by Neil Savage for CELL
When colleagues first encouraged Eric Topol to start using Twitter several years ago, he resisted, assuming most of the content would have to do with what people had eaten for lunch or what some celebrity had said. “I thought it was just nonsense stuff,” says Topol, though he finally gave in and signed up for the microblogging site in November 2009. Now, five and a half years, 6,500 tweets, and 60,000 followers later, he’s changed his view. “It’s a pulse of what’s going on in science in the biomedical space,” he says. “I don’t know how you can keep up with your field today without the likes of Twitter.”
Topol, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, CA, now finds himself urging fellow scientists to embrace social media, which he says promotes discussion in the scientific community. “So far nobody’s come back to me and said ‘I regret it’” says Topol. “The return on investment of time is well worth it.”