This is the question you most need to answer. Why is this project, of all possible projects, a good scientific bet?
Biology is complicated, which makes layman explanations a challenge.
Perhaps the best you can do is lay out in clear terms what you know and what you don't. This compound has been shown to be XXX±XXX% effective against these three cancers. It has also been shown to kill 90% of test animals. These three respected theory papers [1,2,3] have highlighted the fact that, if only the animals hadn't died, this compound would be more promising than YYY,ZZZ, and QQQ. Furthermore, in these references [4-10], making the modification we propose to make (9DS) in other related substances has been shown to reduce lethality by 100x. Our goal is to explore this alteration to see if we can address the lethality of the compound while preserving its anti-cancer properties.
Give people the references, and some laymen will dig all day long. Motivated people are really smart.
totally understood. It's really good that you're holding my feet to the fire. It's a little bit buried, but linked from the "details" page is the full proposal:
I apologize, I had accidentally put in a wrong link there previously, it's been fixed, but the file has been publically available and visible for a while. Some non-scientific aspects (like our launch date) have obviously been changed at the last minute, but the proposal stands.
Biology is complicated, which makes layman explanations a challenge.
Perhaps the best you can do is lay out in clear terms what you know and what you don't. This compound has been shown to be XXX±XXX% effective against these three cancers. It has also been shown to kill 90% of test animals. These three respected theory papers [1,2,3] have highlighted the fact that, if only the animals hadn't died, this compound would be more promising than YYY,ZZZ, and QQQ. Furthermore, in these references [4-10], making the modification we propose to make (9DS) in other related substances has been shown to reduce lethality by 100x. Our goal is to explore this alteration to see if we can address the lethality of the compound while preserving its anti-cancer properties.
Give people the references, and some laymen will dig all day long. Motivated people are really smart.