Austin Young Shull

For nearly a decade, I've taught writing to undergraduate juniors. One pattern has remained consistent: students struggle with the leap from structured assignments to the messy, open-ended world of real science communication.

“Niggle was a painter. Not a very successful one, partly because he had many other things to do.” —“Leaf by Niggle,” J.R.R. Tolkien I have a confession to make: as a scientist, I rarely accomplish what I set out to do, and this inability to measure up to my own expectations disheartens me. This feeling often stems from the perpetual tension between an idealized vision of what my work should produce and the constant interruptions that prevent me from realizing this vision.

1 Introduction Approximately 50% of cancer patients have tumors with one or more genetic alterations in the tumor suppressor p53, making it the most frequently mutated gene in cancer. In response to DNA damage, hypoxia, oncogene activation, or ribosomal stress, p53 acts as a transcription factor to activate target genes that mediate various cell fates including apoptosis, cell cycle arrest, DNA damage repair, metabolic changes, and more (Hafner et al., 2019).