late-Substack-bloomer, I am asking people who have followed me for years on Instagram to please also find me on a platform that can.

The foundations and partners who have funded our work are the reason we are still here, and I am so very grateful. My frustration is with the structural reality that good funders are scarce, and most organizations that claim to value this work never actually write a check for it.

The collapse of trust in scientific institutions has created a vacuum, and vacuums get filled. Independent science communicators are working to fill the vacuum faster and more accurately than those whose business models depend on being wrong, but doing so is nearly impossible without proper support.

The people pushing misinformation have a clear and lucrative funding model: engagement revenue, supplement sales, and donor bases motivated by the feeling of fighting the establishment. They seem to face none of the constraints we impose on ourselves. They are replicating like gremlins exposed to water while we are still debating whether it is acceptable for evidence-based communicators to be paid for their expertise and labor.

Science communicators need to stop bragging about doing this work for free. The “I’m not getting paid for this” badge of honor signals that compensation somehow cheapens the work, the message, or the integrity behind it. It doesn’t, and we are reinforcing a norm that is actively killing the field. We had better start thinking creatively about how to fund this work, and fast.

Problem two, continued: When transparency gets punished

Let’s start with the facts about “neutrality.” No funding source is neutral. Government funding comes with messaging constraints and political priorities. Foundation funding reflects the ideological commitments of the donors. Institutional funding reflects the agendas of the institutions. Even “independent” funding from high-net-worth individuals or anonymous donors carries the biases of the people writing the checks. The honest question is not whether a communicator has ever taken money from a compromising source; it is whether they disclose their funding, maintain editorial independence, and only say things the evidence supports.

A recent example from our own work. We published a piece on microplastics, co-authored with a chemist, reviewed by a medical editor, and vetted by an immunotoxicologist with an academic appointment. We had covered the topic before without any funding and reached the same balanced conclusion. The industry sponsorship was fully disclosed. We maintained complete editorial and scientific control, and the sponsor had no input on the content — we were asked to summarize the best available evidence, so that is what we did.

Honestly, this is the most painstaking and time-consuming work I do. Paid partnerships are the projects where I scrutinize every line, double-check every citation, and pressure-test every claim with experts before publication. The standard is higher, not lower, because I know exactly the kind of scrutiny the work will get. I am not naive about why people are suspicious of paid partnerships— plenty are done without integrity, with creators handed scripts and a sponsor’s preferred angle baked in. That is exactly why the markers of rigorous work (visible sources, expert review, full editorial independence) matter. They are how you tell the difference.

I have turned down hundreds of thousands of dollars from wellness companies asking me to endorse detoxes and supplements. I understand why some people find that money too good to pass up. Misinformation and wellness grift are extremely well-funded. Sci comm? Purity tests and pennies.

And still, a few vocal critics took to social media to publicly shame the microplastics piece, taking issue not with the science but with the fact that we were paid for our work. One wrote that they were “as red angry as my hair” over the sponsorship. Another called it a “public health education miss” on the same grounds. Neither engaged with the actual evidence. The fact of compensation alone was enough to trigger the pile-on.

Many of the people who criticize our work this way hold positions at universities, with institutional salaries, infrastructure, and the built-in support that comes with academic appointments. They are not surviving on Substack subscriptions and consulting contracts, and they are using that backing to shame people who are doing rigorous, transparent work without it.

Negative reactions are loud and tend to stand out in memory, but I was elated that the overwhelming majority of responses to the microplastics piece were positive. Readers engaged with the substance, asked thoughtful questions, and told us the piece helped them sort through coverage that had left them confused. The trust-building did what it was supposed to do.

Still, this is about optics. All of the work—the chemist co-author, the toxicologist review, the editorial control, the disclosed sponsorship—was canceled out, in some readers’ eyes, by a single phrase identifying who paid for the project. The transparency that purity culture claims to want became the very thing that got us attacked.

