Everything outside of a person’s direct experience is translated to them through some other medium and author.  When this happens, it is changed from its original content and form, how this happens, and to what extent is in large part caused by the author of the translation.  This takes place both consciously and unconsciously, as authors are limited by their own experience, or they tailor the translation to a specific audience.  When approaching a specific audience authors make conscious decisions in how they craft their work.  This includes everything from diction to what information is discussed.  This is especially true of the established media, writers for newspapers, TV, and even government spokesmen.  When engaging an audience the author decides what to include, how to display the included information, and with what specific words to discuss the topic at hand.  This has its uses as it allows for translation of broad ideas into simple terms and truncating of longwinded discourse into short and attractive discussion.  This is important in making the work of scientists and other field specialists approachable to the common man, like the discussion of the newly machined CRISPR systems derived from bacterial clusters, modified to a eucaryotic format, to ameliorate the effects of DMD, or rather, the use of new gene editing techniques to fix wasting muscles in young men.  In 2018 the Medical Center at University of Texas Southwestern published a journal on gene editing procedures that were put through trial on dogs to help develop a cure for Duchenne, an often-fatal form of muscular dystrophy most prevalent among young boys.  Dina Fine Maron of the popular magazine Scientific American wrote an article addressing the Duchenne study by a research team at UT Southwestern Medical Center.  In her article Maron exercises the ability of the author to translate an event outside the audience’s experience, in this case a work of authorship itself, by making her article significantly more attractive to the casual audience through purposeful selection of discussed material, diction within the article, and the format in which the information is encountered, as well as crafting the narrative of the article to promote her view on the material.  These deliberate decisions made an informative and accessible presentation of information on a highly technical and complex issue now readily accessible to the common man.

The Duchenne study performed by faculty at the UT Southwestern Medical Center was led by Francesco Chemello, an instructor in molecular biology, Dr. Rhonda Bassel-Duby, a professor of molecular biology, with graduate programs in genetics, development and disease, and Dr Eric N. Olson, the professor and chairman of molecular biology.  These highly trained individuals provided the study’s results to The Journal of Clinical Investigation in an academic and detailed manner that was in need of simplification for general audiences.  Dina Fine Maron is highly qualified as a writer, and was perfect for the truncated and succinct transfer of material from a scientific journal like The Journal of Clinical Investigation, into an article that everyone can read.  She holds a master’s degree in Public Health and has won awards during her time as journalist, working for news outlets such as; National Geographic, Newsweek, The Boston Globe, Time.com, Scientific American, Science News, and more.

In pursuit of making the Southwestern study truly accessible Maron carefully selected the pertinent material from her source, choosing to stray away from discussing how the gene modification takes place, and instead focusing on what exactly is being accomplished.  While the Southwestern study spends nine pages discussing everything from the origin and variation of different muscular dystrophies along with their treatments to exactly how the new treatment works on a sub-cellular level and why that makes it most effective, the Scientific American article written by Maron focuses on what information the general audience will understand and is relevant to their interests.  There is no need for Maron to address the variations in DNA and RNA type treatments development because the readers aren’t necessarily interested in what went into creating the treatment, but rather what it can do, like her subtitle refers to “editing dogs’ genes to correct a common form of muscle dystrophy” (10).  Maron’s brief and concise magazine article focuses on the CRISPR gene therapy and how it can hopefully soon be applied to children in need, noting how far the study has come, from being mildly effective in rodents to being viable in the Southwestern tests on beagles suffering from Duchenne.  Maron further focuses her article by using select data, like the 92% increase in protein development seen in the dogs treated with CRISPR, “[i]n cardiac muscle, a crucial target for treatment” (10) while the study performed by the team at UT Southwestern is far more pedantic, covering the statistics and results in the field of muscular dystrophy treatment to meet its broader goal.  Simple statistics for the effects of Duchenne become, in the journal from Chemello et al., a detailed list full of highly specified terms, “DMD mutations include exon deletions (68.8% of DMD patients), exon duplication (11.2%), point mutations (10.4%), and small deletions/insertions (9.6%)” (2769).

