How sharing your science in an opinion piece can boost your career

Devang Mehta wrote his first opinion piece in 2017 for online magazine Slate when he was a graduate student at ETH Zurich, Switzerland (see go.nature.com/3rf7lwt). It had the provocative title, ‘Nobel Prizes Should Reward Science, Not Scientists’. Since then, he has written more than a dozen others for publications including Massive Science, Salon and Nature.

When colleagues ask Mehta, a synthetic biologist now at the Catholic University of…