Interview with Núria Negrão
What initially made you interested in the scientific field?
I think I just kind of like science. I liked all the subjects, I can tell you. It was so hard for me to choose. [In] Mozambique, where I’m from, in middle school, you choose whether you want science or humanities. And it was not easy for me to pick. I think I liked everything. But what I liked about science, what I found super interesting, was figuring out how things worked, and I liked the possibilities of what we could with it. I remember that I finally decided that I was going to go more into the sciences when Dolly the sheep was cloned, and I was like, “This is super cool!” So, when I started my science career, [I] was going into genetics and then later, I figured out that the thing I was like “pretty cool” with [what] was more like bioengineering, so tissue engineering and creating organs in vitro and things like that. So that’s kind of what got me going, what’s like, “Oh this is cool!”
What attracted you to medical writing? And after that, what made you want to continue to be a medical writer?
I found out there was this thing that people could be paid to write science when I was in my undergrad, because I was in a writing group to write a dissertation (or a small dissertation). And there was another person in the writing group who was hired as a writer for a clinical trial group at the university. And I was like, “Oh, you can just write? And you don’t have to do [benchwork]” and I was like, “Oh, that’s intriguing.” But I wouldn’t say that was my goal then. It was just like, “Oh, this is intriguing.” But then as I moved through work and my academic journey, what I started to figure out is that I didn’t really want to be a bench scientist anymore. So, I was looking for other sorts of careers. And I discovered a bunch of things, including medical writing. But honestly, I wasn’t really looking at medical writing. I wanted to work more in policy and health care policy, and all of that. But then, COVID happened, and I was like, “Let’s try this medical writing thing that I can do from home.” And I started doing it, and I discovered that it is interesting. And I discovered that I liked freelancing. I liked being the decider of what I’m going to do next. I got into the flow of doing that and making business decisions and all of that. And here I am today!
What do you like specifically about the CME space?
CME merges a lot of things that I like. So one, it is about things that are happening now, in medicine, right? And not about something that may happen in the future that may work out, may not work out. No, it’s very practical and very, I know that whatever it is I’m doing is having an impact now. So that’s one thing. [CME] is still very science-y, right? It is about science, but not just that, but also how science actually impacts people. So, it’s the merging of those two. Then the other thing that I like about CME is that it is about teaching. So, it merges this other side that I always really liked, science communication and how do you teach science and how do you get people to get things? It’s this other side of work that I also like, which is the education and the science communication part of it. So it kind of is everything that I wanted.
When did you start using AI, related to medical writing or even just in general? What appeals to you about it?
I started using it when ChatGPT came out, so November of 2022. I was like, “Oh, this is interesting.” But sometimes it didn’t do what I wanted and I was like, okay, how can I get it to do what I want, right? I think coming from a bench scientist point of view was really helpful here. Because if it didn’t work, it didn’t matter to me, I just wanted it to work so I would try again. Which is basically what scientists do, you have to have a high tolerance with failure. So I think, in the beginning, I had a very high tolerance for failure and I was like, other people are saying this works for them, so I need to figure out how to make this work for me, right? And the people I was listening to weren’t just like regular people using AI, I was listening to developers, the people that actually knew how to use it. I was like, if they know how to use it and they say that this is useful, this must be useful. We’re just not getting it. So, that’s how I got into it.
The science fiction coolness factor is really what appeals to me. It is cool in the same way that Dolly was cool, right? It was like “Oh wow, we can do that.” So, what is cool is what it can do right not but also it is just imagining that one day you can just be talking to a computer and it can do what you’re telling it to do. Like magic, right? So I think that the thing is chasing the magic is still what is driving me to AI so much. In the beginning I was more interested in it from a practical point of view in my work. My thing was like, how can I work faster? How can this make my work go faster? But as I have evolved, in my thinking, I really appreciate it’s not just the faster, but what can I do now that I couldn’t do before? Either because I have more time or because this allows me to go deeper. So, sometimes, I will do a regular PubMed search and find a bunch or articles and then I will use a tool like Perplexity and ask it for references for a particular question, and it will find stuff that I didn’t find. So that is making my work better, right? Or run ChatGPT with deep research or Gemini with deep research and they find sources that I didn’t find. That is making my work better, right?
What are your thoughts on the future of medical writing as a field? What about CME specifically?
I have no idea, right? Is the honest answer. I can make some educated guesses, the trends that I see. I’ll speak for CME in particular. A lot of CME companies are being bought by venture capital [companies]. They’re becoming bigger and bigger. What you see with that is like a tightening of timelines, focusing on a quick return of the investment and things like that. So I think those trends might continue for a bit. You also see Pharma investing in more non-accredited education as well. It used to be all kind of mixed, and then these rules came out and it had to be really separate. But I feel like, and a lot of people have been telling me this, is that there is a trend going back to non-accredited education. So as a medical writer, I think people need to start making inroads into the non-accredited space a bit. It’s still education and it’s still quality education. It’s just that is considered in the promotion side rather than in the strictly education side, right? So that is a trend that I’m seeing or that other people talk about. Now other things in publication and regulatory writing, I don’t know as much, so I’ll let other people talk about that.
In terms of AI, so I think it is still possible, and I think the probability is, I don’t know for sure it will happen or it’s more like a 50-50 toss-up type thing—I think there will be a revolt against AI. In the same way that there was a revolt against machines that people used to go into factories and try to break the factories. So, I think bumpy times are coming. The question is how big will that revolt be? If it’s huge and it completely leads to the shutdown of AI, then things will go back to the way they were before. If the technology survives that, one way or another, then what I see is that we will all be integrating these technologies into almost everything we do. I do think the second one is more likely. We will need to start working with it kind of like we work with other people, right? So we will learn how to delegate certain things. We will learn to create different systems that fact check each other and will really start focusing on how do we, as humans, have what AI itself doesn’t have? And the people that understand how to use AI really effectively, but also understand what they bring as humans (with the human perspective), I think those companies, those people will have an advantage, right? So one really clear example that has nothing to do with AI that I really like is what we have had for years now, lots of online courses. They’re even taught by people, right? You can go to LinkedIn and LinkedIn Learning and you have lots and lots of courses there. But when you’re trying to look for how to learn something, you still want a person that you know and trust and you would prefer live lessons to just the video lessons. When you want to learn about one very specific thing, I go to YouTube and I’m really glad that YouTube is there and can teach me how to use Photoshop to do one very specific thing on Photoshop. But if I’m trying to learn, say, for example, everything about instructional design, and if AMWA told me that we’re going to put up a three-day workshop and it costs this much, but you’re going a certificate out of it and you’re going to be with other people and you’re going to build a course together, I would be tempted to go with that. Even though there are tons and tons of videos online about instructional design. There’s something that we always like about having a person there to show us how to do things and to get their opinions and to really understand the difference between theory and practice, right? And I think that we [will] still be there and we just need to figure that out right? So, I think in education, in general, we really need to understand that. Where the value comes from [is] the human interaction.
About Núria Negrão: Núria Negrão is a medical writer specializing in development of CME content, and an AI adoption consultant. She is also the Chair of the AI Committee at the Alliance for Continuing Education for Healthcare Professionals.