Maron’s focused message and goal of creating a brief overview of the study is furthered by her deliberately focused adaptation of vocabulary from the scientific journal into the more informal magazine format, ensuring that the threshold for understanding her article was open to a much wider audience.  The team of Chemello, Bassel-Duby, and O’Neil presented their research with several diagrams, an expansive overview of the actual sequence that takes place on the biological level, and a hefty share of jargon to match, using technical terms such as “homology independent targeted integration (HITI) or intercellular linearized single homology arm donor mediated intron targeting integration (SATI)” (2769), both specific and highly complex approaches to edition genomes.  This is in stark contrast to the deliberately brief overview provided by Maron which takes the time to explain the more advanced ideas.  “[A] molecular biologist at UT Southwestern, and his colleagues engineered viruses to act as delivery trucks, stripping out some of the viruses’ own DNA to make room for gene-editing machinery” (Maron 10).  Maron artfully puts everything in layman’s terms, providing the audience with an intriguing and topical article that is accessible to all.

Much like both the selection of material and vocabulary, the format that Maron presents the information is important to not only making the material more understandable, but also more attractive to the general audience.  As discussed above, most of Maron’s choices when writing the article had to do with accessibility, a large contributing factor to accessibility is actually attractiveness.  By making something appealing an author opens it up to a broader audience, it catches their eye and piques their interest.  This was displayed by Maron’s diction and title, “Fixing Wasting Muscles, scientists edited dogs’ genes to correct a common form of muscle dystrophy” (Maron 10) as they seemed more open to the casual reader than the title provided by the UT Southwestern team, “Correction of muscular dystrophies by CRISPR gene editing” (Chemello 2766).  Maron’s title is engaging, opening with a mission statement and then providing well-chosen words for a slight description of the study being discussed, the Chemello journal on the other hand has a very bland title that has an unknown scientific term in it.  However, where the attractiveness of Maron’s article really shines is in the formatting.  It starts with the problem and proposed solution, “Duchene muscular dystrophy is a life-threatening muscle-wasting illness”(10) and “scientists used a gene-editing technique called CRISPR/ Cas9 to pump up muscle protein levels” (10), and then smoothly guides the reader into how it is accomplished, “engineered viruses to act as delivery trucks, stripping out some of the viruses’ own DNA to make room for gene-editing machinery.  A number of the viruses were then loaded up with the Cas9 enzyme, which acts like “scissors”; this was used to cut out the DNA sequence that hinders dystrophin production in muscle cells” (10), finally ending with potential applications, “Olson and his colleagues hope the intervention might be durable enough with a single dose, but they need further results to get a clearer idea” (11).  This simple arrangement keeps a casual audience engaged and enables their comprehension.

Maron, in casual discussion of the work being done to promote a gene editing based cure to Duchenne muscular dystrophy, as presented by the medical center at UT Southwestern, beautifully fulfills the role of a translating author.  She delivers information outside of the audience’s personal experiences and keeps their attention while doing it.  The author of a work makes deliberate choices in how to convey their information to a specific audience.  Choosing what to say, how to say it, and in what order it should be said, all in the interest of delivering the desired material to the audience in a clear and informative way, this is best accomplished by making the material approachable and appealing through selection of material and formatting and easily understood through provided information and diction.

Works Cited

Chemello, Francesco, et al.  “Correction of Muscular Dystrophies by CRISPR Gene Editing”.  The Journal of Clinical Investigation, vol. 130, no. 6, 2020, pp. 2765-2773.

Maron, Dina Fine.  “Dina Fine Maron.”  Linkedin, www.linkedin.com/in/dinafinemaron. Accessed 17 November 2021.

Maron, Dina Fine. “Fixing Wasting Muscles.” Scientific American, Nov. 2018, pp. 10-12.

UT Southwestern Medical Center.  University of Texas Southwestern, www.profiles.utsouthwestern.edu. Accessed 17 November 2021.