This is not to say our work should be immune to criticism. We welcome civil scientific discourse; that’s the whole point of science. The standard being applied is just the wrong one. It is not “did this person disclose their funding, maintain editorial independence, and only say things the evidence supports.” It is “did this person ever, at any point, receive a dollar from a source someone could make look bad in a LinkedIn post.” One is about integrity. The other is about purity. I care about the first. I have run out of patience for the second.

Problem three: We are tethering funding to the wrong things

Funding decisions are tied to engagement metrics. When a foundation officer or a sponsor evaluates whether your work is worth supporting, the first thing they look at is the dashboard — likes, shares, follower counts, reach, and impressions. The implicit message is: optimize for engagement or watch your funding evaporate. Which means the system is effectively asking science communicators to produce clickbait that collapses nuance and plays to the already science-minded crowd rather than reaching anyone new. That is not good science communication. Good science communication is two-way. It listens. It takes the questions people are actually asking and answers them directly, rather than broadcasting past them. It is patient, balanced, often emotionally restrained, and aimed at people who are not already on the team.

Maybe the question isn’t how many people our work reaches. Maybe the question is what happens when it does reach someone. Whether they came away clearer than they were before. Whether they trusted the source enough to come back. Whether anything actually shifted.

Good science communication is a slow trust-building exercise. It is seeds planted that may not sprout for months or years. It is the worried parent who reads your post at two in the morning and does not share it, because sharing would mean admitting to their extended family that they were wobbling on vaccines. It is the clinician who saw your explainer and now uses a version of it with patients. It is the policy staffer who cited your piece in a briefing memo nobody outside that office will ever see. The best communicators I know are not chasing virality — they are trying to become the voice a specific person trusts on a specific topic over a long period of time, and the algorithm does not reward that.

I have made this tradeoff myself, deliberately, for years. I have prioritized building trust over building follower counts, which means I am not raking in the kind of engagement money that creators with seven-figure followings pull down. A few communicators have managed to do both, but they are rarer than the field’s success stories suggest. For most of us, the choice between scale and depth is real, and the field has not figured out how to recognize, let alone reward, the people who choose depth.

When our work breaks through to the audiences we most want to reach, those audiences often do not like or share it. The people most likely to hit the share button are already on our side, broadcasting to communities that share their beliefs. The people we most want to reach (the ones quietly rethinking a position) rarely signal anything publicly. If I write something that lands with a vaccine-hesitant parent, the win is that they quietly process it. Maybe they think twice before sharing the next post claiming vaccines turn you into a lizard. Maybe, eventually, they get their kid vaccinated. That’s the goal, but it doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t happen in a way the dashboard can track.

We need different standards. It is pie in the sky to expect the average science communicator to run randomized controlled trials on whether an Instagram caption shifted behavior — a handful of research groups can do that work, and they should. For the rest of us, the path forward is developing better proxies: trust, depth of engagement, reach into hard-to-access audiences, longitudinal return readership, qualitative signals from the people we are actually trying to reach. None is perfect, but all measure something closer to what we actually care about than likes do.

What I actually want

Three things.

One, treat science communication as a discipline. That means training that goes beyond a half-day workshop. It means ending the idea that this is a soft skill anyone with good vibes can pick up on the side of their real job.

Two, fund it. Actually fund it. Staff lines, not honoraria. Contracts, not grant applications. Career ladders, not gig work. Advancement criteria (in academia, industry, and nonprofits) that count a well-done explainer or a trusted newsletter the way they count a peer-reviewed paper or a successful campaign. And while we are at it, stop shaming the communicators who have figured out how to survive in a broken system. Instead, help us change the system.

Three, measure what actually matters. Trust, depth, return readership, reach into skeptical audiences— not likes or superficial algorithm engagement.

Until that changes, science communication will remain an afterthought, and, as a result, the potential gains in understanding, behavior change, and better health outcomes for patients and communities will go entirely unrealized. The next time someone at a podium tells you science communication has never been more important, ask them what their organization is doing about it. Not in the abstract. In the budget. In the job postings. In the contracts they signed this quarter. That is the question. Everything else is applause.

Stay Curious,

Unbiased Science