Lost in translation

Valeria Ramírez Castañeda, a Colombian biologist, spends her time in the Amazon studying how snakes eat poisonous frogs without getting ill. Although her findings come in many shapes and sizes, in her years as a researcher, she and her colleagues have struggled to get their biological discoveries out to the wider scientific community. Spanish is her mother tongue, and her research had to be translated into English to be published by international journals.

Budget shortfalls or time constraints meant some of her findings were never published. “It’s not that I’m a bad scientist,” she