Features / Spectrum

Research one-liners

Autism researchers distill countless hours of frantic grant-writing and experiments into a single sentence — with some hilarious results.

By Jessica Wright

22 December 2015 | 1 min read

This article is more than five years old.

Neuroscience—and science in general—is constantly evolving, so older articles may contain information or theories that have been reevaluated since their original publication date.

It can seem impossible to subsume countless hours of frantic grant-writing and experiments into a single research paper. But distill them into a single sentence and the results can be hilarious.

One-liner theses became an Internet sensation this summer when a user on the online bulletin board Reddit asked the “PhD’s of Reddit” for a dumbed down summary of their theses. Nearly 8,000 responses later, the trend had spread like wildfire, spawning tweets, blogs and even tumblrs. We asked autism researchers to join in on the fun.

Here, ranging from earnest to entertaining, are single sentences summing up years of work.